CRM - January 2009 - (Page 40)

THE MOBILE ecause salespeople are often traveling to make sales, it only makes sense that mobility is an important part of their arsenal. Pitching to prospects and checking up on customers means spending a lot of time away from the desk, but that doesn’t have to mean lost work time. The cell phone has been a hit with salespeople since it became affordable to non–Gordon Gekko types, and today’s models are essentially personal digital assistants (PDAs). There’s a lot that can be done with a smartphone, RIM BlackBerry, Apple iPhone, or other such device, but only if the user takes advantage of the possibilities. Even simple advice can be welcome. “Have sales contacts and prospects on your phone, so you can leverage your time in the car—just make sure you have a headset,” says James Wong, cofounder and chief executive officer of Avidian, whose Prophet brand of SFA operates as a plug-in to Microsoft Outlook. “All those times when you say, ‘Oh, I should talk to X, I’ll call when I get back to the office,’ you never do.” The instant remote connectivity a cell phone provides means going beyond sales calls that sell. “So many times, we only call because we want something,” Wong says. “Call for no reason at all sometimes.” By focusing on the relationship part of CRM, salespeople can engender closer ties with their clients—and possibly luck out by calling just as those clients’ needs are changing. (A more sophisticated CRM system can help make the most of that luck, or even increase your chances 40 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 of knowing when that “lucky” time might be. See “The Analytical,” page 41.) Remind yourself to reach out.“Most phones sync with Outlook, so put in a couple of reminders,” Wong adds. Calling is important, but so is keeping track of the content of those calls. This looks like a job for integration with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone systems. Even relatively unsophisticated VoIP systems allow automatic forwarding of calls, so important calls need never go to voicemail again. The systems can also record those calls, and applications exist to sync that data with the CRM system. “Control where the phone rings, and record data in CRM with VoIP integration,” advises David van Toor, senior vice president and general manager for Sage CRM solutions North America. “Calling in the car needs to be recorded.” There’s anecdotal evidence that cell phones and their ilk are actually replacing laptop computers as the device of choice in field sales. Sales reps are drawn to the devices’ size and wireless connectivity, while employers find it cheaper to outfit a team with phones than computers. Of course, that means sometimes the juicy CRM data doesn’t get back to the company, so a technological fix may be required. Robert Rothschild, director of CRM solution marketing at SAP, recalls helping a customer solve this particular problem: “The sales reps kept all their contact info on their BlackBerrys, and managers had trouble getting them to put it into CRM,” Rothschild says.“We created a Web service to do a bidirectional data sync, enterprisewide, to get the contacts. Then the customer assigned a dedicated team to search public access information sources like Hoover’s, and push the completed records back one-way to the BlackBerrys.” Not to be outdone, the Apple iPhone is starting to gain traction as well. Salesforce.com and Oracle, for example, have both released sales applications that are native to the iPhone, mobile “SO MANY TIMES, WE ONLY CALL BECAUSE WE WANT SOMETHING. CALL FOR NO REASON AT ALL SOMETIMES.” and Oracle’s new Social CRM gadgets can tie back to the main CRM system for receiving and delivering live data. On the other hand, not everybody is moving toward the handheld end of the wireless spectrum. CSO Insights’ Dickie notes that the tablet PC is taking off in mobile sales, especially in cases where presentations are a must or detailed product knowledge can’t be contained in one’s head. “It’s like a great big cell phone, and with rich media of experts and users easily available, the expert is inside the box,” he says. For the times when the presentation materials can be contained on a handheld, Rothschild recommends Impatica, a Bluetooth presentation connection that lets users deliver a presentation straight from the BlackBerry. www.destinationCRM.com http://www.Salesforce.com http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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