Sales 2.0 regularly pops up in blog posts and articles about how to sell efficiently in this day and age.
In a video announcing the upcoming Sales 2.0 Conference on June 3 in London, the term Sales 2.0 is linked to what Gartner calls The Nexus of Forces, where four trends work together to create a whole new era for business:
"A perfect storm of Mobility, Cloud, Social and Big Data has changed the way we do business forever, giving birth to the next generation of Sales Superstars who master the latest communication tools to develop profitable relationships. Superstars who use tablets to prepare, present, demo, analyze and communicate anywhere in real time. Superstars who build relationships, provide insights and translate this into value for their customers."
Standard tool set for the sales rep of the future
Tablets, armed with productivity-enhancing technology, will become part of the standard tool set for the sales rep of the future. Tablets and a sales and presentation tool combine the four trends that create the current convergence and mutual reinforcement of social interaction, mobility, cloud, and information.
Tablets and Social Interaction
Tablets are the socialites of computerland. You won't use them to create intricate spreadsheets or to crack complex mathematical problems. But for keeping up with people online, interacting with them on LinkedIn or getting to know them better through looking at what they tweet, tablets are great.
The same goes for social interaction within an organization. Tablets will not replace the servers that host your company's website. But when a sales rep can comment straight from his tablet on a piece of sales support material that he is using in a sales conversation, marketing will receive valuable feedback. This kind of social interaction, simple as it might seem, often breaks down the perceived barrier between sales and marketing, and results in better collaboration between the departments.
Tablets and Mobility
Huh. That's a no brainer, or when is the last time you tried to quickly start up your laptop over drinks at a networking event? Productivity-enhancing technology, such as a sales and presentation tool on a tablet, has great benefits for sales reps working in the office too. When all your material is neatly organised on a portable device, your telephone calls will be better. No more "please hold on a minute, I'm just looking up the pricelist, the system is a bit slow today"!
Tablets and Cloud
Cloud has brought a kind of hippie feeling to computing. "We're all happy, and everything is stored in the cloud, where I don't have to worry about it!" Whether tablets make you happy is highly subjective, fact is that with a good sales and presentation tool, all the material that you have on your tablet, is safely stored in the cloud. That's a comforting feeling, hippie or not.
Tablets and Information
Information is often information overload these days. Big Data and raw metrics don't mean a thing, if they ain't got that swing. A sales tool can provide just the swing your organisation needs when it seems like all the numbers just mean that you can't see the forrest for the trees. A sales and presentation tool for tablets keeps useful metrics on document use and sales activity, giving insights in what works in the field.
But what does Sales 2.0 actually mean?
The term Sales 2.0 was originally coined by Nigel Edelshain way back in 2006. The definition he gave to it was:
"Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively."
Web 2.0 refers to technology that allows users to interact and collaborate on the internet, rather than just passively read websites. Now that blogs and sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter have become so popular, it's hard to imagine a time when the internet was static.
In the meantime, the kind of 2.0 technology that allows social collaboration, has firmly claimed its stake within organizations too. New technology makes it easier to collaborate and communicate between departments.
The biggest challenge?
As always, the biggest challenge is not inventing new technology or better ways to work, but getting people to actually use the available technology.
In this sense, Sales 2.0 refers to much more than checking a prospect's LinkedIn or Twitter profile before giving him a call.
Putting the availabe technology to work to achieve a measurable result to the bottom line is what counts. Gerhard Gschwandter, CEO of Selling Power, is doing a lot of work in this field.
Sales 2.0 Conference
Gerhard hosts the Sales 2.0 Conference on June 3rd in London, which specifically focuses on leveraging SaaS technologies to meet the challenges and concerns of B2B sales and marketing executives.
Gerhard Gschwandter's definition of Sales 2.0 is: "Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance."
The Conference will be a day filled to the brim with learning, listening and catching up with thought leaders. Showpad's CEO Pieterjan Bouten will be present, as will yours truly. Do come and have a chat!
We're giving away some free attendee passes to the Sales 2.0 Conference in London on June 3, worth £349! Register here, first come, first served!
To celebrate the second anniversary of Showpad, I'd like to share some stories and anecdotes that I have collected during my first three months with the company as Content Creator. If that job title doesn't ring a bell, don't worry. Maybe copywriter makes more sense? When I first started with the company, I thought Showpad was just a great sales app for iPad. I knew how hard it was to get any kind of sales support document to show up correctly on a tablet, and when I gave the app a try, I saw the potential. Over the past months I learned that there's more to Showpad than being a good sales app for tablets. It's all about making sales teams sell in a smarter way, and it brings a lot of good things to the marketing team as well. In my writing, I really want to get that message across. After all, a company or a product is worthless without customers, and to get customers, we need to spread the message of what we do.
Or more precisely: the message of what our customers do. Because it's the stories of our customers, the people who use Showpad as a sales and presentation app, that matter. I have had the chance to talk to quite a few customers, and these are some of the most remarkable things I heard.
The clever Sales Manager who gets his sales reps out of their comfort zone.
At first, I thought Marc was not making himself very popular with his sales reps. He told me how he had set up their sales app in such a way that they would spend more time selling products they were less familiar with. When he explained what he did, it made sense.
The company Marc works for, has a steady stream of income from three products. To increase revenue, they introduced a new line of products. Marc noticed how his sales reps continued focusing on the existing offer, because it was known territory, and because they knew they had a good chance at getting in a sales order with those products.
When Marc placed sales support material about the new product on their iPad sales app, his reps learned more about the product, which made it easier for them to sell it. Marc started giving positive feedback to the reps who interacted with the new material, even if they didn't immediately close a deal. After a while, the new product became a natural part of the sales pitches, and sales went up accordingly.
Marc's phrase "it's more than a sales app for iPad" stayed with me, and was the inspiration for this blog post...
The Marketing Manager of a large team that hardly ever sits around the same table.
One of the first conversations I had was with Koen, who manages the marketing for an international team of salespeople. Although they talk regularly, they only meet once every few months. The way the reps sell varies a lot from country to country. There are cultural differences, and each sales rep has his personal traits too.
Koen found it hard to make sure his brand was represented in a consistent way. He doesn't mind that his sales reps have their own style, but he did worry that some sales reps worked with old material, or started to make their own presentations, which didn't help to bring the brand message across.
Because their ceiling systems come in a myriad of different styles and sizes, Koen had given his sales reps tablets to have all the technical product sheets at hand all the time. He struggled to find a good sales app that could easily distribute new product sheets and catalogs to all his sales reps' tablets.
It was a real eye-opener for me to listen to Koen explain how he uses Showpad to efficiently manage his team: he updates everything centrally, the reps don't have to worry about getting the correct material in the sales app on their tablets, and the whole team brings the same, unified message across. If a sales rep still wants to make her own presentation, that's ok, but it has to go through Koen's hands before it goes on her sales app, to avoid mistakes that can cost the company a lot of money.
The Director proud to show his product in action.
The story of the Business Sytems Director of a lighting company was different, and gave me a new view on how people use technology.
Simon works for a company that sells lights. Boring? Not if you see the videos of what a difference light can make. Lighting is typically one of those things that you don't notice, unless it's wrong. Ever had a meal in a restaurant with really bright lights? You feel like your in a school canteen, no matter how good the food is.
So Simon's company invests in making short videos of the projects they have done. Still, he couldn't ask people in the hardware supply stores, where his lights are on sale, to watch the video at home, and then come back to the store. Instead, his company decided to put an iPad in a sturdy holder next to the products on display in the shops.
The iPads have Showpad installed on them as a presentation app. The videos are available offline, shoppers see the product in action, experience the difference good lighting can make, and get inspiration for their home or organization.
I hope you find these stories inspiring. If you would like to learn more about using tablets in sales, download our e-book "How Tablets and Mobile Sales Enablement Technology Make Your Life as a Sales Director Easier" below.
What Our New PDF Processing Engine Means for You:
Suited for print, great for digital
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a popular file format for print, but it is very suitable for digital publication as well. Most files such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentations, InDesign files... can be saved or exported as PDF. The good thing about PDF is that, to represent a document, you don't need to have the original software installed that was used to create the file.
PDF for tablets
Because PDF works independent of software, hardware or operating system, it is a great format for material that you want to show on a tablet. However, some types of PDF files look perfectly fine on a regular computer, but may cause unexpected issues on a tablet: color differences, extremely slow rendering, or worse, they may fail to open.
Meet our brand new PDF optimization engine
We are happy to announce that we have a brand new, top-notch, super-duper PDF optimization engine in place. I can imagine this is not something that makes your heart skip a beat, but let me explain how this engine is improving the way you work with Showpad:
- Downsamples large images for you
If you have made a PDF that needs to be printed too, chances are that there will be nice and large images in it. Full color, 600 dpi, high quality... Lovely in print, but simply too much for a tablet to swallow. Result: your perfect PDF gets a firm no-no from your tablet. When you send the PDF to your tablet through Showpad, our new PDF engine warmly welcomes your large PDF, carefully examines which images would simply be overkill, and gently downsizes them, without losing any visible quality. The result? A bitesize chunk of optimized PDF your tablet will simply love.
Complex PDF files can consist of many layers. This is also something the less-than-fenomenal processing powers of tablets struggle with. Who can blame them, just looking at their size it's amazing they can do so many things as it is. We can't expect tablets to be as strong as their much larger and heavier lap- and desktop counterparts, so our really powerful PDF optimization engine comes to the rescue. With a great thump it flattens all the layers, turning bulging files into wafer-thin beauties just perfect for any tablet. Again, without losing any visible quality.
- Deals with color conversions for you
You may know that computers work with RGB and printers with CMYK colors. If not, don't worry, thanks to our PDF optimization engine you will never need to know the difference. PDF files are not fussy about colors systems. But tablets are... One CMYK picture in a PDF document with many pages and many pictures can really be a showstopper. Swiftly the PDF processing engine comes to the scene, taking away any conflicts in color systems and delivering a PDF-file that shows the colors on the tablet exactly as they were meant to be.
Read more about presenting marketing support material on tablets in this free e-book!
Do you attend trade shows, exhibitions or conferences? Then you probably noticed how more and more businesses are using tablets to engage consumers during those events. Tablets are definitely on the rise. When used in the right way, tablets can help you make the most out of your presence at a trade show. Attract visitors, let your sales people shine and collect contact details, all with a device that won’t break your back when carrying it from your car to the exhibition center.
6 Reasons to Use Tablets at Your Next Trade Show:
1. Attract more visitors to your trade show booth.
Nowhere will you encounter more competition than at a trade fair. While standing next to many other products and businesses, it is important to grab the attention of the visitors. Tablets have a special aura about them, people are attracted to iPads and other tablet computers. Curiosity is a great motivator!
2. Give your sales team correct up-to-date material to work with.
With paper documentation, last minute changes just before or during a trade fair can be problematic and costly. Using tablets gives you the advantage that you can easily distribute the latest version to the whole team at the exhibition.
3. Have better and more effective conversations.
All types of content can be shown on a tablet, depending on what the visitor to your booth is looking for, or in which part of his buying cycle he or she is. The sales support material on the tablets can be divided according to product and stage of the buying cycle. That way, you can showcase your solution with appealing photographs to visitors who are just looking around, and dive deeper into pricelists and technical specifications with visitors who are ready to buy. Showing the right material allows your visitors to make an informed decision about your product. When you have to carry all your sales support material in a printed version, you can never bring enough to answer all questions.
4. No Internet? Make sure your content is available without an Internet connection.
With so many smartphones, tablets and laptops that want to go on the Internet in the same room, you cannot rely on the wireless network for your tablets at trade shows. There are tools available that let you easily store your material on your tablets, so everything is accessible in offline mode.
5. Quickly capture contact data.
It is often a challenge to get the contact information that you capture at a trade show back to the office in a quick and easy way. Especially when trade shows run for more than one day, or when they take place far away from your main office. When you wait until you are back in the office to organize the follow-up, you lose valuable selling time. With a sales and presentation app that syncs back with the back office, your sales people at the office can start following up on hot leads long before you have unpacked your traveling bags.
6. Reduce print and transportation costs.
Attending a trade show is often very expensive, so keeping the extra costs under control is vital. When using tablets to present the bulk of your sales support material, you reduce the budget for paper and print costs, as well as the cost of getting boxes of brochures and catalogs to the exhibition. Of course you will want to take a printed flyer or brochure as well, because it remains important to give people who visit your booth something tangible. But when you don’t need to print a lot of different material, you can make that one piece really special.
Thinking about using tablets during your upcoming trade show? Download your copy of our e-book "How to Make Marketing Easier with Tablets and Mobile Sales Enablement Technology" to find out how to use tablets to increase the effectiveness of your team.
Using Mobile Technology To Unlock Your Sales Potential
Recent developments in mobile sales enablement solutions are starting to provide enormous benefits to healthcare organizations. Although many have already turned to tablets, they’re often left with the key challenge of finding the right application to leverage this transformation and get the most out of the opportunities mobile technology has to offer.
The mobile buying experience
People constantly change the way they interact with businesses. In these past few years, they have become familiar with fast access to a huge amount of content, both online and offline. Customers are no longer impressed by standard laptop presentations and static sales talks. The rise of smartphones, tablets and mobile internet has initiated a mobile revolution among consumers and is now pushing businesses to adapt to these new market dynamics.
There are many ways to use mobile technology to increase productivity and drive revenue growth. Today’s competitive market calls for the generation of additional business value and competitive differentiation. It’s all about the customer, so organizations should start transforming their sales methods, leveraging the power of mobile technology.
Traditional sales often require a lot of manual processes, which result in long sales cycles and delayed turnaround. The use of tablets in your organization can provide you with many advantages. While striving for growth, here are some benefits of tablets to consider:
- Powerful tools for healthcare organizations to reach their customers more cost-effectively
- Enhanced communication possibilities with doctors & their patients
- More customer visits due to reduced paperwork
- Improved training possibilities
- Faster gathering of client information
- Increased customer engagement
- Reduced print costs
- Fast, reliable & secure
Stand out from your competitors
Access to doctors is decreasing. And many visits last less than 10 minutes.
A sales rep who does his presentation offering a memorable experience, with accurate technical information compatible with the physician’s practice, will stand out from his competitors. Sales reps can adapt to the specific needs and goals of a physician’s practice.
Mobile solutions:
- Shift from a display device to a real solution-selling tool
- Fasten processes
- Create a shorter sales cycle
- Enable more customer & employee satisfaction and engagement
- Offer business intelligence to optimize sales effectiveness and performance
- Effectively provide support as a closed-loop marketing tool
- Guarantee better collaboration with team members to localize opportunities
The new way to boost sales
Tablets in combination with an easy-to-use application enable sales teams to engage customers in new ways that were not possible before. They are now able to interact with customers in a way that outperforms traditional conversations and classic sales tools. That’s why it’s important for organizations to understand their customers’ needs, the way they want to be informed and what influences their buying behavior.
By making the most of their face-to-face time, sales teams can close the sale much faster. They have up-to-date and accurate information at their fingertips and have the empowering opportunity to sell in a new and more efficient way.
Do you want to find out more, and see how BASF is using tablets to transform its business?
Download the BASF case study here, and discover how BASF increased the sales effectiveness of more than 1.000 sales reps.
Tablets are changing the game in face-to-face selling and field sales. When sending sales teams on the road with tablets, Sales Directors and Marketers can use mobile sales enablement technology to let the sales professionals use tablets in the most effective way, making sure the investment in sales material and tablets yields measurable results. Great results are achieved when businesses harness the possibilities offered by sales enablement technology to bring a system for mobile content management into place.
Content such as presentations, catalogs, pricelists, videos, product sheets, photographs… is great to be used in sales conversations. But how can we make sure all sales reps use only the latest, company-approved content?
When working with mobile sales enablement technology, all existing content is uploaded to a central platform in the cloud, from where it is simultaneously pushed to all the tablets of the sales organization. This creates a central source of truth, and a system for controlled content distribution.
All sales material can be accessed from the tablets anywhere and anytime via a mobile app. With such an app, all sales material is correctly displayed on a tablet, and becomes accessible even without an Internet connection. When a new version of a certain document is available, uploading it once to the platform is enough to make sure all sales reps are working with correct and up-to-date material.
The benefits of having a good Mobile Content Management platform:
- Everyone has access to the latest and approved content.
- Updating content is easy: it only needs to be uploaded once.
- There is no more confusion about which version of a document to use.
- Sales reps only use company-approved material, resulting in a unified message and communication.
- The existing content within an organization is used to its full potential because sales reps carry it with them at all times.
Selling with a tablet is an interactive experience, where the potential customer can easily be shown additional sales support material when it comes up in conversation. Existing sales material becomes the building blocks for interactive stories, holding people’s attention and establishing a real connection.
The benefits of Mobile Sales Enablement Technology for a sales organization:
The positive impact of using a mobile sales enablement tool goes further than efficiently managing the distribution of content on the tablets.
- Insights: With a mobile sales enablement tool, sales directors gain insights into how sales reps interact with the sales collateral on their tablets. From these insights, best practices can be distilled and knowledge about efficient selling can be shared with the whole sales team.
- Feedback: Mobile sales enablement technology allows sales reps to easily provide feedback on the sales material. When sales reps can easily rate and post comments on the sales support material on their tablets, improvements on the material becomes a lot easier, and so does the correct allocation of budget.
- Administration: Presenting sales material on a mobile device works very well in a sales conversation. But potential customers often want to have another look at the sales material later on, or share it with co-workers and decision makers. Sharing and distributing content from a tablet is straightforward with mobile sales enablement technology. Capturing contact information for use in a CRM system from the tablet is easy as well. As a result, sales reps have to spend less time doing administration after a sales meeting, such as sending a follow-up email or updating the CRM system.
- Collaboration and communication: Mobile sales enablement technology gives sales directors the possibility to send push notifications to the tablets of their sales team. These pop-up messages never go unnoticed – which is not always the case for emails nowadays.
Would you like to learn how set up a Mobile Content Management for your sales team today?
Download your copy of the e-book “How Tablets and Mobile Sales Enablement Technology Make Your Life as a Sales Director Easier", and discover the benefits of mobile sales enablement technology.
To really benefit from using tablets in sales, you need a sales and presentation app. One of the key questions is the price tag associated with a tablet app…
How much does it actually cost to build a custom sales app?
When you want to send your sales force on the road with an app that is completely focused on what they need, there are basically 3 options:
- Have your IT-department develop a custom application.
- Hire a 3rd party to develop a custom app.
- Subscribe to a service like Showpad.
Nobody likes another monthly fee, no matter how small, so custom app development might seem like a better idea. You pay once, either in time spent by your IT-staff, or in cash to a 3rd party. When the price is paid for development, the app is yours to keep, for as many sales reps as you wish.
Actually, reality learns it is not that simple.
1. Custom app development is downright expensive.
It takes a big team and specific skills and knowledge to create a good business application:
- user interface specialists,
- designers,
- mobile developers,
- backend developers,
- testers,
- project managers,
- ...
Looking at the current rates of specialized mobile agencies, you are looking at a price tag of at least $150.000 to develop your own sales and presentation app with its own content management system. You want your app to work on Android tablets and iPads? Let’s add another $50.000. If you want an app that is integrated with your existing enterprise software such as Salesforce, Sharepoint etc, be prepared to spend another + $200.000 on the integration. That money buys you many licences for a very long time!
2. Development needed after the first version
.
Development doesn’t stop when the first version of app is ready.
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When the platform that your app operates on, goes through a major update, you will want your app to be updated too. Chances are that your app may not work the newest version of iOS or Android. So you need to update your app. At between $70 and $100 per hour, development cost to upgrade your app will be high.
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And what about new features? After a few months of working with the app, your employees will be screaming for new functionality. Again you need to pay your development partner or let your IT-department spend a lot of time on something that is not their core business.
We have a team of 15 developers and designers constantly working on improving our platform and the application. We release updates approximately every month, and major updates every quarter. Small or major, every single update of the Showpad app is included in your monthly fee.
3. Developing a custom app takes a long time
.
Between deciding that you want to build your own custom app, and clicking the icon on your tablet, you have to count a minimum of 6 months. When you subscribe to a SaaS service, you can be up and running in less than a week, training included.
4. Optimizing files so that they can be viewed on tablets is hard, and costly.
When you have your app custom built, it should include a possibility to add new material, or to update pricelists and presentations. But the technology available to process files so that they can be viewed on a tablet is constantly changing. When you subscribe to a SaaS service, you benefit from the latest technology to make sure the files you upload to your device display correctly. Whereas a custom built app will usually continue to work in the same way as it did when you paid for it.
5. The security cost that comes with custom app development
.
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A business app needs a platform, a central place from where the material that is in the application can be managed.
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You want to make sure that the files you keep on that platform are secure, and that sending files to the platform and downloading content on your tablet is done in a secure way.
We have all necessary precautions in place to keep your files safe and so secure safe file transfer. The investments we make for securing our platform are much larger than what is justifiable for a single, custom built app. Our customers include banks and other organizations who deal with sensitive material, and every single one of our customers benefits from the security needed for those customers.
6. Service comes at a price
.
Just like with any software or application, issues can arise or bugs can be discovered.
If you paid for a custom app, any additional service will be an additional cost. Which might make you think twice about calling to resolve a smaller issue. As we all know, once you know that there is a bug in an application, the desire to use the application greatly diminishes.
In your case, you would just call our support desk and we will fix your problem instantly and free of charge – what we fix for you, we fix for all of our customers at the same time. It’s important for us that your sales reps enjoy working with the app. Our engagement doesn’t stop when your app is ready.
The same goes for the platform: we cannot afford any downtime, and make serious investments in servers and back-up procedures. So the risk of not being able to access your platform just before an important sales meeting is minimal.
7. Maintenance is not optional.
Every app needs maintenance. If you need to pay for this on a yearly or quarterly basis, you are looking at a recurrent cost, that in itself can be higher than your licence fee.
8. Vision versus requirements.
Something that is often overlooked, and that is very difficult to put a price on, is vision.
When you go to a developer with a set of requirements, he will build the best possible app to meet those requirements. But rarely will you find an engineer who thinks about the bigger picture, about what tablets mean for the sales process as a whole.
Here at Showpad, we take your requirements into account, but we also have a vision about the future of sales. Tablets will play an ever more important role in selling, because they bring the focus back to the conversation with the customer. Mobile technology goes much further that what you can see on the tablet screen. It’s about enabling communication, collaboration and making people smarter and more efficient.
9. What is the price of a high adoption rate for your app?
With the consumerization of IT, employees want the same smooth experience from their business apps that they are used to from dealing with in their daily life.
Usability, intuitive interface and design should all serve one single purpose: make sure people love using the app.
Because an app can be really beautiful and jam-packed with features, the moment your sales reps have a sinking feeling in their stomach when they see the icon on their tablet screen, your investment has gone to waste.
Download your free copy of our e-book “How Tablets and Mobile Sales Enablement Technology Make Your Life as a Sales Director Easier", and learn more about the benefits of tablets for a mobile sales force.
Tablets and sales are definitely a match made in heaven. Using a tablet during a sales conversation truly enhances the customer experience.
Are you ready to take it to the next level, and start using a tablet application to boost your mobile sales efficiency?
5 Benefits of Using Tablets in Sales
1) Sales conversations can happen anywhere, anytime: at a desk, over lunch, in the hallway…
The main benefit of using tablets in sales is that the sales conversation isn’t limited to one place. You can pick up your tablet and give your product presentation straight away. Tablets have a long-lasting battery and can be switched on instantly, so you are always ready.
Tablets help you to present yourself and your company in a professional way, and to stand out from the competition.
2) Products and services come to life.
Sales material such as presentations, catalogs, pricelists, photographs and videos can all be stored in that little piece of awesomeness. Your customers can even swipe through the different types of content themselves, which creates a valuable engagement.
A great evolution is happening here: where sales people used to carry all kinds of sales material around, now you have all the information you need on your tablet. The hands-on approach of touching, tapping, swiping and zooming provides a new and non-linear experience that lets you make the best use of your sales material.
3) The customer and sales rep share the screen, creating proximity.
The obvious good thing about tablets is that it are highly portable devices. No matter where you go, you can always take your tablet along. Tablets are light, small, can easily be held with one hand, and are still large enough to share the screen. When you share the screen with your customer, it creates proximity and that is the start of a good relationship. With a tablet, a sales presentation can become an interactive experience, and interactivity is the key to real engagement.
4) The conversation flows naturally, as tablets encourage engagement.
When using a tablet in sales you can focus on what is most important: your client. The customer is still king.
5) Depending on the conversation, additional resources can be accessed.
When the conversation takes a turn, and the customer wants to see your product in action, you could, for example, show a video fragment. Or when you meet a potential customer at a networking event, you can immediately input his contact data for your CRM application. Using a tablet sales app greatly simplifies the gathering of information during face-to-face talks. These combined benefits result in improved engagement, and improved engagement leads to increased sales.
Would you like to learn more about using tablets in sales?
Download your free copy of our e-book “How Tablets and Mobile Sales Enablement Technology Make Your Life as a Sales Director Easier", and learn more about the benefits of tablets for a mobile sales force.
Today's blog post is a guest post by Jan Flamend, CEO Valueselling.
The sales community today has 2 mantras:
- Sales Effectiveness (also known als SEf)
- Sales Excellence (also known as SEx)
SEf can be improved through clever effort management. Research shows that about 30% of sales time is wasted on projects that won’t be won.
Sales people should ask themselves 3 questions to improve Sales Effectiveness:
- Are we talking to customers with real potential?
- Are we talking to the right people at the right level to take decisions?
- Should I invest my time in this prospect?
SEx on the other hand, has to do with the quality of the sales efforts.
Questions to measure your Sales Excellence:
How good are we in:
- Asking questions.
- Articulating the value.
- Dealing with objections.
- Closing deals.
Some people would say that you cannot focus on SEf and on SEx at the same time. I am not sure about that so called incompatibility. The new trend toward
Sales Mobility– you can call it the third mantra if you like – is proving me me right.
Sales Mobility: the 3rd mantra in sales.
By Sales Mobility, we mean the fact that sales people are equipped with tablets and smart phones that have CRM apps and Controlled Content Distribution tools installed.
These tools help field sales to:
- Save time.
- Focus on the right customers.
- Conduct qualitative conversations with those customers.
Our collegues from Huthwaite conducted an interesting survey in the sales community and they found that:
- 70.1% of people with a company-issued tablet hit sales targets for the most recent sales quarter, compared with 62.5% overall.
- Nearly 90% of those surveyed also said mobile devices improved their productivity.
- 46.5% cited faster communication as the main benefit of having a mobile device.
One would say that Sales Mobility is the New Normal. As devices become more powerful and more user-friendly, and the applications more up to speed with the needs of sales people, it becomes difficult to imagine a sales organisation without a Sales Mobility solution.
Key success factors for Sales Mobility solutions.
- You need a strategy and a policy.
- You need security.
- You need to bring the tablet and the smartphone beyond the status of shining gadget.
- Your content distribution system needs to be flexible, helpful and reliable.
- Your CRM must go beyond the status of pain in the neck.
- And you need adoption by your sales people.
When you have taken these steps, SEf and SEx objectives will contribute jointly to a dramatic sales increase.
Jan Flamend is CEO of Valueselling.be. Jan works with international companies who wish to push their sales operations further, improve their sales people's skills and motivation and boost their bottom line as a result.
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VentureBeat reporter Sean Ludwig reports: "European tablet presentation startup Showpad has raised $2 million in its first round of funding to help more enterprise companies use iPads for work and to grow its business in the United States.
Showpad offers up software that turns iPads and other tablets into sales and presentation tools. The software lets you easily upload content and manage separate content profiles online. When you open the app on the iPad, the content profile that has been assigned to you shows up. (See the photo above for an example of a content profile.) Showpad joins other startups that are trying to make mobile devices a bigger part of the enterprise.
“The mobile tools that are available on the market today are not suitable for modern salespeople,” Pieterjan Bouten, Showpad co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Just like any other employee on the move, salespeople have a need for accurate and real-time data. In addition, they need to be able to adapt their sales documentation to the individual customer’s requirements and to gain fast access to the experts within their companies.”
Read full article here.