Category Archives: Sales Enablement

Tablet Computers’ Killer App?

Anyone who works in sales enablement needs to take notice of how rapidly tablet computers are sweeping across the corporate landscape. According to recently published research from Model Metrics, 68% of companies plan to have tablets deployed in the field by 2012. Over 40% have deployed or plan on deploying them by the end of 2011. And almost 50% of those deployments, according to the study, involve sales force automation applications.

As we have blogged previously, the rapid and widespread adoption of tablets represents a huge opportunity for organizations that are willing to make an investment in sales enablement. Even further, deploying tablets to the field in the absence of high-quality sales tools designed for the tablet platform is a waste of the technology investment. In many ways, sales tools—such as automated proposal builders, presentation templates, and product comparisons—should be a “killer app” for the tablet in B2B selling because they represent a perfect alignment of technology benefits with user requirements. For sales tools to be effective, they must be easy to use, intuitively interactive, and fast: all of these characteristics are part of the raison d’etre of the tablet device. Moreover, though, tablets enable sales tools to go a step beyond the status quo because, if done well, they can facilitate customer participation. Compared to handing a prospect a feature-based product comparison sheet, how much more effective would it be to hand prospects a tablet loaded with a diagnostic app that walks them through a series of questions about features, benefits, and value that highlight key points of differentiation for your product versus the competitions’?

Perhaps the most important component of the tablet opportunity in the sales force is that tablets can provide significant support to the majority of sales people in the vast middle of the bell curve—not the stars but those who have some skills and the best of intentions. If the greater structure, consistency, and interactivity enabled by the tablets can raise the average performance of this group just a few percentage points, it can represent millions of dollars in revenue gains.

Relationship Marketing Is…

A client asked me today when does old-style direct mail turn into relationship marketing? I said…

  • When it’s about the whole relationship—web, emarketing, mail and human channels—and all of these know the customer equally well.
  • When all of these channels are enabled to deliver offers and services that demonstrate that customer knowledge.
  • When the focus is on the customer’s lifetime value, with measurement to match, rather than making a single product sale in a silo.
  • When the lines between service, marketing and sales are seamless and invisible to the customer.

iPad-Enabled Salesforces: The Future of Sales Enablement?

Recently, The Hartford, John Hancock, and JP Morgan have all been in the news regarding their decisions to equip some wholesalers with iPads. The rationale was fairly consistent across the three companies: leverage the greater presentation capabilities and impressiveness of the iPad versus a laptop, and remove the burden of carrying large amounts of material and technology. JPMorgan appears to be seeking even more out of the new technology as it is rolling-out a presentation app that offers greater functionality than the native web-browser-based version.

From a sales enablement perspective, the iPad represents an incredibly valuable platform: It ensures that sales people will be relying solely on the materials they can access on the device. Whereas in the past, field sales people may have used outdated presentations that resided on their laptop hard drive, now consistent, current presentations can be pushed out to them with a high probability of 100% compliance. In fact, a presentation template app could even enable the real-time creation of a prospect-ready presentation based on input from the sales person. Likewise, apps could deliver, at the touch of the screen, fully updated product comparisons or ROI calculators. Moreover, usage of these tools would now be significantly more measurable.

In other words, the use of iPads by sales is a classic “win-win”: sales gets a slick gadget and can get rid of bulky papers and clunky laptops; sales management gets increased compliance and, with it, consistency.