File this under TMI
(too much information): a survey discovered that about 75 percent of Americans admit to using their mobile phone in the bathroom. Here are some additional statistics that are a little less personal:
• Internet usage via mobile phones is expected to overtake desktop usage this year.
• 70 percent of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour.
• The global mobile market will grow from $3.4 billion in 2010 to $22 billion in 2016.
If that doesn’t convince you that mobile no longer is the future of sales and marketing, it’s the present, then we’ll bring things back into the bathroom: Of the world’s 7 billion plus people, more of them own cell phones than toothbrushes.
Lest you think we’re only talking about the consumer world, Forrester Research states that B2B e-commerce sales are now more than twice the size of B2C e-commerce and were expected to reach $559 billion in sales in the U.S. by the end of last year.
“The biggest thing right now — for the last year — for B2B sales and marketing teams is mobility,” says Mark Woollen, senior vice president of product marketing for Salesforce.com, the ubiquitous customer relationship management (CRM) provider that has expanded its offerings into the social enterprise arena. “When we say, ‘run your business from your phone,’ we mean it.”
Woollen recounts his early days in field sales “breaking out my giant, seven-pound Toshiba laptop in the airport,” the same way early techies nostalgically recall DOS and dial-up connections. “I dig being able to run my business from anywhere, but there is nothing quite like it when you can actually do it from something that is in your pocket, that has instantaneous connectivity and is pretty much viewed as being in the office.”
Going mobile
The challenge for a lot of companies is transferring technological capabilities that have become a way of doing business in the office and making them work via mobile devices, Woollen says. Salesforce.com’s Salesforce1 Platform is designed to accelerate mobile app development for connected companies. B2B companies can develop customer-facing apps, build employee-facing apps and connect any product, device and platform through the cloud. In other words, anything a company has built on Salesforce can be mobile instantly.
The mobile movement has spawned countless companies that want to help B2B marketing and sales teams push their CRM and other data management systems out of the office and literally into their employees’ hands. Roambi, a company founded in 2008, takes data from CRM systems, business intelligence systems, spreadsheets, etc., and converts it into an application experience that is optimized for mobile. The entire interface of the interaction with data is completely touch-oriented and highly animated, making it easy to interact with data on a small screen, says company co-founder Quinton Alsbury.
“A lot of trending talk around the smartphone is that it is ushering in the post-PC era; my spin on that is that it’s actually going to be the most PC era — the most personal computer you can own,” Alsbury says.
Roambi and companies like it go to market as software as a service (SaaS), using a per-user subscription fee that scales relative to the number of users a company enrolls. Other SaaS offerings aim to help sales managers and sales reps streamline lead management, enhance lead qualifying and improve customer conversations, mostly by collecting and analyzing unbelievable amounts of data.
Taming Big Data
Zilliant, an Austin, Texas-based company, produces SalesMax and MarginMax, two SaaS products that it says eliminates the guesswork that thousands of B2B sales reps wrestle with when deciding what products to offer prospects and at what price. Eric Hills, Zilliant’s chief evangelist and senior vice president, says the typical Zilliant client is an industrial products supplier that offers thousands if not tens of thousands of products to just as many customers. If you’re a sales rep at one of those companies, how do you determine what prospects to see, what products to talk about and what price to quote?
“At our core, we are an advanced analytics or Big Data company,” Hills says. “We have a team of what we call pricing scientists and our work is about finding patterns and ultimately finding opportunities in our customers’ data — what they sold in the past, who they sold it to — and using that to play forward.
Leadspace, a 2010 San Francisco-based startup, offers predictive lead targeting SasS that sifts through gobs of data, including social networks, contact databases, websites and client CRM, to help companies identify and connect with ideal prospects.
“What we’re really seeing now is the emergence of customer insight for B2B,” says Leadspace CEO Doug Bewsher, who joined the company earlier this year after serving as Salesforce.com’s chief marketing officer. “Companies need to sift through vast amounts of data in order to really understand who their customer is, what they’re interested in and what their passions are so they can have meaningful and relevant conversations with them.” (See sidebar story on page 48 for more on this concept.)
By moving this capability to mobile devices, Bewsher says Leadspace allows sales managers to connect data systems in a matter of seconds in order to provide the right information to their marketing team and sales reps. Bewsher says Leadspace was founded by people with national security intelligence service backgrounds. They were sifting through vast amounts of data sets and the unstructured Web to connect the dots that helped them “find out who the bad guys are.” They took the best of that knowledge and applied it to this new goal.
Wringing valid sales and marketing information from vast pools of data relies on three things, Bewsher says: “If you don’t get the data, the analytics and the process integration with existing marketing platforms right, then I don’t think you’re going to be successful.”
Usefulness rules
The promise of going mobile is increased productivity, but that will only happen if the tools and the data that companies provide their sales teams are on point and on time. One true measurement of effectiveness, says Kurt Andersen, executive vice president of marketing and sales enablement for software solutions provider SAVO, is the hours that a rep spends versus the amount of revenue he or she brings back to the organization. Mobile marketing and sales tools should improve that ratio.
“An organization usually has no shortage of content. Usually, what they have is a shortage of context. We run into companies all of the time that think they have bad [marketing] content because it’s not being used or they can’t find evidence that anyone is finding any value from it. We take what you have and help you segment it down into the context that people can more effectively use to sell.”
Hills from Zilliant adds, “I have a phrase that sometimes goes over with people and sometimes doesn’t: ‘the un-CRM.’ I think salespeople over the last decade have become saturated and cynical in terms of new applications, including new BI applications. They see through management’s spin. More often than not, it’s ‘we need information about what you’re doing.’
“What we believe and what we practice and how we’ve designed our solutions is that [salespeople] will embrace a technologically enabled capability that lives up to this promise of making jobs easier. That’s one of the big problems with analytics in general — it has to feel like it shows up at the right time and in the right place.”
