Empowering sales and customer service teams with mobile-ability straight from your ERP/accounting system can have a powerful impact on your business. Not only can it increase revenue, but benefit the bottom line in other ways, too–like reducing labor costs and eliminating redundant data entry.
Mobile selling also can provide a new means of intelligence gathering, making your people more confident, and more engaging.
But because everyone’s needs are not the same, choosing the right solution for your business is really important, but luckily, not complicated.
Whatever your needs are, these are some important things to keep in mind:
- A great mobile solution starts with a vision. Get the mobile conversation started with your most free thinking people. And be open to ideas come from anyone in your organization. Everyone and anyone on your team might be sitting on a billion dollar idea.
- Identify the business processes that require change. Mobilizing your workforce is good old fashioned business process reengineering.
- Articulate expected benefits. What financial and behavioral impacts do you seek from mobile? If you don’t have a profit motive, why would you do it?
- Evaluate customized and pre-existing packaged solutions to determine which will work best. Then ask yourself if what you really need is a custom app, because you want to separate your company from any competitor, and a packaged app could be done by anyone.
- Determine the optimal level of integration with your accounting/ERP/CRM system. Don’t overlook the fact that security is an important matter here, and that can vary user-by-user, role-by-role within your company.
- Select a mobile platform after choosing a solution. The real value is not a matter of Android versus Apple. Remember that the real value is in the experience you create for salespeople and customers, and the processes you transform. The phone itself is usually the commodity – if not – what you created has not much value beyond the price of the device.
Consider the greater impact of mobile. Mobile allows for a significant number of changes that can have a transformative effect on your business. It will even change the way your customers look at you.
The video below is a recording of a recent webinar we presented. It is geared for small and mid-sized distribution and manufacturing companies who use Sage 100 software to run their businesses. It also contains nuggets that are useful regardless of your back-end system of choice.
It includes descriptions of some key differences between Sage Mobile Sales and these two packaged solutions published by xkzero:
- iSales 100
(for Sage 100 ERP) - xkzero Mobile Commerce
direct store delivery (DSD) and sales automation for food and beverage distribution, and for any other company with sophisticated sales and delivery needs
Also, there is a feature comparison beginning at 23:38.
[51 min 58 sec]
Would you like to talk mobile strategy for your distribution business? At xkzero we’d love to hear from you. info@xkzero.com www.xkzero.com or 847-416-2009.