Choosing the right mobile sales app for your business

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.  Distributor sales rep

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:

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.

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Apple vs. Android is not the question

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One of the worst things you can do for your business is you limit your mobile business choices to either Apple or Android-based apps - simply because you, or members of your team, currently own those certain devices.  If your intent is to make a major impact on your business with mobile, you should be thinking more expansively than that.

Sure, the cost of acquiring smart phones or tablets is an important part of the ROI calculation to measure the success of your mobile initiative, but leading with pre-selected hardware is a mistake, especially for small and mid-sized businesses who may be entering the mobile business world for the first time.

Regardless of your specific goals (and you’ll need to get really specific), if the driving factor for your mobile automation project is increasing revenue, elimination of redundant labor, or improved customer and salesperson engagement, the real value will come from new or transformed processes that you design to make that happen.  If you can succeed with that the bottom line impact on your business could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for your business – millions or billions for the truly creative, resourceful and, yes, lucky.

The development platforms for Android phones and iPhones both are powerful and capable, and while there are certainly situations when you might choose one or the other, when it comes to having a booming impact on the future of your company, it’s changing the experience of buying from you, changing the experience shared by your sales team and your customers – and not the maker of the smart phone – that will determine your success.

Is one better than the other when it comes to business?

Is one better than the other when it comes to business?

Are you ready to start the mobile conversation in your business?  We can help – www.xkzero.com, info@xkzero.com or 847-416-2009