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productivity

Novelty is sustainable

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Remember your last technology purchase? Was it the latest flat panel TV? A new tablet or smartphone? Lucky you. Feels like technology is changing so rapidly that we can have that excitement once a month forever.

Our apps can be a continuous source of excitement and productivity as well. Canned apps are plentiful, but are less likely to satisfy since their one-size-fits-all design typically doesn’t address our specific needs.

Custom apps, on the other hand, can be an ongoing source of conversation and utility. There’s no substitute for a purpose-built tool that users experience and after doing so, can become instrumental to future improvement and function.

Our apps can generate steady increases in productivity if we design, deploy and iterate with the expectation that novelty is sustainable.

How to pay for a custom app project (3rd in a series of 3)

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Prove the productivity

A B2B sales team’s custom selling tool saved them 30-45 minutes per day per rep, making the ROI on their project just 18 days. Need proof that a mobile project will save time and drive sales? Plenty of data exists, but every situation is unique and so your app strategy will be too. Build mobile tools with tracking and analytics and soon you’ll know exactly how your technology investment is faring and what adjustments are needed to get even more out of it.

In a sales setting, one of the greatest opportunities for mobile technology is to increase the speed at which our salespeople can sell. Get started by shifting funds from antiquated methods and apply technology that accelerates the sales cycle while collecting proof that shows the investment is succeeding.

Sales enablement enables what?

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In my 20 years in sales and marketing, I can’t think of another time when hardware and software have been evolving so quickly and offered so much promise. So let’s explore the category of sales enablement. Who wouldn’t want to empower our salespeople to do more?

What we want our sales team to do, however, should define the tools we build, not the other way around. If our people in the field are supposed to spend as much time as possible in front of customers, many sales enablement projects actually detract from their mission:

  • Time-consuming CRM data entry that is never converted into insight that the salesperson can use
  • Lead management systems that trap salespeople on the phone to qualify long lists of prospects
  • Literature fulfillment processes that are cumbersome and unreliable
  • Content libraries that require hours of manipulation to produce a presentation suitable for a customer

By definition, sales enablement tools can help our salespeople do more, so focus on the handful of critical things things we’re counting on them to do and resist the urge to add new tasks simply because the tools now exist.

Making productivity gains meaningful

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Justifying a business investment that leads directly to new sales is straightforward: figure out the investment, revenue, and profit, do the math and move forward.

To justify an investment based fully or partly on productivity gains, however, there’s a critical blank that needs to be filled in when we make our case: what will we do with the time we’re saving?

  • A new phone system saves each CSR 15 minutes a day, so from now on we’ll expect them to call customers that we haven’t heard from recently…
  • Mobile sales tools mean that a salesperson avoids spending hours searching for literature and modifying presentations, so from now on we’ll expect them to make one more sales call per week…

Many technologies are truly win/win in that both our people and our customers benefit. If your project saves time, claim it, designate what it will be used for, and show greater return on the investment.