De-Bunking Mobile CRM Myths
June 29, 2007
Customers demand faster response times. To get ahead of the competition and improve your bottom line, get on board with mCRM before you fall behind the curve.
By Christine Galea
Just the mere mention of the acronym CRM makes salespeople cringe, but as all savvy executives know, it's critical to staying ahead in today's business world. Mobile customer relationship management (mCRM) has had a hard time finding its footing in the market, but all signs are pointing to a shift in this mindset.
Today's customers are at the center of the business ecosystem and are demanding more—and faster—so in order to keep up, companies need to address their needs in real time, which is why the drive to put information in the hands of your field reps is so urgent. So finally, after years of waiting for its banner year, mCRM seems poised to get the spotlight it deserves. According to a recent survey by Boston-based research firm Aberdeen Group, 47 percent of organizations surveyed planned to expand their use of mCRM technology within the next six months. Another 65 percent of best-in-class respondents say mobile sales force automation (SFA) will have a significant impact on the way they conduct business over the next five years, and 95 percent already reported an increase in revenue as a result of using mobile SFA solutions.
"I asked one of the survey respondents if mCRM was a business-critical application, and he said, 'It's no longer even business critical—if I don't have it, I'm not in business,'" says Alan Hubbard, senior vice president of the customer management technology group at Aberdeen Group. "If you cannot respond back to customers in a timely fashion, you lose business. MCRM used to be a differentiator. Now it's a necessity."
So what's been holding you back from implementing a solution that can potentially increase sales and make your processes more efficient? Most likely it's the misconceptions about mCRM, which cloud the benefits of deployment. Read on to see some common mCRM myths debunked and how companies have successfully gotten their mobile initiatives off the ground.
Myth No. 1: The CRM provider I already have will provide mobility, so I don't need to put out an RFP or pilot other vendors.
Not necessarily. A lot of companies just go with the browser-based application their CRM vendor supplies, but that isn't always the best alternative because it often isn't process-oriented, says Sheryl Kingstone, director of enterprise applications and mobility at Boston-based Yankee Group, a research and consulting firm. "Don't automatically go to your CRM provider. Look at it more holistically," she says. "The better approach is looking outside the back-end CRM provider into what's called a mobile middleware provider. It's better for a company in the long run because they can use that provider to enable other applications down the road."
AT&T, formally Cingular Wireless, is on the tail end of implementing Antenna Software's Antenna Mobile Platform (AMP) Studio to work with its back-end Siebel CRM system for 1,500 field sales reps. They needed an application that would work with a number of wireless operating systems and devices.
The decision making process was similar to purchasing any another application, according to Laura Johnson, senior director of wireless enterprise solutions for AT&T, based in San Antonio, Texas. The first step was to put out a request for proposal with all their product capability requirements. Then a cross-functional team (which included people from sales, marketing, and IT) reviewed the vendors from a technical and practical standpoint to understand how they would function on the back-end, from integration to development, and considered overall usability.
Once they narrowed the field down, they had the finalists do a real-world, "day in the life" pilot, spending time with each vendor to watch them develop the application and view the interface to see how well it could work with their back-end system. Antenna emerged as the winner. "It was because of the ease of use with AMP, and they could build all the integration we needed into our Seibel system," she says.
At press time, AMP Studio was still being rolled out to a core group, but the project is currently on track for July deployment for their entire wireless enterprise sales force.
Myth No. 2: The entire back-end CRM solution should appear on a mobile device screen for it to be effective.
Only if you want to ensure reps won't use it. Executives need to simplify the user experience by only exposing data on the mobile device that is critical to the reps' functions. Otherwise it destroys usability.
"A mistake that a lot of companies make when they implement mobile applications is trying to replicate the desktop on a mobile device," says Jeff McDowell, vice president of global alliances at Research in Motion (RIM), based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. "What you're trying to do is create a perfect experience for a mobile user. They don't have time to click through all those fields. You want information accessible in three clicks."
Managers should treat mCRM as they would any other value proposition in they company, which requires thought on how you can optimize your business in real time. "Several years ago it was 'let's take the laptop application and pop it into the mobile device'. It doesn't work," Aberdeen Group's Hubbard says. "You have to understand how much real estate you have on screen, and how much you have to scroll through to get to your data."
For AT&T, usability was a big factor in deciding which vendor to choose for their mobile deployment. During the pilot, they wanted to make sure the solution would be easy for sellers to navigate on screen. "We asked ourselves, was it easy to use the application on a handheld?" Johnson says. "You're not going to bring all of the information from the back-end system out to the handheld, so it was about working with our sellers to get only the pertinent information they needed."
Myth No. 3: IT should handle all of the implementation and customization of the mCRM solution.
The danger of allowing the information technology folks to handle the implementation of mCRM is that you might not get buy-in from your sales staff, which ultimately means the project becomes a waste of time.
"What a lot of companies forget to do is consult business users about what they need from mCRM. IT managers are great at managing, deploying, and building the CRM system on the back-end, but then they end up customizing or deploying that solution in the way they think is right," McDowell says. "When architecting this system, the people deploying it need to interact and get a lot of feedback from business users so they understand what their workflow is, what the processes are, and what the most important fields are to them."
Therefore, managers should spend a considerable amount of time with their deployment team and salespeople in the design of the application to ensure buy-in. "If I'm a sales manager, I need to find out what my team would like to have out there in the field, so bring them into the fold and get their buy in, because they're the ones who will use this system," says Michael Thomas, national president of The Customer Relationship Management Association based in Atlanta. "Ask reps what three components they need in a mobile application. Then ask them what they want in a mobile device. They should be able to pick out a device they like because they are the ones who will use it."
Ellen Kleinlein, the IT relationship manager for sales and marketing at Celanese, a chemical products manufacturer based in Dallas, was part of a team that implemented an mCRM solution. "We definitely needed to have salespeople involved upfront in the whole process testing. When you have them involved, you have buy-in and then they become trainers. They own the solution, not IT. It's not just another piece of software IT takes care of."
Myth No. 4: I thought about implementing mCRM four years ago. It didn't work work and nothing has changed since then.
Actually, a lot has happened in the past few years that have made mCRM dreams a reality. When mobile customer relationship management became the buzzwords for where business was headed, the corporate mindset was in the right place, but the technology was lagging behind the ambition. That has since changed, according to experts.
"A survey noted that mCRM was something people said they were interested in doing, but they got burned by their salespeople not using their existing sales force automation in the first place. So why go invest in the mobile side of this?" Yankee Group's Kingstone says. "Then what started happening in 2004 to 2006 was the success of the BlackBerry. The infrastructure is maturing:—devices have matured, connectivity has matured, and applications have matured. Now the stars have aligned. Everyone is looking for a differentiating factor, and customers are demanding response times at unprecedented levels, so the business case is evolving. mCRM has gone from a 'nice to have' to a 'need to have,'" she says.
With advancements in technologies such as 3G networks, voice over Internet protocol and dual-mode handsets, salespeople are better positioned for easier adaptation than they were five years ago, and will have the ability to access and download data from CRM systems—turning their handhelds from e-mail receivers into mini computers.
Kingstone says if your team is already doing wireless e-mail, mCRM is the next natural step.
Myth No. 5: My salespeople won't use it.
Companies have gotten burned by purchasing expensive CRM solutions that salespeople ignored, but there has been a change in the attitude toward technology, Hubbard says. "There are plenty of salespeople now who can't live without their mobile devices, so in order to facilitate change, you need a well-designed application that they will want to use."
A properly designed mCRM application will encourage use if it helps close deals faster.
"Salespeople find it tedious to go into CRM every night after pounding the pavement all day," RIM's McDowell says. "What you can do once you have wirelessly enabled CRM is update it, get information out of it, and incorporate it with all other business workflow processes."
And for a start-up, time is of the utmost importance, which is why Aethon, a company based in Pittsburgh that provides robotics for hospitals, chose a CRM-like system to ramp up its sales force. Vice President of Customer Solutions Peter Seiff started a sales force from scratch two years ago, and his efforts were aided by Landslide Technologies, a sales workstyle management solution that helps manage customer information and training.
Seiff wanted to get his newbies out on the road and selling as fast as possible. "It was a good way to ramp them up because they had a process to follow," he says. Reps use Landslide's IO channel, a portal that facilitates communication with reps and prospects, and alerts managers when someone has accessed information from that portal. "It was something they had to use daily to facilitate sales and learn their process as they sold," he says. In the end, it cut sales training from seven weeks to three.
The Landslide VIP Assistant service also helps salespeople with data entry. Here's how it works: Seiff's salespeople call an 800 number and enter a pin. Then a live assistant, usually one assigned to that particular rep, updates his contact information, similar to data-entry dictation. Seiff says it helps because otherwise reps may wait until the end of the month or quarter to get data into the system, but by and the quality of that data suffers.
"At first I thought salespeople should update their own information. But my team raves about VIP," he says. "It gives us a much better picture of real-time information, and the guys are good about giving their updates through the VIP assistant. Sometimes they say VIP is tougher on them than their sales manager."
Myth No. 6: mCRM should be deployed companywide, in one shot.
Absolutely untrue. In fact, in order to gain executive buy-in for the project to deploy companywide, it helps to start with a small group piloting the initiative to prove the business case.
"Developing a business case upfront by using pilot programs to roll [mCRM] out is one of the best practices we've seen," Aberdeen Group's Hubbard says. He suggests picking a section of the organization and deploying it to that piece of the company first to see how it works.
When chemicals producer Celanese acquired another business unit in 2005, the two groups had different back-end CRM systems in place. The first step was to consolidate them into a single CRM solution. Then the company used deployment in that new group as the first step toward companywide deployment of their mCRM initiative. "We had two choices about our back-end CRM: We could either purchase the license of the system we were on" that her previous company owned, Kleinlein says, "or we could look at another solution." Celanese already had SAP and stuck with it because the data proved to be more accurate, and reps preferred using it. Then the firm decided to go mobile with mySAP CRM 4.0.
"The initiative was successful because we started with a small business unit instead of trying to force the whole company to go one route," Kleinlein says. "We've worked out the bugs in it and because of what we've done, other business units have followed our lead."
Not only did it get the attention of other departments in the company, but the early group of users liked if so much they wanted to expand the offerings of the initial product they were using to increase their effectiveness. "They're getting good at it and they want more things to happen with it. Right now we're in the middle of piloting a portal project, transitioning from a mobile system to a portal-based system, based on the feedback from salespeople," Kleinlein says. Again, the company is using the best practices from the first move to mobile to ensure their success with the new initiative, which launches at the end of July or in early August.
Myth No. 7: My team is too small for mCRM to be worthwhile.
Whether you have one rep or a thousand, it's worth having a mobile solution in their hands, especially if you want to keep up with customer demands in real time. With the speed of business transactions today, companies cannot afford to let time go by.
WhippleHill Communications, based in Bedford, N.H., supplies Web-based software solutions to schools from kindergarten through grade 12, and has a sales force of 65, although only three reps are on the road. Director of Business Development Will Redway finds that having customer information on his BlackBerry has helped streamline his sales cycle, even though the field team is small.
"Where I see mCRM shortening time the most is the first part of the process. Our deal closings took three to four months on average to close, but now we can get from 'Hi,' to proposal much faster," he says. It used to take him five to six hours to prepare a proposal following a meeting, but now it only takes two hours because he writes in his handheld right after a meeting and communicates with people at the home office to get the job done quicker.
What Redway also likes is that ability to push data to clients while he waits at the airport and recaps what happened in the meeting. "I want to make sure they have the information in their heads fast," he says. "The key is that mCRM offers real-time communication. The client can still be in a meeting discussing, and a proposal from me comes through fast. That makes us look like we're on the ball from a customer's perspective."
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