In your experience working with UK enterprises, what are the top priorities of sales organisations and the biggest challenges they’re facing?

 

Breaking down internal silos and understanding customers better to maximise their share of wallet. UK companies understand there are technologies that can help them to sell better, but they are often challenged to adapt their organisations to sell more effectively – they think the technology alone is the magic bullet. It’s hard to take the opportunity to also reevaluate how you run your sales organisation – what your process is and which KPIs are being tracked. However, to optimise profitability, sales organisations need to focus on evolving their processes and giving their teams access to better quality data. Technology is just the enabler.

 

Why/how are UK enterprises looking to use mobile applications to increase sales effectiveness?

 

Mobile is really hot in the UK right now. Every organisation we talk to has a substantial percentage of their top performers that spend most of their time on the road and whose primary business tool is a mobile device. These organisations are excited about the possibilities of having people connect in real-time to core business systems remotely. There are still concerns about the security implications of this, especially amongst companies that are new to the cloud, but more and more sales managers are coming to realise the benefits of having reps access all of the critical information they need to do their job at their fingertips, wherever they are. And workforces in the UK are rapidly becoming more mobile.

 

My advice to sales organisations seeking to implement an enterprise mobile strategy is don’t try to “boil the ocean.” Instead, spend time working alongside your reps to capture the few very high-value functionalities they need on the road and focus on delivering those incredibly efficiently. There are two considerations that will help you identify the functionalities that will be most valuable:

1. What content is it critical for your reps to have access to in real time, in order to sell more effectively (as opposed to information that can be referenced at their desk)?
2. What is the core data that you want to capture about your interactions with customers?

The overarching objectives of an enterprise mobile strategy for any sales organisation should be to help reps sell better and to more accurately capture customer information.

What will be the key areas of focus for sales organisations in the UK over the coming 12-18 months and which technologies do you expect will drive those business objectives?

 

Mobile applications will continue to be hugely important to sales organisations.

 

More and more, marketing automation solutions are also becoming a critical tool for closing the gap between sales and marketing organisations, so that sales teams can prioritise their opportunities better and be more profitable.

 

Business intelligence is also a hot topic because companies realise they’re capturing enormous amounts of data across their systems and they want to translate it into actionable insights about their customers and business strategies. With the proliferation of cloud-based applications, the complexity and cost of integrating systems has been greatly reduced. Salesforce® is now increasingly being incorporated into end-to-end ecosystem integration strategies, creating the potential for the promise of the “360 degree customer view” to finally be realised, and for data to be more easily accessed and digested across the enterprise.

For more information on how to ignite your sales team in era of the empowered customer, download our free guide: The Changing Role of Sales.