Build better sales figures with Mobile CRM

Keep your customers happy and improve your sales performance. Mobilise your CRM system, advises Research In Motion’s Sarah Probert, Director Segment Marketing EMEA at RIM.

Market volatility and gloomy economic predictions have not completely halted financial services investment in technology, but those who are still spending money are certainly spending it in very specific areas.

Customers everywhere are reassessing their investments and looking to the value they derive from their existing suppliers. In the consumer world, this means re-evaluating insurance or banking deals to see if there’s anything better out there. In the business world, shrinking budgets and increased accountability are driving budget holders to seek more value from expenditure and prioritise investments that improve customer service and accelerate differentiation.

On the other side of the fence, financial companies are looking to their sales forces to maintain revenues, find new sales propositions more effectively, and convert leads into new business more efficiently. Inevitably, in a recession, competition for available business increases. One compelling way to overcome this is simply to treat your customer better.

How? Keener pricing is a start, but to achieve this and protect revenues you will need to make cost savings and efficiencies that can plug the gap. Developing differentiated services can help retain existing customers and make you stand out in a crowded market. Improving customer service by taking longer to understand their needs will also help you capitalise sales opportunities more effectively. 

‘That’s what we bought a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for’ you think, and you’d be right. CRM has always been about enabling customer-facing sales teams to work more effectively by accessing business information as they need it. For most financial businesses CRM represents a significant investment that has underpinned their sales strategy and helped them derive better business intelligence, sales forecasting and pipeline management.

But now there’s a new way to derive more value from your CRM system, deliver the efficiencies that can keep you competitive, provide the platform on which to develop value-add and differentiated services, and reinvigorate the levels of customer service and attention that your front line professionals are able to deliver – mobile CRM.

Popular CRM software vendors are launching mobile versions of their products that allow mobile staff to interact with the CRM from anywhere, using a convenient mobile device like a BlackBerry smartphone.

Keeping sales staff in front of customers
Many companies are aware that the real value of mobile CRM lies in empowering sales forces to service their customers better. In sectors such as financial services, sales forces are looking to be leverage real time data to be more effective, more competitive, convert opportunities quicker, manage risk and to lower total costs of sales. Providing this information to your sales force, wherever they are, empowers them to do more, more quickly.

However these sales managers do not always have the capacity to return to the office, find a computer or laptop connection in order to find this information before meeting a customer. They need fast, accurate and easy-to-use access to key data when on the road. Customers benefit because sales staff can access their account history and status, notes and preferences, before they walk into client meetings. Once they’re in the meeting, sales staff can react immediately to client requests, instantly advise customers on account issues, provide accurate quotes and forecasts on the spot, place orders for the client, even generate invoices and contracts.

Banc Sabadell, the fourth largest group in Spanish banking, has recently provided its sales force with a CRM system in order to allow customer sales managers to access client account details and case histories before they visit or contact the client. This enables their sales staff to prepare adequately for calls or meetings, identify areas of sales potential and get up-to-the-minute detail on account positions

"Accessing our CRM system using BlackBerry smartphones branches us closer to clients and makes commercial management more dynamic” says Alberto Martínez Zurita, the head of Banco Sabadell's department of commercial applications. “It allows us to provide better services, adapting our products to each client, which helps to improve our ability to retain clients, which is an aim for all of us”, says.

From a sales perspective, this can help drive a sales strategy based on almost instant conversion. If your lead or client shows an interest or if you spot an opportunity to up- or cross-sell, mobile access to the CRM enables you to log that lead straight away and start working on converting it. Meanwhile, in the background, your support teams like account management and customer service can all be gearing up to fulfil, deliver and invoice for the product that your client  has only just told the sales team he wants to buy. It’s a classic win-win.

“Mobile CRM access cuts the need for sales teams to return to base to file information on clients and pick up new schedules. They can do their homework on the road” adds Sarah Probert. “Theoretically it’s possible for sales teams to stay out of the office permanently, enabling more through-put of sales activity and a positive impact on bottom line.”

Banks leading the way
Arguably, no industry has suffered from client perception issues as badly as financial services in the last two years. But financial services companies are among the first to recognise that building better relationships with clients will be one way to restore credibility and ultimately a return to growth and differentiation.

The commercial equipment financing subsidiary of French bank BNP Paribas, BNP Paribas Lease Group, has adopted a similar strategy. Operating in a highly competitive market, their sales staff have been able to simulate financing situations with customers in real time using the latest rate updates which are pushed to the BlackBerry smartphone in real time. The system they have developed enables sales staff to instantly draw up a financial proposal and email it as a PDF to customers, using their BlackBerry smartphone.

At the same time, the details can be transmitted to colleagues in other departments. The whole process can be managed from proposal to contract using the BlackBerry smartphone, which means the sales rep never has to walk out of the client’s office without a sale. 

Why is that better than what we’ve got already?
Of course, conventional desk-based access to CRM systems offers similar advantages. But mobilising CRM simply extends the benefits of the original investment and brings a new layer of productivity to the concept. By enabling sales teams to access the information as they need it, document management needs are minimised. As François-Régis Martin, BPLG Deputy Director of Marketing, points out. “Our objective has always been to increase responsiveness to give our customers an answer in the field as soon as possible. The PDAs, however, were not connected to our system. Sales reps had to stop by the office to synchronise their devices.” BPLG realised that manual synchronisation was a time waster. “The ability of BlackBerry to keep sales reps connected 24/7 greatly appealed to us,” says Martin.

By enabling users to input data directly into the CRM from their smartphone while they are mobile, you ensure that business intelligence data is accurate and timely, and can make it available to other business units as soon as it’s recorded.

There are other convincing reasons to mobilise. From an HR perspective, mobile CRM can keep under-pressure sales teams happy and collaborating. As flexible working becomes a more important issue and sales teams become more and more distributed, the ability for staff to work on the road becomes an attractive proposition for attracting and retaining the right staff. If workers need access to the CRM to do their jobs, mobile CRM will help them do their jobs where and how they prefer. The benefits to Banco Sabadell of the BlackBerry solution are very clear according to Alberto Martínez Zurita “The BlackBerry solution allows us to improve productivity, increase employee availability and allow them to better combine working days with their personal lives"

Practical considerations come into play too. Sales staff are usually not keen to haul laptops around and wait for them to boot up and connect to the networks. Smartphones such as BlackBerry devices offer enough processing power and memory to enable users to pull up information from corporate sources as and when they need it. When they’ve finished it slips back into the jacket pocket. They can be linked with Bluetooth printers and portable projectors to provide a mobile presentation kit that can enable sales staff to show presentations, then print out the contract. They can even be used with digital pen solutions to get a client signature on an order or record notes directly back into the CRM.

Without doubt, though, the main attraction of mobile CRM is productivity. Sales professionals waste time traveling between clients, waiting in car parks and hotel lobbies, airports and taxis. When they‘re through with their meetings they frequently have to return to base to file information, get updates and attend sales meetings. With mobile CRM access, this burden is minimized. Not only are updates freely available to the whole team, but they can collaborate more effectively and access the information they need as they need it. Wasted time can be converted to time spent preparing for the next sales meeting, using the very latest market data and sales figures.

What are the challenges? Data security is a massive issue, especially for clients. Smartphones are easily misplaced, so you need to choose a mobile platform that will enable your IT department to lock or erase data on lost or stolen devices, and ensure data is adequately encrypted in transit. Ease of use is another. Devices can be quite fiddly, and when accessing complex systems containing rich data such as CRM, usability can be an issue. “The BlackBerry solution ticked all the boxes,” François-Régis Martin says. “The business application demonstrates the benefit of this mobile solution and the BlackBerry smartphones integrate into the group’s security policy. For example, the user must regularly log in, data communications are encrypted and the terminal can be remotely deactivated if lost or stolen.”

Fortunately the BlackBerry solution is an ideal choice, being robust, inherently secure, fully integrated and easy-to-use.