Download Transforming Sales and Service with a Mobile-First

Transforming Sales and Service
with a Mobile-First Strategy
How to use mobility’s unique capabilities for competitive advantage
Overview
The proliferation of digital capabilities and convergence
of social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies are
rapidly changing how every industry and enterprise
interacts with its customers. Across all business models,
customer expectations are at an all-time high. To remain
competitive, companies must deliver an omnichannel,
nonstop customer experience, which increasingly means
blending sales and service into a seamless capability.
This approach provides more value to customers and,
therefore, drives increased revenues to companies.
The route to success is to redefine and redesign existing
sales and service processes to make them more agile in
the context of a day-in-the-life of sales representatives
and customer service representatives (also known as
service agents), with the unique capabilities of mobile
in mind. While many companies tack on mobile apps
or capabilities to existing processes and tools, that
approach usually fails to deliver desired results. Leading
with mobility in mind creates a distinctive experience;
we refer to this as a “mobile-first” strategy.
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In this paper, we discuss how to implement a mobilefirst strategy. It is a holistic approach within agile selling
and service that begins with the desired outcomes and
determines how mobile can enable them. Importantly,
this method works across B2B and B2C models (see
sidebar “Applying Mobile First to Different Selling
Scenarios” for more information). In our experience,
companies adopting a mobile-first approach can
achieve transformed customer interactions that enhance
retention and growth. As just one example, Accenture
helped a hair and beauty products client deploy a
sales mobility solution that consolidated opportunity
information from CRM, booking data from ERP, and
marketing collateral from the company’s context
repository. The result: a sales force that had information
at their fingertips to prepare for a call and the ability to
engage customers in highly interactive conversations.
Mobility is top-of-mind…
but not effectively leveraged
The enterprise use of mobile solutions
among sales and service forces is growing
rapidly, but most have only begun to tap
the true transformational potential of
mobility. Recent CSO Insights data shows
chief sales officers (CSOs) consider mobility
as an important tool to grow revenues,
with 81 percent indicating they believe that
mobile customer relationship management
(CRM) has at least some impact on sales
team performance.1
Likewise, C-level executives are actively
allocating money to spend on mobile
initiatives. Results from the Accenture
2014 Mobility Insights research indicate
that executives recognize the need to have
a mobile strategy and execute on it to keep
pace with industry.2 The survey also shows
that mobility is a top five priority for 77
percent of C-level executives, and 87
percent of companies have formal mobility
strategies. Mobility’s importance is also
recognized at the very top in 35 percent of
companies where the CEO plays a role in
mobility strategy development.3
Despite the strategic intent and daily
use, companies are not fully realizing the
benefits of mobility solutions in sales
and service, primarily because they do
not know how to take advantage of the
unique mobile capabilities to achieve an
agile sales and service model. For example,
CSO Insights data shows that although
most companies have a mobile agenda,
it is not dramatically increasing revenue
or contributing to the bottom line. While
tablet usage has increased exponentially
in the past year fewer than half of sales
representatives are using mobile devices to
access selling tools.4
Why is this happening? Based on our
client experience, we see mobility
evolving along a continuum (see Figure 1).
Unfortunately, many companies rarely get
beyond the individual app approach. They
mistakenly think purchasing the newest
versions of tablets and smartphones for
sales representatives, or extending an
existing CRM tool to customer service
representatives with a mobile app, is
sufficient. These approaches rarely achieve
desired outcomes. because they merely
extend existing processes into a mobile
environment. They do not look at how an
“always on” channel, such as mobile, can
transform those processes to drive greater
efficiency and effectiveness. Currently, very
few companies have agile sales and service
capabilities that fully leverage mobility’s
transformational potential.
High Value
Figure 1: Few companies leverage mobility’s transformational capabilities.
Process-based User
Experience Solution
4
Analytical Data
and Insights
Individual Apps
3
Voice/Email/ Web
2
Applications for
one platform
(SFDC, SAP, etc.)
Complete user
engagement across
a range of backend
information and
systems
Mine data for
meaningful insights
to drive process
and operational
efficiencies.
Transformational Sales and Service
Basics of
mobility
Low Value
1
0
No Program
1
2
3
Mobile Use Case Maturity Curve
4
Sophisticated
3
Applying Mobile First to Different
Selling Scenarios
The mobile-first premise, capabilities and
use cases are similar across these three
selling models; however, the way in which
the sales and service organizations achieve
targeted outcomes are different.
Business-to-business (B2B)
Typically a complex solution sale that involves
multiple decision makers and several sales
support resources to close the sale.
From a mobile-first perspective, having
access to timely and relevant information
from multiple systems is key to improving
customer intimacy through a 360-degree
view of the customer, including sales and
service interactions. Similarly, enabling
mobile processes to uncover and capture
the customer’s business problem and needs
is critical to developing customer-centric
solutions and engaging the right level of
sales support resources.
Business-to-business for small and
medium businesses (B2B SMB)
Typically a solution sale with one or
two decision makers where the sales
representative can often architect the
solution and close the sale with limited
sales support resources.
Taking a mobile first approach helps
improve sales representatives’ ability to
close the sale in “one call” by using mobileenabled processes to:
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• Understand the customer (plan for the
sales call)
• Uncover and document the customer’s
business problems and needs
• Present potential solutions
• Configure and quote solutions
• Take the order and capture a signature.
Delivering this end-to-end solution through
an agile, mobile device not only increases
representative productivity, but also
provides an interactive and efficient sales
conversation with the customer--reducing
the number of customer interactions
needed to close a sale.
Business-to-consumer (B2C)
Typically the consumer can engage with
the business through multiple channels,
including online, direct and partner sales
channels.
A mobile-first strategy provides sales
representatives with the mobile tools to
execute a “one-call” close similar to the
process for small and medium businesses.
In addition, representatives need
aggregated information about all other
interactions the consumer has had across
various sales channels, including service
groups. When consumers encounter a
direct representative, analytics pushed to a
mobile device can help guide the customer
conversation to capitalize on the most
opportunistic selling scenarios.
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“A day in the life” with enhanced mobile capabilities
It is important to look at these processes from the perspective of both efficiency, i.e. how to give representatives more productive time by
reducing administration, and effectiveness, i.e., how to help representatives derive more value from that productive time. A mobile-first
approach can address both of these aspects across a spectrum of B2B and B2C sales and service situations as illustrated in Figures 2-4.
Figure 2: Mobile-first makes it faster and easier for sales representatives to prepare for sales calls. It also allows sales and service
forces to seamlessly share information about customers.
Preparing for a customer conversation
Without Mobile
Sales Rep or Service Agent
CRM
Analytics
Service Data
ERP
Comp Data
Social Media
• At a desk
• Multiple sources
• Siloed from service
• No collaboration
Before a meeting, sales
representatives typically spend time
accessing multiple systems to get a
complete view of the customer.
Information related to accounts/
opportunities, data about open
service requests, details on the
customer relationship and power
map, and social media profiles of key
contacts all reside in different
systems. As a result, preparing for the
sales call is a time-consuming task
that may be done the night before,
done in an incomplete manner or,
worst of all, not done at all.
With a mobile-first approach, sales
representatives can more easily and
effectively prepare, as:
Mobile-First
CRM
Analytics
Service Data
ERP
Comp Data
Social Media
Timely,
relevant, and
interactive
content
• In the field
• One centralized source
• 360 degree view across sales
and service
• Key information is available as
needed from multiple systems
and can be presented in an easy,
accessible, "push" format.
• Call planning can occur right
before a meeting.
• Sales and customer service
representatives can share a
common set of sales and service
data, so sales is aware of open
service issues, and service can
resolve issues to minimize any
impacts to closing a sale.
Figure 3: Mobile-first greatly improves sales representatives’ ability to collaborate with customers and accelerates the sales cycle.
It also enables customer service representatives to take advantage of opportunistic selling situations while at the customer site.
During a customer visit
Without Mobile
Sales Rep
• Present AT customer
• Disjointed data capture
When meeting with the customer,
traditionally, sales representatives
may present solutions without first
understanding customer needs or
engaging in a dialogue around the
impact of solving the customer’s
business problems.
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Service Agent
• Fix single solution identified
• Limited customer engagement
Mobile devices can help:
• The sales representative conduct
an interactive needs assessment
along with the client.
• Joint solution building and
configuration leveraging the
device's touch capabilities.
Mobile-First
Sales Rep
• Collaborative discussion
• Customer involved
• Improved customer experience
• Sharing and interacting with
marketing collateral.
• Automatically sync with the
CRM system any information
gathered on the tablet, significantly reducing post-call
administrative tasks.
• Enable a “one-call close” in some
B2B and B2C sales situations.
Service Agent
• Comprehensive solution
• Opportunistic
cross-sell/up-sell scenarios
• Improved customer
experience
This means the entire sales
process—capturing customer
needs, presenting solutions,
configuring and quoting a
solution, taking an order with
signature capture, and even
payment—can be enabled and
completed on the device.
From a service perspective, new agile processes can be created for opportunistic selling situations. For example, in a B2C scenario, a
customer service representative working on an issue with the customer’s washing machine may also have information that the water
filter on the customer’s refrigerator is due for replacement. Access to this level of data while at the customer’s site allows the customer
service representative to proactively address potential service issues before they occur, providing the customer with improved service
while reducing service costs (see Figure 3). Delivering a positive service experience also creates opportunities for cross-selling and
up-selling additional products and services to the customer.
Figure 4: Mobile-first collects sales meeting information in real time for manager review and increases sales representatives’ ability
to complete more calls throughout the day. It also improves communication between sales and service with a complete view of
customer information.
After a customer conversation
Without Mobile
Sales representatives often call their managers
after a sales meeting to explain what happened.
Although the manager receives the update, the
information is not captured in an enterprise
system so that others can see what transpired.
In addition, sales representatives are required to
later update opportunity data at their desk,
increasing the administrative burden and reducing
selling time (see Figure 4).
In a B2B selling scenario, failing to get relevant
information into the CRM system makes it difficult
to efficiently engage sales support resources like
pricing or competitive teams.
Mobile-First
Data captured in real-time
to update sales metrics and
customer service details
With a mobile-first approach:
• Information is captured during the sales meeting and directly updated in
the CRM tool, providing the manager immediate metrics.
Identified leads passed to
sales rep instantly through
system.
• The sales representative now has time to pursue additional sales activities.
For instance, he can review in his car new leads in close proximity, access
relevant contact data and drive to conduct additional sales meetings,
helping increase both efficiency and revenue (see Figure 4).
On the service side, customer interactions typically end after a customer
visit. With an agile mobile process, however, if the sales representative has a
large opportunity where a critical service call just happened, the customer
service representative could instantly contact the sales representative to
convey the service call resolution. This could even happen automatically
with sales and customer service representatives having a 360-degree view
of customer data. Finally, if the customer service representative happens
upon any opportunistic selling situations, it can quickly be passed as a “hot
lead” to sales. Increasingly, the service channel is becoming a core lead
generation engine.
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Analytics capabilities power new insights
Many sales and service initiatives generate
sales analytics for managers to view
retroactively, giving them greater insight
and control into the sales process, i.e.,
understanding if a sales representative
booked an opportunity or if a lead was
moved along in the pipeline to the commit
stage. In contrast, a mobile-first strategy
uses comprehensive, sophisticated tools
to monitor selling processes in real time.
Using tablets and smartphones with builtin mobile analytics capabilities, companies
can automatically collect and analyze
real-time data from sales conversations
and other sales and service activities.
Examples include clocking the amount of
time spent at customer site, tracking the
efficacy of marketing collateral shared and
automatically documenting customer needs
(see Figure 5).
These advanced analytics can help drive
better decision-making and help guide
the conversation or engage additional
sales resources via video as the sales
representative is conducting a meeting.
They can also help a customer service
representative to initiate an upsell or
cross-sell opportunistic scenario, follow a
playbook or script, and automatically track
and measure how the technician performs.
Additionally, they can help sales managers
understand what high-performing sales
representatives do during customer
interactions and help coach other sales
representatives on how to repeat those
actions in their own meetings.
From a B2B perspective, companies can
quickly deduce what sales representatives
need to complete a one-call close.
Similarly, there are advantages for longer
B2B sales cycles to capture customer
needs and automatically update the CRM
system in the cloud to engage proper sales
resources, such as software, hardware or
professional services sales representatives.
Importantly, these next-generation sales
analytics allow companies to proactively
and regularly adjust sales and service
strategies, rather than waiting until the end
of the quarter. Potential outcomes include
significantly reducing the sales cycle,
improving the ability to identify new use
cases or opportunistic deals, connecting
sales and service, and increasing the overall
deal size.
Figure 5: Mobile-first uses advanced analytics to help drive better sales and service outcomes.
Agile, process-led mobile applications combined with the unique capabilities of mobile allow for new metrics
that drive increased productivity.
Example Metrics
Supporting Mobile Capability
Value Delivered
Time spent at client site
GPS with ability for reps to “Check In” at
client site
• Reduced sales cycles time
• Improved coverage analytics
Selling content shared with the customer
Tracking of content leveraged tied to
opportunities through mobile application
• Increased win rates
• Reduced sales cycle time
Thoroughness of customer needs assessment
Guided conversations that help ensure
complete needs assessments on the first
call with automatic ties to CRM
• Increased win rates
• Reduced sales cycle time
“On demand” support leveraged
Mobile collaboration technologies (video) to
efficiently engaged sales support resources
• Decreased cost of sales
• Reduced sales cycle time
Up-sell/cross sell “opportunistic” opportunity conversations
Mobile enabled playbook for common
selling scenarios
• Decreased cost of sales
• Reduced sales cycle time
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How to adopt a mobile-first approach
Executing a mobile-first strategy can
deliver impressive results by reducing
sales cycle timeframes; improving sales
and customer service representatives’
preparedness and productivity; accelerating
lead qualifications; promoting information
exchange between sales and service; and
enabling the use of real-time analytics to
drive highly-effective sales and service
force behavior. Companies need to take
three primary steps to accomplish this:
1. Drive an innovation agenda to
more effectively sell and service as
an organization
The first step is for companies to figure
out how they want to sell to and service
customers as well as how customers
want to be sold to and serviced. This is a
strategic and operational shift, requiring
both CSOs and CIOs to collaborate and
determine how to be more effective, close
deals more quickly and decrease sales
cycle time, as well as how the mobile
infrastructure will support the strategy.
A critical component of this step is to
look at sales and services processes and
use cases differently. Examples of these
processes include how sales representatives
prepare for and follow up on calls, or how
sales and customer service representatives
share information about customers.
Companies must determine how to make
these business processes more agile and
streamlined by leveraging the capabilities
mobile brings—from location-based
services to multi-media screens.
One way to jump start the process is to
look outside the organization for leading
mobile practices from other industries.
For example, Accenture helped a toptier pharmaceutical company to create a
single sales and service mobility solution
in the cloud using tablets and to provide
mobile application development services.
Through a phased roll-out over three
years to 25,000 sales representatives,
the solution has lowered total cost of
ownership of sales force hardware by
25 percent, reduced in-office training
time, and decreased sales and customer
service representative time on technology
activities by a few hours per representative
per week. Ultimately, with easier and
increased access to information, the sales
team can help health care providers meet
their objective of improved patient care.
A key factor of this second step is to
incorporate aspects of social and analytics
from multiple data sources in the cloud.
Mining information from a customer’s
social media profile and aggregating it
with data collected in real time from
sales and service interactions can help
representatives and technicians to make
more informed decisions while in the field.
Think of it as a digital sales aid. Analytics
can also enable companies to make better
decisions about how to shorten the sales
cycle and drive opportunistic selling
scenarios, as well as how to coach specific
sales representatives and train service
representatives in cross-selling techniques.
2. Review and redesign for mobile
the key processes/tasks for sales
and service
The third step is for companies to build
integrated and easy-to-use mobile apps
that directly support the newly designed
sales and services processes. These apps
must not only support how sales and
customer service representatives perform
their work in the field with customers, but
also enable them to deliver a consistent,
differentiated customer experience that
aligns with the company’s brand. Accenture
worked with a global e-commerce company
to quickly build highly functional mobile
applications across multiple smartphone
platforms. In just two months, Accenture
developed and tested a branded mobile
app that facilitated direct contact between
sellers and buyers.
The second step requires companies to
closely examine the primary daily tasks of
sales and customer service representatives
in the field, breaking them down into
discrete work flows, ensuring each adds
value and redesigning each with mobile
capabilities in mind. Using this approach,
a company might, for example, redesign
a process to alert a sales representative
when she is near a customer who is due
for sales calls, or enable a customer service
representative to show a customer a
tablet-friendly brochure about an extended
warranty while he is fixing the refrigerator.
3. Develop apps and capabilities to
support improved sales and service
teams’ processes/tasks
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Move ahead with mobile-first now
Implementing a mobile-first strategy to transform sales and service requires commitment.
Companies that move boldly toward an agile approach that takes full advantage of mobility
will have a head start on achieving high performance.
Contact us
To learn more about how Accenture is
helping companies develop a mobilefirst strategy, please visit accenture.com/
customer or contact one of the authors:
Join the Conversation;
Follow Us on Twitter:
@E2ECustExp
Yusuf Tayob
Managing director - Accenture Strategy,
Sales Execution & Enablement global lead
[email protected]
Dan Petrossi
Senior manager - Accenture Strategy,
Sales & Customer Service Transformation
[email protected]
Andrew Hopkins
Senior manager - Accenture Digital,
Mobility Transformation lead
[email protected]
References
1, 4 “How Agile Sellers Play to Win - 2014 CSO Insights”, Accenture, 2014
2, 3 Accenture 2013 CIO Mobility Survey
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About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing
company, with approximately 289,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.
Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies,
Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses
and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal
year ended Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Copyright © 2014 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
This document is produced by consultants at Accenture as general guidance. It
is not intended to provide specific advice on your circumstances. If you require
advice or further details on any matters referred to, please contact your Accenture
representative.
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