Transforming Sales and Service with a Mobile-First StrategyHow 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.

In this paper, we discuss how to implement a mobile-first 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.

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Mobility is top-of-mind… but not effectively leveragedThe 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.

Figure 1: Few companies leverage mobility’s transformational capabilities.

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3

2

1

0 1 2 3 4

Voice/Email/ Web

Mobile Use Case Maturity Curve

Basics of mobility

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 e�ciencies.

Individual Apps

Process-based User Experience Solution

Analytical Data and Insights

Low

Val

ue

No Program Sophisticated

Hig

h Va

lue

Transformational Sales and Service

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Applying Mobile First to Different Selling ScenariosThe 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 mobile-enabled processes to:

• 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 capabilitiesIt is important to look at these processes from the perspective of both e�ciency, i.e. how to give representatives more productive time by reducing administration, and e�ectiveness, 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.

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.

Preparing for a customer conversation

Without Mobile

Sales Rep or Service Agent

• At a desk• Multiple sources• Siloed from service• No collaboration

CRMAnalyticsService DataERPComp DataSocial Media

Without Mobile

Sales Rep

Mobile-First

Sales Rep Service AgentService Agent

• In the field• One centralized source• 360 degree view across sales

and service

Mobile-FirstBefore 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 di�erent 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.

During a customer visit

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.

With a mobile-first approach, sales representatives can more easily and e�ectively prepare, as:

• 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.

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.

• Present AT customer• Disjointed data capture

• Collaborative discussion• Customer involved• Improved customer experience

• Comprehensive solution• Opportunistic

cross-sell/up-sell scenarios• Improved customer

experience

• Fix single solution identified• Limited customer engagement

• Sharing and interacting with marketing collateral.

• Automatically sync with the CRM system any information gathered on the tablet, signifi-cantly reducing post-call administrative tasks.

• Enable a “one-call close” in some B2B and B2C sales situations.

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.

CRM

Analytics

Service Data

ERP

Comp Data

Social Media

Timely, relevant, and interactive content

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After a customer conversation

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.

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 a B2B selling scenario, failing to get relevant information into the CRM system makes it di�cult to e�ciently engage sales support resources like pricing or competitive teams.

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).

Data captured in real-time to update sales metrics and customer service details

Identified leads passed to sales rep instantly through system.

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.

Mobile-First

With a mobile-first approach:• Information is captured during the sales meeting and directly updated in

the CRM tool, providing the manager immediate metrics.

• 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 e�ciency 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.

Without Mobile

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Analytics capabilities power new insightsMany 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 built-in 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.

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

Example Metrics Supporting Mobile Capability Value Delivered

Thoroughness of customer needs assess-ment

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 e�ciently engaged sales support resources

• Decreased cost of sales• Reduced sales cycle time

Up-sell/cross sell “opportunistic” opportuni-ty 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 approachExecuting 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 top-tier 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.

2. Review and redesign for mobile the key processes/tasks for sales and service 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.

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.

3. Develop apps and capabilities to support improved sales and service teams’ processes/tasks 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.

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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.

References1, 4 “How Agile Sellers Play to Win - 2014 CSO Insights”, Accenture, 2014 2, 3 Accenture 2013 CIO Mobility Survey

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Contact usTo learn more about how Accenture is helping companies develop a mobile-first strategy, please visit accenture.com/customer or contact one of the authors:

Yusuf Tayob Managing director - Accenture Strategy, Sales Execution & Enablement global lead yusuf.a.tayob@accenture.com

Dan Petrossi Senior manager - Accenture Strategy, Sales & Customer Service Transformation daniel.petrossi@accenture.com

Andrew Hopkins Senior manager - Accenture Digital, Mobility Transformation lead andrew.d.hopkins@accenture.com

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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.

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