MWC: The Smartphone, a Key Asset to Boost Sales Performance

With 1.47 billion units sold worldwide in 2016 (1), the smartphone has become the dominant device in daily life, whether for personal or professional use. The international Mobile World Congress, currently taking place (MWC, from February 27 to March 2 in Barcelona), focuses on the theme “Mobile: the next element”. It’s the perfect opportunity to examine the role of this technological powerhouse, which almost all sales professionals are equipped with in 2017, and to understand how the smartphone can be a driver of sales performance.

Track Performance Anytime

Emails or Excel spreadsheets are, for most companies, still used daily tools for communication and performance tracking. However, they are increasingly failing to meet the expectations and operational needs of modern sales teams, for whom mobility, rapid communication, autonomy, and fluid exchanges are essential for efficiency.

Today, there are mobile sales engagement platforms that automatically retrieve key process data in real-time, allowing access at any time not only to sales results but also to all activity indicators. This way, your teams can compare themselves and mobilize to achieve and even exceed their objectives. Your sales representatives feel more autonomous in evaluating and managing their performance, which fosters a sense of mastery and control.

Implement Innovative Challenges

Digital transformation and smartphones also offer the opportunity to modernize sales challenges, making them mobile, interactive, and individualized. A successful challenge is one where engagement is regular, participation is high, and your teams’ involvement is daily. All of this is now possible on smartphones, thanks in particular to gamification. Game-derived mechanics, combined with challenges, are increasingly appreciated by sales professionals because they are effective and motivating.

For your sales challenge to generate a real return on investment, use tools that combine gamification, real-time data, mobility, data integration, and simplified engagement. Choose simple interfaces where your teams will have access to rankings, a visualization of “what’s left to do,” and dedicated community spaces. Knowing daily which product or service to sell to reach the next reward is a must in a gamification, motivation, and performance tracking logic enabled by mobile and the application.

For example, Fitbit, an app for tracking sports activities, encourages its users to share their performance and compare it with friends. Running Heroes, another running-focused app, goes further by offering to reward its users for their physical efforts with discounts from third-party partners or by making donations to associations.

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Offer Micro-Training to Everyone

Training is essential for developing your teams’ skills and knowledge. This obviously impacts efficiency but also engagement: feeling progress is a real motivational factor. This is where mobile can help you, by offering engaging and fun formats:

– micro-training, or micro-learning: learning modules in short sequences of 30 seconds to 3 minutes, using text, images, and sound

– quizzes: short, fun, with potential rewards

– videos (webinars, MOOCs, or themed videos)

Accessible anywhere and whenever your sales representatives wish, these are the optimal formats for daily training and raising awareness among your teams on various subjects.

Establish Communication and Foster Sharing

Communication is the cement of any organization. Too often reduced to a few emails or a monthly debriefing, it is often top-down and leaves too little room for a participatory system. Communication unites, engages, builds coherence, facilitates, and streamlines your sales force’s processes. Strong communication can activate almost all levers of intrinsic motivation.

Several solutions exist to reinvent your internal communication. Enterprise social networks (Whaller, Yammer, Google+…), chat applications (WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram…), sharing platforms (Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote…), all these tools are available on smartphones and allow for the creation of collaborative and engaging discussion spaces. Thus, the exchange format becomes more informal, faster, and your teams will gradually free themselves from traditional and hierarchical communication patterns. However, be careful: having a channel is not enough; it is essential to feed it! In these spaces, you can exchange multimedia content, best practices, or even motivate your teams with a daily quote, for example.

Your sales representatives will also be able to communicate much more easily with each other and thus share their tips or field feedback. In addition to being useful for collective performance, it is also a practice that promotes personal motivation, because helping a colleague or giving advice develops a sense of recognition for the sales professional.

Many companies still favor a responsive design website for their sales engagement. When choosing your digital tools, opt instead for a dedicated application, truly adapted for mobile use.

Smartphones and, more broadly, digital technologies offer a tremendous opportunity to reinvent sales engagement and to mobilize the collective energies of sales networks. And you, what digital tools do you use to motivate your troops?

Download your white paper: Managing Performance in the Digital Age

¹ http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/chiffres-cles-les-ventes-de-mobiles-et-de-smartphones-39789928.htm