Overall, the idea of turning work into play with rewards is catching on, especially with the iPad. In July, the most popular presentations at the Mobile Health World Conference in Boston covered “gamification” in mobile healthcare apps for iPad. Gamification is the idea that you can include the elements which make games fun and addictive in work that isn’t traditionally thought of as a game. Great iPad apps for healthcare or sales can use game play mechanisms for non-game applications to make the app for iPad stronger and help people to accomplish more.

Use Carrots not Sticks for the iPad to Build Sales Performance

Traditional methods of incentivizing or motivating sales reps for better performance include “stick” methods like “walls of shame” or using basic statistics from their Salesforce to identify sales “winners” and “losers.”

ISM is focused on creating relevant apps with great data that reps can share in a way that makes it easy for them to use. When we give data to a rep in a CRM system, including Mobile CRM HD for iPad, we’ll automatically build in quick, easy ways to know whether it’s valuable for sales reps to pay attention to or not. You’ve got talented salespeople and employees. In a lot of cases when you look at what they’re actually doing, you find they spend too much time on things that aren’t really important. You can make it easier for them and more fun to perform by offering a lot of different “carrots” combining information and incentives. We’re big fans of “carrot” concepts at ISM.

Making a Great Sales App for iPad

According to motivation/performance guru Daniel Pink, “Gamification could go either way — toward 2.0 if the rewards are the point of the exercise, towards 3.0 if the rewards are a form of feedback, information, and a way to make progress and achieve flow.” In other words, the “game” part of the App should fit with the work that’s being done and make it easier, not harder, for sales reps to do their jobs.

This is where ISM’s experience comes in. We’d like to hear how you see the iPad working to improve your sales and work for your sales reps. If you have any stories about “walls of shame” or a “gamification” of your sales process where the sales reps came out as winners, post a comment below, or we want to hear from you. We’re gearing up for Dreamforce, August 30 – September 2 in San Francisco, where we will showcase our Mobile CRM HD iPad App.  Let us know if you are going, we’d love to meet you.

To learn more, please visit our Mobile CRM page.  Or call us at 877-553-0485, or email us!

Process and Strategy has Proven Success

According to the 2011 Miller Heiman Sales Performance Survey, the top 4 percent of 25,000 sales forces surveyed achieved 4 times greater sales growth than the other 96 percent of sales forces, even during the down economy.  Miller Heiman Executive Vice President Bill Golder said that even during the recession, the “World Class,” top sales performers moved ahead by being focused on their process and strategy. “Knowing your customer” is one of the three primary ways these sales forces continued to achieve success. According to Bill Golder, the organizations that succeeded put most of their time in aligning their sales metrics with business objectives.  For example, they built comprehensive prospecting plans and aligned prospects as closely as possible with the “ideal customer” for their products.  These activities are not possible without intelligently-used and accessible customer and prospect data.

Intelligent and Accessible are Keys to Sales Performance

Steve Snapp from Integrated Sales Management shares simple best practices and techniques you can use in your company to drive the behavior that increases sales.   Companies that use Salesforce.com, Siebel, Microsoft CRM, and other Customer Relationship Management software will discover some simple best practices that help organizations use Dashboards and Analytics to increase the ability of sales people to make better decisions.  Better decisions enable sales people to be more proactive and make better use of their time in their territories.  This video includes detail from one of our leading CRM Consultants and will focus on basic ideas that will help your company better answer the question “what is CRM” and leverage the power of Cloud Computing more effectively.   Our CRM Consultant will also highlight techniques that you can use to integrate other data sources like ERP Software and provide significant insight to your CRM users.

For more insights on CRM Best Practices please visit our Resources and Blogs or Contact Us.

Salesforce.com has reached a level of sophistication where sales CRM software applications built on its platform are easy to use for nearly sales rep and manager, solving an age-old problem of employees hating the software. Salesforce.com can be just as easily customized to work for your company – not just the way you work today, but optimizing performance for the future. Imagine that instead of CRM software, Salesforce.com was a new delivery vehicle for your company – one that was affordable, “green”, had a great ROI, ran on all terrains, and could be customized exactly for your business with little extra time and trouble.

The technology industry is aware of the communication gap in explaining this type of idea to their customers. Jonathan Follett wrote in Digital Media Magazine, “High tech’s lack of understanding of customer language is even reflected in the way the industry refers to its audience. The joke starts like this: “There are only two businesses that call their customers “users”…”  Think for a few minutes about the “other” business that has “users” as customers . . .

“Stick your head in the cloud and experience the multi-tenant environment!” said one CRM software guru, encouraging corporate clients to customize Salesforce.com for their sales forces and systems.

Hearing this, it’s hard not to think, “If I stick my head in a cloud, I don’t think my sales are going to do too well this quarter.” Most of us would rather not live in a “multi-tenant environment” – if we’re still working toward our “dream home,” then we want a good house that is right for us and our families.

In plain English, using cloud technology for a web based CRM software like Salesforce.com eliminates the problem of managing, maintaining and networking between numerous separate desktop computers in vastly separate offices, servers of many different ages, and important information kept on individual computers. A “multi-tenant” environment is a good thing in using technology to support sales programs. Rather than a large apartment building, “multi-tenant” in CRM software terms refers to allowing different employees, from sales reps to billing, service, customer support, development, marketing and management to work seamlessly together.

Two of the underlying CRM software technologies that enable this type of customization and seamless work are VisualForce and Apex. ISM has worked with over 300 companies to customize their CRM software to benefit their individual sales processes, systems, and sales rep performance.

In just one of the ways that Salesforce.com can be customized, one company wanted a custom route planning management function in their CRM software – their sales tactics were tied to both location and date. ISM created customized screens and reports that allowed sales reps to see the routes they had scheduled over a period of up to 12 weeks. Sales reps and managers could identify specific planned routes and available dates. ISM also built a customized call log for the company with their own specific products and activities, immediately tied to a company-specific, sales rep-friendly follow-up screen and notes.

To learn more about CRM Best Practice and Process, please visit our Resources and Blogs.