Evaluating SFA Functionality for Smartphones

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Overview
As smartphones become standard equipment for salespeople, we describe useful sales
force functionality to deliver to the mobile device.
Key Findings

Lack of screen real estate will remain a key limiting form factor for deploying most
sales force automation functionality on a smartphone.

Highly data-manipulative-based applications, such as sales configuration or proposal
generation, will remain poor options for deploying over a smartphone.

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Recommendations

Focus on core sales force capabilities, such as opportunity data viewing and
manipulation, e-mail, contact and calendar integration, for initial smartphone
deployment.

Avoid functional overload — too much functionality will make the application
unusable due to ergonomic constraints.

Focus on simple, but essential, tasks that can be quickly accomplished with minimal
browsing, scrolling, entering data or clicking on icons, and avoid complicated
routines requiring extensive sequences of actions.

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What You Need to Know
When developing a sales force automation strategy, consider mobile devices such as
smartphones as a key way to drive end-user adoption. Smartphones are more accessible,
popular and used more frequently throughout a day than laptops, especially for
salespeople who spend more time traveling than in the office. Salespeople who are "on the
go" find their mobile devices are lifelines to the company. Focus on smartphone
capabilities that are conducive to quick data entry or automated "process capture" that
relieves rather than increases the reporting burden placed on sales forces.

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Analysis
Smartphones are fast becoming standard equipment for salespeople offering mobile email,
thin-client access to corporate intranets, instant messaging and thick line-of-business
applications. These devices provide a salesperson with access to enterprise information in
environments and settings that would have been impossible just five years ago. However,
smartphones have limits to their ergonomics that prohibit them from being used as
primary interfaces with an organization's sales force automation application involving
more-complex tasks. Gartner has classified sales force automation functionality for
smartphones into three categories:

Core functionality — encompasses capabilities that enable more than 90% of
salespeople to receive value from their smartphones

Value-add — highly dependent on the sales process of the salesperson

Not practical — device does not support the ergonomics sufficiently enough to
effectively deliver the capability the salesperson desires

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Core Functionality

E-mail and simple text messaging: Real-time e-mail access is critical for any
salesperson. Whether on the road, leaving a meeting, at lunch or in the office,
salespeople must have access to e-mail. In some cases, responding to an e-mail
quickly may be the difference in winning or losing a deal or retaining a customer by
being notified of a development involving field service or operations. Salespeople
need to access, review, transmit and archive e-mail communications quickly.
Archived e-mail should be associated and synched to the relevant sales opportunity
in the sales force automation system. Text messaging is valid in geographies or in
organizations where it doesn't make sense to pay for or support a mobile e-mail
client.

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Calendar: The key for all salespeople during the day is the calendar, which informs
them where and when their sales calls are scheduled. The calendar on the
smartphone must not only show the salesperson when and where sales calls are to
occur, but also provide a quick link to customers and opportunity data regarding the
call, including late-breaking information about the customer that could affect the
sales interaction. For smartphones with GPS devices, quick links to maps and
directions are also desirable. The ability to leverage GPS/geographic information
system (GIS) information to identify opportunistic ways to increase "face time,"
including searching for prospects/clients in an area when unplanned visits happen,
or to recover time when a client or prospect fails to show or changes plans. The
overall gold standard for the calendar is tight integration between a native client
calendaring application and a sales application server.

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Customer contact data: This is the most static of the application data and can be
synched on a handheld or laptop before leaving the office. In addition to name,
address and phone contact details, call notes and follow-up details from previous
meetings or leads can be accessed.

Sales opportunity data: The baseline view of opportunity data should be a
summary. This is important for usability due to the reduced size of the screen on
the device. The data fields visible in the summary should be those that are most
valued for the sales representative and, ideally, should be self-personalized. From
the summary view, the salesperson needs the option to drill down into further detail
to review and specify the progress of sales efforts with specific prospects and clients
within the context of stages or phases based on predefined sales methodologies.
Detailed opportunity information would include opportunity status, product mix
owned by the customer or presented to the customer, and activities accomplished

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Recent/top views: Recent/top views are navigational aids to help salespeople
quickly access information they may have viewed recently or often. Salespeople are
frequently walking from meetings to their cars, or are between flights in airports, so
any navigational aid to quickly get to information is helpful.

Alerts: A smartphone is always guaranteed to be on a salesperson. Therefore, it is
the best communication medium to communicate alerts associated with their
accounts, such as order shipment, organization changes and customer acquisitions.

Quick communication hyperlinks: Phone (link for quick dial), e-mail (link to
direct e-mail function) from contact opportunity data is a highly desirable usability
feature for salespeople.

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Tasks/to-dos: These offer the ability to review, modify and designate as complete
common or regularly scheduled events linked to the sales force automation system.

Today's tasks: This should be a summary view of a salesperson's appointments
and tasks for the day.

After-call tasks: Often, when a salesperson leaves a sales call, he or she has
committed to deliver content, or possibly to schedule a follow-up meeting with a
subject matter expert. Salespeople desire the ability to have a quick approach to
designate follow-up action from the smartphone to trigger the activity, and to
receive confirmation that the task was completed.

Wizards: These help salespeople navigate little-used or new menus, or those that
are repetitious — such as "add new prospect entry," for example, to consume an email
and autopopulate a sales force automation data entry, or to attach a voice mail
left by the prospect to a sales opportunity.

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Value-Add Functionality

Sales order management: The first level of order management is the ability to
quickly look up order information by order number, customer name or status. The
information should be displayed with summary information to avoid screen clutter.
The second level of capability is to enable order capture and entry. The applicability
order entry information on a smartphone will directly relate to fulfillment
considerations and to the complexity of the order. Complex orders with high
configurability are not good candidates for smartphone order entry. No matter how
complex the order, a quick-stop function from a handheld device will provide value.
In some cases, the salesperson entered an order on the laptop and shut it down.
Rather than waiting for the laptop to reboot or send an e-mail or call someone, the