CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwire - Sep 18, 2012) - According to a recent poll by the SAVO Group, 26 percent of participants reported their organizations are providing tablets for sales representatives while another 43 percent said their organization supported the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend. Of those sellers with tablets, 67 percent are not being trained on best practices for utilizing the tablet during customer interaction. These numbers are from a live poll of 117 participants during one of SAVO's Mission: Possible educational webinars, "Mobile with Impact: Enable Sellers to Inspire Customers."
The webinar also shared results from a recent survey by The Sales Management Association1 that found respondents were using tablets for communication, web access and social media applications, rather than customer presentations or CRM applications. With little to no training, tablets are quickly becoming a costly investment in email and social networking for sales representatives.
"iPads were designed to be intuitive, with easy start functionality," said Dan Schleifer, senior director of marketing at SAVO. "However, many professional applications require some form of training to ensure you're using all the functionality for the best deliverable on your investment in technology."
As the mobile market continues to heat up, an increasing amount of sales executives are developing plans to distribute iPads throughout their sales organizations. Keeping this trend in mind, the importance of having a clear adoption strategy, prior to deployment, becomes more critical than ever. Training sellers on the appropriate applications will simultaneously increase adoption and, ultimately, drive revenue growth. Organizations should also consider aligning their applications with a sales process and distributing well-defined usage goals. This strategy for adoption is already gaining traction as 77 percent of survey respondents noted their desire to include sales process integration with their iPad adoption.
During the webinar, participants identified genres of tablet applications for which they'd like to see further development to make them more valuable for sellers. The results are below:
- 74% said distribution of approved corporate materials
- 74% expressed interest in virtual whiteboarding
- 69% would like to see development in multimedia applications
- 63% thought hosting a webcast would be a beneficial application
SAVO will host its ninth sales enablement webinar in the Mission: Possible series on October 9, 2012 titled, "Mission Possible Lessons Learned: The Welch Allyn Story." Registrants are eligible to receive a free SAVO Maturity Benchmark for their organization.
About SAVO
Founded in 1999, SAVO is a leading provider of sales enablement solutions. SAVO's on-demand sales enablement platform maximizes the sales team's ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent and compelling ways. Combining proven sales and marketing best practices with award-winning technology, SAVO addresses all aspects of the sales enablement challenge -- spanning people, process, insight and technology. For more information, visit www.savogroup.com or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
1 The Sales Management Association, "Tablet PC Usage by Sales Organizations." September 2012. http://salesmanagement.org/blog