How To Manage Remote Sales – and Shorten The Sales Cycle

Chapter 1: Consider the client

Imagine that you or your company needs some construction work or HVAC maintenance. Maybe you want a security system installed at the office, or a truck in your fleet wheezes as it climbs hills. Whatever it is, we’ve all been there.

So you reach out to a prospective vendor or, better yet, one of its salespeople identifies the issue and contacts you. The ball is moving forward and the goal line is straight ahead. Ideally, the entire transaction is completed so quickly and professionally that you’ll hire the company again and recommend it to others.

There’s nothing better than word of mouth.

But in reality? The process often moves along at less than maximum speed and efficiency. The sales cycle resembles someone stuck in morning traffic, lurching a few feet forward and then stopping, lurching a few feet forward… repeat, repeat, repeat.

What’s going on here? Let’s count up some of the potential roadblocks in the sales cycle of most companies.

First, it takes hours or even days for a sales team to make an appointment with the prospect. Even after the rep arrives for an estimate, it can take several days for paperwork to arrive in the prospect’s mailbox, because it took a full day just to get the estimate back to the office to type it up.

This back-and-forth continues all the way through billing and receipt of payment.

If you’re still doing business like this, you’re all but begging the customer to lose momentum and drop the project altogether or look for a speedier competitor. Once upon a time, there weren’t many, if any, quicker, more proficient alternatives. Everyone did business the same way. Customers just had to live with it.

Not anymore. Your competitors are harnessing the power of 21st-century tools in droves and generating entirely new consumer expectations. In a recent survey, two out of every three companies with field service workers reported that they now use an automated software solution. (For more about this, check out “Eye Opening Facts About Field Service.”) 

Today’s customers demand near-instant fulfillment of their wants and needs.

The businesses that successfully respond to this fact manage their sales teams and field workers better — becoming more efficient and profitable in the process.

Chapter 2: It’s not about you. It’s about the paper

We get that there are all kinds of reasonable causes for the delays and inefficiencies. On paper, the sales process is a huge time suck and hassle. What are the causes? How many of these apply to your operation?

• Some salespeople/field service workers have terrible handwriting. Illegible notes require phone calls/emails for clarification.
• It can take hours or days for management to receive information, making it impossible for them to provide informed decisions in something resembling real-time.
• Sometimes folks fail to fully complete a form, which requires phone calls/emails to track down the missing information. A single missing digit can set the process back.
• Salespeople/field service workers operate out in the world. Transporting paper takes time.
• Even the best staffers don’t have instant recall of all of your varied products and services. Without that information at their fingertips, follow-up research is required.
• Inventory is constantly rising and falling. Salespeople can’t instantly and accurately report on availability to clients. More calls and more research are required.
• The client is disputing a line item on the invoice. The collections staff can’t reconcile the issue without talking to the salesperson, who is flying across the country.
• Salesperson A is confronting an issue out in the field that Salesperson B successfully overcame a few weeks ago. But nobody at the home office recalls what she did, and she is tied up in an extended meeting with an important client

The root of all of these issues? It all comes down to one word: paper.

It’s not magic; it’s simple, and it’s inexpensive to boot 

A quick, two-question quiz:

1. Is your smartphone or tablet within your reach now?

2. Is it more accessible than the paper document you would need this second to complete a deal?

If you answered yes to both, it’s time for a change.

In fact, if you want your company to flourish in a marketplace that is increasingly digitized, automated, electronic, and cloud-based, you have to change.

Every employee of the most efficient and effective companies can access business information and work from anywhere – the office, the car, at lunch, on vacation (like that ever happens), out of town trying to drum up new business — and forge closer relationships with existing clients.

Management can also be better at what it is intended to do: manage, even when their charges are on the road. 

How? Shift your paper forms to mobile apps and get data, responses, payments, and more, all in real-time from your employees in the field. It may seem daunting, but if you start small, making the shift doesn’t have to overwhelm you or your organization. It can even be a chance to improve your processes.

Chapter 3: The first step: start with one form

Some companies make the mistake of trying to make a shift to mobile all at once. Just choose one or two forms that you use most frequently and make your initial shift with those.

Good forms to start with might include:

• Inspections 
• Expense Reports 
• Work Orders 
• Checklists

Make sure you think about how the form you selected is working for you and your staff. Maybe now is the time to make some changes to that form instead of replicating it exactly as you have it now.

This is where you can, and should, enlist the help of the people who work with that form. Input from your staff both in the field and at your office can help them feel more invested in the transition and more committed to moving to your new mobile app. Ask them what they would change on your old form, what works, and what doesn’t.

Some questions to ask to help you tailor your mobile app include:

• Are there questions staff routinely forget to ask customers? 
• Are there sections on your form that should be optional for specific situations? 
• Does your form require calculations? If so, are math errors common?
• What information would you like to update, add or delete from your form?

Chapter 4: Save time, improve communication

Once you know what you want, you can add a variety of functionalities that will help you be efficient with your mobile workforce. Adding features like GPS, image capture, dispatch, barcode scanning, electronic signatures, push notifications, and field access to business data such as parts catalogs and price lists will make your data more accurate and life for your employees much easier.

Need a way to improve communication among field workers and between field workers and supervisors? No problem.

Just take a look at what mobile apps did for Clear Water Products. A flourishing solids control equipment company serving the oil and gas industry, Clear Water needed a better way to manage communication.

It’s not that their people weren’t talking to each other. Just the opposite: Everyone was doing a terrific job of sharing up-to-the-minute information via text. As the company grew, the problem became one of volume. It just got hard to keep up with the torrential flow of communication, and things got missed.

“I had to reread text messages multiple times to get all the information. If someone missed something in their message, I’d have to call them to find out the answer.” – Jay Ziesler, Clear Water engineer

So Clear Water transitioned from text messages to GoCanvas apps via smartphones and tablets. The results were dramatic: They improved response times, standardized record-keeping, and became significantly more efficient.

How much more? A company engineer said that it took him 90 minutes to complete a single report prior to the conversion. Now it takes him just 10 minutes to generate a new report. He estimates that in a single year he’s saved 220 hours on reports alone.

Chapter 5: Managing with mobile

With remote or mobile workers, it can be difficult to know which employees are carrying their weight and which ones aren’t, exactly what people are doing during the day, and exactly how they are doing it. Mobile apps can help you track employee work and productivity in a few important ways.

Time cards

For businesses in many industries, such as oil and gas, manufacturing, and construction, time cards are crucial for tracking not only employee time worked but also labor costs. For decades, standard practice has been to track hours with time cards.

Ensuring that time cards are filled out accurately, however, can be a challenge. If someone arrives late to a work site, for instance, site managers have to retrieve a paper form from their truck or office, note the employee’s arrival time, and return the paper form — a slow process that cuts into the day’s workflow. For many managers, it’s easier to estimate when someone arrived on site than it is to report in real-time.

But estimates can lead to further problems with employees. Some may complain that they aren’t being paid for the time they were actually on the job. Suddenly, you have to double check hours worked before sending checks.

Time cards try to make tracking labor easy, but create extra hurdles for businesses.

Mobile apps make time cards easier. When an employee opens the mobile app on a smartphone or tablet, the app can automatically enter time. The company then gets accurate information in real time, immediately received at the office. Mobile time cards help businesses with hourly workers spend less on tracking employees and more on their actual work.

Sales meetings

Many companies have salespeople who are on the road for days or weeks at a time, meeting with potential customers. You may have a few of these folks in your business, or you may have hundreds of them all across the United States, or the world. Tracking these meetings, and understanding how they go, along with many other details, is crucial to success.

On paper, this process is a huge hassle. Information can take days or weeks to return to regional or national offices, and companies rely on sales employees to provide proof of the meetings. This may work if you’re able to follow up each day with a couple of employees but why not track things more accurately?

With mobile apps, it’s much easier to track these types of sales efforts. Salespeople can easily type in the information previously filled into forms but also include additional validation. Time and date stamps can be automatically included every time the mobile app is opened.

In addition, the salespeople can record their location with a GPS location capture. Since these fields cannot be manipulated by salespeople, reports from mobile apps are more accurate than before. And because the information is captured in real-time and stored in the cloud, it’s instantly accessible for others in the company who need it. No delay or waiting for data entry. Sharing is immediate. Going mobile has made gathering sales meeting information and managing remotely more efficient, more effective, and more reliable for tracking and reporting.

Work orders

For field workers in the service industry, productive employees generate more revenue for a business. Like tracking salespeople, tracking how many jobs each employee does can be cumbersome and time-consuming with paperwork orders. They can be hard to read, inconsistently returned to the office, and impossible to get in real time. For an HVAC business owner, for instance, paper forms make it time-consuming to know which employees are productive and which ones aren’t.

Mobile work orders create a system that’s reliable, accurate, and accessible in real-time.

Time and date stamps can accurately show when the job occurred. Some companies will also ask for a GPS location to prove that the technician was at the site.

Mobile apps enable this kind of data to be stored in the cloud, eliminating the need for manual data entry (and all the errors that come with it) and filing cabinets. The office accesses these forms in real-time, allowing managers to see how productive technicians are that day, rather than a week or two weeks after the fact.

On-the-spot payment

Sales cycles can take days or weeks. Information has to return from the field with reps, data has to be entered, time is lost, and payment is slow. Things get even worse if documents are misplaced or information is inaccurate.

If reps have the ability to take customer payments on the spot, imagine what happens to the sales cycle. With GoCanvas’ mobile payment integration with Square, your technician or field rep can take cash, check, or credit card on-site, shortening your sales cycle, offering more service to customers, lowering your administrative costs, and more. And you are on top of the revenue in real time.

Yeah, but …

We owe it to you to also share a little information about how things sometimes don’t go as well as they should.

In one survey of more than 250 sales professionals, more than a third of respondents said that technology is more of a hindrance than a help in their job. A closer look reveals that a large part of that is due to how the technology is deployed and how it works with other systems.

The key is, you’ve got to use the thing to achieve what you want. You’ve also got to set yourself up in other ways to succeed. So it goes with apps and cloud computing.

How to make it work

• Up-front training for staff that is both relevant and meaningful is key. Piloting your mobile app with just a few members of your team is a good way to get going. If you are concerned about staff being enthusiastic adopters of mobile, test it with the most “technologically challenged” staffer you have. Once that person is on board, the rest of your staff is more likely to follow suit.
• Resources and support are also critical. Be available for the team when they have questions. Success depends on your sales staff and field service workers actually seeing managers using the new tools and receiving praise for using them themselves.
• Allow yourself (and your staff) some transition time. Make a plan to implement over a transition period instead of in one day. This kind of shift requires thought and work, but the investment of time and energy passes an enormous benefit for everyone involved — you, your staff, and, most importantly, your clients.

Mobile apps that deliver data in real time give managers more knowledge in more places. For example, using real-time time-tracking apps, managers can see what everyone is doing as they do it. Using built-in GPS technology, they see where everyone is at any moment.

That helps managers provide feedback when it will have the most significant impact: when your employee is in front of a customer or in a situation in need of immediate response. Paper is an anchor. Fix a problem in Omaha. Help a salesman in Portland. Get home to dinner in Baltimore in time for your daughter’s description of her day in school.

Ready to Rethink How You Work?

GoCanvas has helped a variety of businesses across multiple industries transform their safety processes and rethink their efficiency, ultimately saving them money. Why not do the same? Reach out to one of our experts today to kickstart your process revolution.