SAVO Survey: Training and Alignment with Sales Process is Critical to Tablet Adoption

By Sujata Garud
TMCnet Contributor

A recent poll by the SAVO Group stated that 26 percent of participants reported their organizations are providing tablets for sales representatives while 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. The figures 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."

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.

The webinar also shared results from a recent survey by The Sales Management Association1 that found  that 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 e-mail and social networking for sales representatives.

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. 74 percent said distribution of approved corporate materials which 74 percent expressed interest in virtual whiteboarding. 69 percent said that they would like to see development in multimedia applications whereas 63 percent thought hosting a webcast would be a beneficial application.

Dan Schleifer, senior director of marketing at SAVO, said, "iPads were designed to be intuitive, with easy start functionality. 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."

Recently, Sage North America selected SAVO Group to help realize the full potential of its partners and increase revenue. Sage will begin their SAVO implementation with an initial group of key partners in July, with plans to expand to a full channel roll-out before the end of this year.

Steven Cameron, senior vice president of sales, Mid-Market ERP and CRM Solutions for Sage, said, "This partnership bolsters our continued investment in our channel partners to provide powerful tools and communications to best position and sell Sage solutions. With SAVO, our 1,300 partners across North America now have a cloud-based sales enablement tool that will keep them updated on such assets as marketing messages, customer success stories, and winning sales playbooks.”

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