Using your mobile phone to boost sales

With new applications arriving every day – many aimed specifically at businesses - the latest generation of ‘smart’ mobile phones are becoming a versatile tool for salespeople. Rachel Miller finds out how to use your mobile to boost sales

Entrepreneurs and salespeople have long been reliant on their mobile phone to keep them in touch with colleagues and clients while on the move. Until recently, however, their use has largely been restricted to voice and text communication and providing a simple database of contact information.

The new generation of mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) may well transform the lives of entrepreneurs and sales people. BlackBerries have given business people the capacity to send and receive emails and communicate with their company IT for a couple of years now. But the iPhone has pushed the envelope further – to the extent that mobiles may, to a large extent, replace laptops for business people on the move.

Phones such as this and the G1 (the ‘Google’ phone) offer email, good quality Internet browsing, social networking tools and an ever-growing range of useful applications that vary from customer relationship management systems to accounting tools, spreadsheets and even global positioning and mapping systems – and they are improving all the time.

So how can you use a modern mobile to boost your sales?

Keeping in touch with your mobile

“Mobile phones are changing the way sales people and small businesses operate,” says Andy Preston, director of sales performance training company Outstanding Results. In fact, he says, they increase the time sales people spend actually selling. “The best way to sell is face-to-face but I’ve seen surveys showing that salespeople only spend eight per cent of their time in meetings with prospective clients.”

At a  basic level, a new generation mobile phone can help you get to more meetings more quickly in a typical day thanks to its GPS and route planning software. “And if you can fit in more face-to-face meetings, you can maximise your sales opportunities,” says Preston.

But it can also help you arrive better prepared thanks to its capacity to store information; and it can allow you to respond to any request on the spot through Internet access and reference tools and its capacity to share information with other devices.

Rapid response to sales enquiries

“When it comes to dealing with sales enquiries, speed of response is very important,” continues Preston. “Nowadays people use Google to find something they are interested in, they may then contact two or three companies and the one who answers first is likely to get the sale. So it’s vital to be able to respond wherever you are.”

And today these enquiries can come from phone calls, email, via websites or through social networks. “I do very well with social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook,” says Preston. “Because I’ve got Internet access on my phone, if I get a sales enquiry via Twitter I can respond straight away.”

At the same time, Internet access helps sales people to prepare for meetings and increase their chances of success. “You can prepare for meetings by looking on the website of the company you are visiting and also Google the name of the person you’re meeting,” says Preston. “By the time you arrive you might know that the company is expanding into the Far East, have scanned their latest business results and read their latest press releases. All that can take just a few minutes.”

Know your customers

Many smartphones and PDAs also have CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications so you can consult your own client data and check on everything from orders and stock levels to delivery times. These applications should enable you to share files and information with your PC/laptop/server and many are compatible with commonly-used business packages (such as Microsoft Exchange or Google’s business software, for example).

Preston even claims that by using your mobile phone to its full potential in meetings you can impress clients. “You could arrange the next meeting while you’re sitting with your client, put it in the diary, set up reminders and send a confirmation email to the client. Or if you are talking to a client about an event and you want to send them details, 60 seconds later, the relevant information can be in their inbox.”