Mobile CRM adoption is on the rise, with the market estimated at $26.2 billion in 2022 and expected to reach $52.4 billion by the end of 2029, according to Future Market Insights. One of the reasons for such growth is that mobile CRMs enable sales and marketing reps to access work data from anywhere and at any time easily, which contributes to employee productivity.
CRM solutions can make a great difference for companies with multiple field sales reps or distributed sales and marketing teams. To ensure implementation success and choose the right solution, companies should consider multiple factors in advance.
This article highlights the main advantages of mobile CRM solutions and provides several considerations to help a company choose the right one.
Why Implement a Mobile CRM?
In addition to on-the-go access to data and functionality, mobile CRM can deliver the following business benefits:
Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration
With a robust mobile CRM at their fingertips, field sales representatives can perform various tasks and work from anywhere and anytime. For instance, they can generate and edit contacts, forecast sales, share files, and even co-manage lead pipelines with their colleagues on the go, which contributes to employee productivity and simplifies collaboration.
Mobile CRMs benefit the work of supervising managers as well. For example, heads of the sales department can use mobile CRMs to track the tasks and performance of field reps even in real-time, which can help allocate the workforce more efficiently later on, resulting in improved sales teams’ performance.
Better Customer Service
With the proper functionality, a mobile CRM can automatically redirect customer calls from a company’s website to a sales rep’s device and create a smoother interaction flow. In addition, with a mobile CRM, a sales specialist can view critical customer data on the way to a meeting or even during negotiations and suggest more personalized offers, closing more deals.
Improved Data Accuracy
If equipped with the proper features, a mobile CRM allows field reps to use predefined templates and even their voice to input customer and sales data, which is then synchronized with other corporate applications. This can not only increase the work speed due to data entry automation but also reduce the likelihood of data error and duplicates, resulting in more accurate business decisions.
Reduced Business Costs
With mobile CRMs, companies can implement the BYOD policy and allow field sales reps to use their own devices while working. Although BYOD can be challenging due to increased cybersecurity risks, it allows companies to reduce hardware spend and improve overall business flexibility.
What to Consider Before Mobile CRM Adoption
There are plenty of factors that should be taken into account when implementing a mobile CRM solution, and here are some of the essential ones:
Business Requirements
A company that wants to adopt a mobile CRM has two main options – purchasing a proprietary CRM software that is optimized for mobile devices (Salesforce, Zoho, etc.) or developing a customized mobile CRM based on one of the open-source platforms (OroCRM, Suite CRM, and so on). Both approaches can be more suitable in different circumstances and for different business needs.
To decide on how better to adopt a mobile CRM, a company should first clearly define goals and requirements regarding a future solution. For this, decision-makers can hold meetings with their companies’ IT, marketing, and sales teams and consider the following questions:
- What business challenges do we want to solve, and what outcomes do we want to achieve?
- What sales and marketing workflows do we want to improve?
- Would a turnkey or a customized mobile CRM help us achieve better business outcomes?
- What minimum set of features should a mobile CRM have to cover our business needs?
Analysis & Research
After decision-makers have an understanding of the requirements for a mobile CRM, a business analyst can conduct research to understand whether there are suitable mobile CRM apps on the market. Here, it’s important to find a proprietary CRM solution that covers all the essential business needs but doesn’t contain unnecessary features that will only make the solution more expensive.
If there are some suitable mobile CRMs on the market, they should be compared with each other in terms of functionality and pricing to narrow down the choice to one or two options for further consideration.
However, implementing a proprietary mobile CRM can be more advantageous if a company does not have specific requirements. For example, there may simply not be a proprietary mobile solution with features for AI-assisted email generation, omnichannel customer communication, and voice search capabilities. A platform-based mobile CRM would also be hard and more expensive to customize should the company want to modify its feature set down the line.
In such a case, a company can consider developing a mobile CRM based on an open-source platform and tailoring it to their business requirements. Although custom CRM development is an expensive option, it can also be the most cost-effective in the long term, as it can significantly improve the work of a company’s sales and marketing reps.
User Experience
Quality user experience is a must to ensure high adoption of your CRM. Such a solution must not only be intuitive and accessible but also easy to learn. Although proprietary CRM solutions and their mobile versions usually provide good UX, customized CRM development can still be more effective in this regard.
Developing a CRM and mobile application from scratch allows companies to tailor the user experience, solution layout, and even in-app content structure to their employees’ preferences, thus ensuring better usability by default. In particular, companies can instruct UI and UX designers to use user-centered design practices, which involve studying sales and marketing reps’ workflows and collecting their feedback during the business analysis stage.
Scalability
If the scalability of mobile CRM is one of the company’s top priorities given the expected sales and marketing departments’ growth, developing a custom CRM is the best choice. While companies can scale proprietary solutions up by purchasing more expensive plans, custom mobile CRMs can be expanded anytime in line with business demand and needs by adding more cloud or on-premise storage.
Final Thoughts
Mobile CRMs are becoming increasingly popular among companies, which is why this software segment is growing rapidly. With a CRM, marketing, sales, and field reps can work on the go and collaborate effectively, leading to increased business flexibility, enhanced performance, and improved service quality.
Although developing a CRM based on an open-source platform can seem a more complex option, at Itransition, we believe it can be viable in many cases. By creating a CRM from scratch, developers can tailor its functionality and design to sales and field reps’ unique needs and thus help a company ensure high adoption among users.