The iPad has fueled an explosive uptake in interactivity in the business world. It has changed how businesses interact and more importantly how they sell to each other in the business to business arena, transforming the effectiveness of external sales teams.
The iPad was a strong seller right from the start, selling 3.2 million units in its first quarter - in the first 3 months of 2012 over 35 million iPads were sold.
The iPad grows in Businesses
The biggest beneficiaries of this new economy may be the many thousands of businesses and professionals whose day-to-day work flows are being altered by tablets. A change took place with the release of the 4th-generation iPad this year: buyers of the new iPad are more likely to use it for work, according to a report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners in July 2012. According to CIRP’s research, 21 percent of owners of the new iPad use it in a work situation.
Business users can benefit directly from the wide variety of productivity tools, ranging from email and note taking to creating and sharing presentations and remotely accessing files. In addition, they can choose from thousands of specialized applications that have been developed for education, retail, health care, financial services and other industries.
Realtors like Coldwell Banker now use iPads in the field to access property listings and other information for potential buyers. Aflac has developed iPad sales presentations for their field agents, resulting in almost a 20% increase according to one statement from the company.
The use of Personal Tablets
In recent years, Sales professionals have adopted personal iPads as a tool for themselves especially when tablets have not been supplied in the face of reticence by companies. Much of this reserve can be placed firmly at the feet of IT departments who are struggling to have the same control over these devices as they have with PC’s and who have found to their chagrin that the iPad especially, is not easy to have command over.
Together with Angry Birds and Google Earth, salesmen have uploaded images, documents and videos of their products as a way of gaining interaction with their customers. Businesses have been slow to realize that they should be supplying both the iPads and the Apps that enable rapid deployment of company information and collateral.
High costs and measurable ROI have often been thrown in the face of supplying iPads for their sales team. This has been a false economy in many, many instances. For example a single piece of glossy literature (which is probably already out of date by time a salesman gets it) can run to a least $3000 for a small print run. An iPad II can be often obtained for less than $360 today. So by producing marketing collateral in PDF form only and deploying electrically can pay for a significant number of iPads.
Sales plus Tablets equals Success
These tablets in the hands of motivated and trained sales professionals can be an incredibly successful tool that gives them the edge over their competition. Customers today are looking for solutions rather than a straight product supply. An iPad, with a suitably sales focused App, can assist greatly in engaging clients and getting commitment at the earliest stages. It can actively help in closing sales.
Surprisingly there are only a few highly quality Apps available that allow businesses to do just this. There are certainly some free and paid apps that allow for PowerPoint presentations to be shown on the iPad. However these are limited in their scope and their applicability. There are some however, that are incredibly powerful with a many features, from images, to word documents to videos, all simply and centrally organized and deployed– iSalesHub (www.isaleshub.com) being a definite leader.
Businesses have a surprising amount of information available to them. Often, very little is available to the salesman, especially when needed – in front of the customer. Having an App that can be created, managed and filled with valuable information is a must for them. A service that allows for simple creation and organization of collateral and data that can be automatically updated and pushed to the salesman’s iPad is crucial to keeping him current and effective at all times, especially when he is remote from the home office.
Tablets, like the iPad, have become one of the most multipurpose, user-friendly and significant business tools to arrive in years, and they are only just starting to reach their full potential. Sales based Apps are also coming into their prime.
If you’re a business and you haven’t begun developing tablet-optimized sales tools, you’re missing an incredible opportunity. If you’re an IT director and you’re not yet evaluating what tablets can do for your organization, you may be surprised to discover that much of your workforce is using them already.
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