Selling Mobile Enterprise Solutions - What Works?

Creating mobile technology is one thing, marketing and selling it to a mainstream enterprise audience is a whole another thing. For several years, we have been systematically researching the business problem: How to sell mobile enterprise solutions effectively into large corporations? How to create demand for mobile solutions? In particular, we have been studying the sales processes, value proposition, buying criteria and ideal mobile customer profile.

Why is understanding the sales process important? The mobile industry structure consists of many types of suppliers and customers, including products and services, software and hardware, applications and infrastructure. The industry is trending away from large vertically integrated providers (like Motorola) to a fragmented structure with many more specialized vendors (like Palm) coordinating through open standards, partnerships, technology alliances, etc. Both the handheld hardware and software industries are evolving away from stovepipe products based on a single application to integrated layers that service a multitude of applications. The merger of the computing, networking, and hardware industry, results in massive changes to the strategic marketing and sales process, increasing the role of solutions oriented selling. Understanding the customer pain becomes more important than ever.

What did we find?
One, mobile is no longer a "gee-whiz" technology sale. It is a value sale aimed at C-level and Line of Business (LOB) executives. For instance, most business managers want mobile technology to reduce transaction costs. What is shocking to us is how many managers in various large companies and startups really don't understand their customer value profile, needs or concerns. Not listening to the "voice of the customer" is a sure recipe for an empty sales pipeline, lengthy sales cycle or inability to close the deal.

Two, customers are tuning out. Mobile Enterprise Solutions is one of those areas where the noise is incredibly high. There were ROI (Return on Investment) claims, TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) claims and value assertions made in 2000 and 2001 that have proven to be either false or much less than expected. As a result, customers have become cautious and pessimistic. Addressing the customer confusion and engaging in a business dialogue is a crucial step that solution vendors have to master ASAP.

Three, customers don't see any pressing or urgent need for mobile. They are not feeling the competitive pressure to implement mobile. Mobile isn't the center of attention. Most of the mobile success stories are rather mundane - how many times have we heard of using a mobile device to order a can of Coke? As a result, management is willing to wait. Mobile vendors are helping matters by not illustrating the singular benefits of adoption.

Four, vendors and influencers are not talking about integration challenges and pitfalls. Application integration is a time-, risk - and resource-intensive process for customers. Customers want to hear vendors intelligently address these issues. Why? Today, companies rely on a number of applications that span everything from horizontal Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, to legacy mainframe applications, to vertical applications that meet the specific needs of industries such as logistics, manufacturing, and financial services. Customers are worried that the fragmented mobile market will spawn numerous, proprietary technologies and cause future headaches for customers.

Five, don't sell technology features. Vendors are not utilizing positioning as a strategy for achieving differential advantage. Positioning reflects the place a solution occupies in a market or segment. For instance, how is the mobile solution positioned in an SAP R/3 market segment? How is the mobile solution positioned in a legacy application environment? Successful position has characteristics that are both differentiating and important to consumers. Unfortunately we see very little positioning out there. Every mobile vendor looks the same, talks the same and walks the same. Each mobile vendor is both an infrastructure provider as well as an application provider. This has eerie similarities to many e-commerce and e-business market segments. You know how that movie ended!


Sales Strategy -- What's A Company to Do?
As the mobile solution environment continues to mature, the sales force is often faced with smaller market windows, shorter product life cycles, intense competition, complex customer requirements, and converging technologies. What's a company to do? We found that the following steps help maintain focus:

• Always start with the customer.  Do customers want/need the mobile product? Do the customers see the mobile product as a pain killer?
• Understand the end customer’s concept of the “product”
• Match customer expectations to the product attribute.
• Translate features into benefits - Don't sell J2ME or yet another XML rendering engine.

Sales Strategy #1 -- Selling mobile is a high-stakes activity. Therefore, selling via pilots that result in a business case might be very effective, since the customer would have to answer a bunch of questions prior to buying the product regardless of whether or not there was a pilot. The whole purpose of integrating a business case into the sales pilot is to avoid the “we-need-more-information-syndrome.” Make sure that you also learn from the customer pilot. Not having effective ways to incorporate feedback from pilots is a definite sign of over-confidence.

Sales Assessment -- Buying Decision Matrix
The “15 Questions” represent filters. Together they constitute a buying framework. Use the following buying matrix to assess your products. How do you score? Always remember that your customer is ranking your product on a similar matrix.

Mobile Enterprise Sales Strategies

• Selling Mobile Hardware
• Selling Mobile Application Infrastructure
• Selling Mobile Portals
• Selling Mobile Customer Solutions
• Selling Mobile Supply Chain Solutions
• Selling Mobile Operational Support Solution