Mobile Sales Support

Jotting down some thoughts on a discussion about the use of mobile as a resource to be used by live salespeople ... my sense is it's not terribly good for that purpose, and can even be counterproductive.

The idea is a that a company can shorten sales training by providing each salesman with access to information about merchandise on a mobile device, so that he can access it while interacting with customers rather than having to commit it to organic memory. On the surface, this seems entirely rational and plausible, but I see a few problems:

Primarily, if being able to reference product information on a device was sufficient, there would be no reason to have a live salesperson. Instead, the firm could simply give the customer direct access to the same information resource (at a kiosk, or a mobile device of their own) and let them browse it for themselves - they don't need a salesman to run the search for them and read what he sees on a screen.

This is the common practice for electronic commerce, and its greatest weakness: it places on the customer the burden of finding product information for himself, which presumes that the customer has sufficient knowledge of the product line to conduct a search that will lead him to the right product. For a customer who is already familiar with the inventory, and has a relatively good idea of what he needs, an online catalog is entirely sufficient. It's especially good for routine reordering of products with which the customer is already familiar.

The value of a salesman, however, is in making recommendations of products that a customer is not already aware of. This may occur when the customer is buying a given item for the first time, and it may be valuable to up-sell the customer on reordering by suggesting they try a better product "this time." In that way, it may even help to retain the business of a customer who wasn't satisfied with the item they purchased previously. But this seems like a digression.

The novice salesman is faced with the same problem as the utterly clueless customer - he has no knowledge of the product line. He is further handicapped because he also does not have knowledge of the customer's needs - which puts him in the unenviable position of identify a good match between two unfamiliar bodies of information (product inventory and needs).

Giving such a person a mobile device loaded with product information merely makes him a wetware proxy to a search engine, which contributes little value and instead makes the process all the more difficult. Especially given that American culture values self-reliance and independence, his position is one of an unnecessary person that is making it more difficult for the customer to get what he wants.

The value of a salesman is his familiarity with products, and the ability to identify a selection that best meets the needs of the customer. The discussion leading up to the sale is one of discovery - the salesman knows his products, but must learn his customer's needs. In this way, it is matching a known factor to an unknown factor - which requires much less effort and has a higher probability of success than situations in which both are unknown.

But more to the point, matching known to unknown requires something to be "known" - in this case, the product line, which must be committed to human memory for it to be known at all (data accessible on a device is just information, not knowledge).

With a product inventory in memory, the salesman will be able to make a product recommendation quickly, revise it when the customer provides additional details, explain the reason for his recommendation, and remain constantly engaged in the conversation with the customer.

By contrast, a salesman who lacks product knowledge must gather information, then take his attention away from the customer to search for products, then repeat the search if the customer provides more information, and would have little ability to explain the reason a given product was recommended.

The situation would be damaging, if not devastating, to the customer experience. The customer would have only intermittent communication, and would have to wait periodically while the salesman interacted with his mobile device - which brings both the frustration of "down time" in the process, and the psychological effect of being repeatedly ignored. He would also have the sense that the salesman was not very competent, having to rely on his device to provide information and being unable to offer any rationale for recommending an item aside of stating that the system returned it it as a match.

All in all, I don't see such a mobile application as being much different than having a salesman carry around a binder of product information and constantly refer to it during a sales encounter - this has been possible for years, but I'm not aware of any instance in which it is a common practice.

And in that sense, there may be some utility in using a mobile device to contain product data - but in the same way that a binder of product information: as a training aid for salesmen to help them learn the product line, and perhaps as a reference the salesman could use if he was unable to answer a question. I think that a customer would tolerate a salesman who could answer most of their questions from his own memory, but would periodically need to check a reference to be sure of his facts.

But in terms of the suggested practice - to cut short sales training and make salesmen entirely reliant on product information stored (or accessed) on a mobile device - it seems fairly clear that this is unlikely to be a successful practice.