2.1 Mobile Sales Force

2.1.1 Introduction

Heather works as a salesperson for services in an IT company. Her portfolio includes selling catalog solutions, as well as designing custom services with the help of the client solution design group .

As a salesperson, Heather needs to access information ubiquitously to provide answers to client questions, retrieve order information, up-sell and cross-sell, forecast performance and quotas, and explore opportunities and client contacts. As a designer of custom services, Heather needs to acquire data from the client, understand the client's needs, report these needs to the solution design group, and act as a link between client, sales, and solution design. In general, about 80 percent of a salesperson's time can be divided into four broad activities:

• Preparation These tasks include preparing offers, making travel arrangements, planning for meetings, and reading through the client's history, if available.

• Travel This time is spent on going back and forth to clients and meeting other employees internally, such as the client solution design group.

• Client Time This is the time spent at the client's site, when the salesperson sits down with the client to understand the needs and design a solution for the client.

• Administrative Most of the remaining time is spent estimating forecast performance, regular staff meetings, or completing expense reports .

Mobile technology can help reduce the amount of preparation time needed, it can make the client time more productive, and it can speed up the administrative tasks. And in those cases where the salesperson is travelling by means other than driving himself or herself from one client site to another, a mobile solution can provide ways of performing administrative tasks or doing something else productive, such as e-mail or on-line training, during travel time.

Specifically me-centric and mobile wireless solutions will provide her the following advantages on the following topics: sales cycles, trips to the office, preparation time, up-selling and cross-selling , administrative tasks, sales efforts, social networking capabilities, and the delegation of simple tasks. If we look at these points a bit more in detail, you will immediately see the advantages. In the sales cycle, for example, you will find that response time to customer queries can be reduced significantly through the availability of information anytime and anywhere. The salesperson can reduce the number of trips and phone calls back to the office significantly as all information is available on site. The same applies to order entry, which can be done anytime and anywhere . Due to the availability of information, preparation time can be done while travelling and can be delegated to smart agents and intelligent services. Intelligent appliances will be able to provide the right information whenever required.

Up-selling and cross-selling also become easier, as smart agents can find the appropriate products and services that can be used in conjunction with whatever the client is prepared to buy anyway. These personalized proposals can be made while entering the order at the customer site, for example. Many administrative tasks, such as travel expense reports, can be done during travel time and can be automated easily, for example, through smart credit cards that will make sure that all travel- related items will be put into the expense report automatically.

In the following paragraphs, we describe two scenarios in which Heather uses three kinds of connections, today and in the future: managed networks, spontaneous networks, and the Internet. Managed networks are probably the best-known types of network and the most commonly used. These networks include telecommunication networks that allow one to retrieve information from a certain location, by phone or a direct modem connection. Spontaneous networks, on the other hand, allow the spontaneous connections between nearby devices and services. These networks are set up only for specific times and purposes. Wireless LAN and Bluetooth technologies, for example, enable these networks. Although not as reliable as managed networks, they provide a shortcut for exchanging information and services on a very local basis. The Internet allows one to access information on a world-wide basis. Information and services can be anywhere and can be retrieved easily through the Internet.

2.1.2 The Present

Heather is about to visit a customer. The mission preparation in the office uses the Internet, connected through a managed network. Instead of going back and forth to the office to receive updated information, Heather and Jim, the field engineer, can synchronize through a wireless connection with people and data in the office. In addition, the managed network guides Heather and Jim to the client site.

Heather's primary repository for information is her PDA. She uses it to synchronize data and to communicate wirelessly with scanners , cameras , microphones, and client devices. Before Heather leaves the office, she downloads all information required for this customer to her PDA: mission preparation, updated answers for client, updated client accounts, ongoing actions, sales opportunities, sales forecasts based on account management. During the travel, the PDAs are working in standalone mode until Heather and Jim reach the client site.

Once at the client site, Heather updates Jim while they take the time to establish communications between their appliances. This lets them transfer files and cross-reference devices. During the meeting with the client, they use to-do lists to help increase efficiency in achieving goals and keeping the discussions on track; they use their PDAs to transmit feedback and input for service specifications to Jim's backend support as well as to Heather's sales office; they can also use their cell phones to make phone calls, if needed. These connections let them share information with people in the room as well as with the backend office. This information can take various forms, such as pictures, plans, and voice annotations, enabling a more interactive description of the specifications. If needed, they could also have video conferences, scan documents, and share spreadsheets, just to mention a few possibilities. Before parting , Jim and Heather synchronize their data once more and send the information back to the Internet.

All of the connections and service discoveries made during this scenario are made manually, requiring set-up time and some management operations. The Internet does not provide these low-level services automatically today.

Managed networks offer privacy, trust, and high QoS in a known environment. This enables Heather and Jim's devices to exchange and access company confidential information inside the client's campus during this scenario. Sending trip reports out immediately following the meeting increases the efficiency and lowers the latency of the answers from the back office.

2.1.3 The Future

While Heather prepares for her customer visit, agents work to carry out certain tasks on her behalf . Specifically, they:

• Revisit the last trip report to verify that action items have been completed (specifically, the answers to client questions)

• Check order status

• Explore potential up-sell and cross-sell opportunities with the company

• Make automatic forecasts based on the client's order history and the goals of the salesperson

• Update all information just prior to the meeting

• Call the client to verify the visit date and location

• Summarize the results of these tasks and download them to Heather's PDA

As Heather and Jim reach the client's campus, their devices automatically discover the local services provided near the campus. They confirm the location of high-quality printing facilities so that Jim and Heather can create updated documents as input to the meeting. At the site, their appliances communicate, synchronize, and interact automatically, taking care of the low-level administrative details such as the day-to-day operations, updates on prices, checking the to-do lists, and so forth. This also enables them to establish a private communication during the meeting, letting them dynamically adapt their strategy based on the client's reactions . They can delegate tasks during the meeting, either to their back-end offices (if any) or to services working on their behalf. For example, they could look for background knowledge on the client's project, or gather evidence on how to reduce the risk on the project by analyzing similar previous contracts and experience. Finally, after the meeting, their agents can fulfill such administrative tasks as trip reports, order forms, and so forth. Heather and Jim can delegate further tasks instantly, resulting in faster answers for the client.

As you can see in this scenario, Heather, Jim, and the client have more time to focus on important issues; their meeting is more efficient because data is exchanged in the background without human intervention. This is a high competitive advantage to the salesperson, as it reduces cost and time while increasing efficiency. The latency of answers drops considerably, and the salesperson is in a good position to close the deal earlier.

To look at the big picture, this setup is delegated to the devices and infrastructure, providing an automatic service discovery and capability to delegate tasks. This provides a virtual office environment to Heather and Jim for all their meetings, right at the client's site. Instead of storing information on a certain device, such as a laptop computer or a personal agent (a successor to the PDAs), the virtual office will store all the information in a central location, making it possible to access the data from anywhere with any device. Data items are downloaded and cached in anticipation of what might otherwise be long latencies or periods of complete unavailability or low QoS.

2.1.4 Summary

Let's look at the key features of a me-centric future. From an appliance point of view, not much will change. Small, handheld devices will still be used, but with one big differencethey will be connected anytime and anywhere, either through local networks, managed networks, or the Internet. Today, many appliances can connect to only one of these at a time. In the future, it is expected that an intelligent appliance will be able to roam through different networks without losing the connection. Many companies are already providing such solutions. Hewlett-Packard, ^[4] for example, is offering its Open Roaming solution. Other companies such as Lucent ^[5] and Cisco ^[6] offer similar solutions, which solve security and mobility problems for mobile professionals whether they roam within the office using wireless LANs or outside using the varying wired and wireless public networks. Users will maintain the security standards and the IP address no matter where they are or what they do. This is essential to a me-centric environment.

^[4] http://www.hp.com/

^[5] http://www.lucent.com/

^[6] http://www.cisco.com/

So while the devices do not have to change dramatically, the services that run on these devices do. With agents, processes can be automated to help users resolve issues much faster. As you can see in Figure 2.2, a set of services exists around the core service of mobile sales force support. One of the key services is roaming. The core mobile sales force service contains knowledge about the required processes and maintains the connections to all other services. It provides the context on behalf of the salesperson that is required by agents and services to bring back the right information at the right time. By moving the context to this central location, the salesperson is not dependent on a specific device. The adjunct services are not dependent on a particular implementation of context, as the core service will provide translation mechanisms for different technologies.

Figure 2.2. Mobile Sales Force Ecosystem

Besides roaming, knowledge agents are providing an important service to find all relevant information about a customer and the desired products and services he would like to buy. A travel management service will help the sales force to optimize their trips to various clients and make sure that the sales agent's calendar is synchronized with all changes that may occur at the customer site. Therefore, a scheduling agent or service needs to be put in place that does all the timely coordination, based on the feedback from the travel management service and the customer. Additional services may be needed during negotiations, such as status order updates or answers to legal questions. Today these services exist as information pools that can be accessed when required. In the future, this information will be retrieved by agents that will provide contextually relevant information on time.

Through new sales knowledge services, it is possible to coordinate sales efforts towards a target customer group. This makes it possible for salespeople from different regions who work on similar clients to get insight on sales strategies of their colleagues, for example, and show how they can combine offers to create more sales. These collaborative services and agents can also create social networks with other salespeople and clients. These social networks make it possible to reuse existing marketing collateral , proposals, and service brochures more effectively. Asalesperson would only see relevant information for that particular kind of deal and it would also allow that simple and standardized tasks can be easily delegated to other employees or to smart agents.

As you can see, both infrastructure and business services must be introduced to make this me-centric scenario a reality. Building up such a scenario would probably be feasible , as the targeted audience of salespeople is enormous and the processes are standardized in many cases. A standardized service with configuration possibilities can help reduce the costs for sales activities drastically.