HOW TO MANAGE

REMOTE SALES
– AND SHORTEN
THE SALES CYCLE
HOW TO MANAGE REMOTE SALES –
AND SHORTEN THE SALES CYCLE
Momentum can play an important role for your company and clients when it comes
to your entire sales cycle — from the initial pitch to bill collections and everything in
between.

How do you build and maintain that momentum, better manage your remote sales
force and field workers — and shorten the sales cycle in the process? Spend a few
minutes with us and we’ll show you. Here we go.

CONSIDER THE CLIENT

Imagine that you or your company needs some construction work or HVAC main-
tenance, maybe you want a security system installed at the office, or a truck in your
fleet wheezes as it climb hills. Whatever it is, we’ve all been there.

So you reach out to a prospective vendor or, better yet, one of their salespeople
identifies the issue and contacts you. The ball is moving forward and the goal line is
straight ahead. Ideally, the entire transaction is completed so quickly and professionally
that you’ll hire the company again and recommend them to others. There’s nothing
better than word of mouth.

But in reality? The process often moves along at less than maximum speed and
efficiency. The sales cycle resembles someone stuck in morning traffic, lurching a few
feet forward and then stopping, lurching a few feet forward… repeat, repeat, repeat.

What’s going on here? Let’s count up some of the potential roadblocks in the sales
cycle of most companies.

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First, it takes hours or even days for a sales team to make an
appointment with the prospect. Even after the rep arrives for an
estimate, it can take several days for paperwork to arrive in the
prospect’s mailbox, because it took a full day just to get the esti-
mate back to the office to type it up.

This back-and-forth continues all the way through billing and re-
ceipt of payment.

If you’re still doing business like this, you’re all but begging the
customer to lose momentum and drop the project altogether or
look for a speedier competitor. Once upon a time, there weren’t
many, if any, quicker, more proficient alternatives. Everyone did
business the same way. Customers just had to live with it.

Not anymore. Your competitors are harnessing the power of

21st-century tools in droves and generating entirely new consumer
expectations. In a recent survey, two out of every three companies
with field service workers reported that they now use an automated
software solution. (for more about this, check out “Eye Opening Facts
About Field Service.”)

Today’s customers demand near-instant fulfillment of their wants

and needs.

The businesses that successfully respond to this fact manage their

sales teams and field workers better — becoming more efficient
and profitable in the process.

IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. IT’S ABOUT THE PAPER

We get that there are all kinds of reasonable causes for the delays
and inefficiencies. On paper, the sales process is a huge time suck
and hassle. What are the causes? How may of these apply to your
operation?

• Some salespeople/field service workers have terrible handwrit-

ing. Illegible notes require phone calls/emails for clarification.

• It can take hours or days for management to receive information,

making it impossible for them to provide informed decisions
in something resembling real time.

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• Sometimes folks fail to fully complete a form, which requires phone calls/emails
to track down the missing information. A single missing digit can set the process
back.

• Salespeople/field service workers operate out in the world. Transporting paper

takes time.

• Even the best staffers don’t have instant recall of all of your varied products and
services. Without that information at their fingertips, follow-up research is required.

• Inventory is constantly rising and falling. Salespeople can’t instantly and accurately
report on availability to clients. More calls and more research required.

• The client is disputing a line item on the invoice. The collections staff can’t reconcile
the issue without talking to the salesperson, who is flying across the country.

• Salesperson A is confronting an issue out in the field that Salesperson B success-

fully overcame a few weeks ago. But nobody at the home office recalls what she
did, and she is tied up in an extended meeting with an important client.

The root of all of these issues? It all comes down to one word: paper.

IT’S NOT MAGIC; IT’S SIMPLE, AND IT’S INEXPENSIVE TO BOOT

A quick, two-question quiz:

1. Is your smartphone or tablet within your reach at this very moment?

2. Is it more accessible than the paper document you would need this second to
complete a deal?

If you answered yes to both, it’s time for a change.

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In fact, if you want your company to flourish in a marketplace that is
increasingly digitized, automated, electronic, and cloud-based, you
have to change.

Every employee of the most efficient and effective companies can

access business information and work from anywhere – the office,
the car, at lunch, on vacation (like that ever happens), out of town
trying to drum up new business — and forge closer relationships
with existing clients.

Management can also be better at what it is intended to do: man-

age, even when their charges are on the road.

How?

Shift your paper forms to mobile apps and get data, responses,
payments, and more, all in real time from your employees in the
field. It may seem daunting, but if you start small, making the shift
doesn’t have to overwhelm you or your organization. It can even be
a chance to improvement your processes.

The first step: start with one form

Some companies make the mistake of trying to make a shift to mobile

all at once. Just choose one or two forms that you use most frequently
and make your initial shift with those.

Good forms to start with might include:

• Inspections
• Expense Reports
• Work Orders
• Checklists

Make sure you think about how the form you selected is working for
you and your staff. Maybe now is the time to make some changes
to that form instead of replicating it exactly as you have it now.

This is where you can, and should, enlist the help of the people
who work with that form. Input from your staff both in the field and
at your office can help them feel more invested in the transition and
more committed to moving to your new mobile app. Ask them what
they would change on your old form, what works, and what doesn’t.

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 Some questions to ask to help you tailor your mobile app include:

• Are there questions staff routinely forget to ask customers?

• Are there sections on your form that should be optional for

specific situations?

• Does your form require calculations? If so, are math errors

common?

• What information would you like to update, add or delete from

your form?

Save time, improve communication

Once you know what you want, you can add from a variety of func-
tionalities that will help you be efficient with your mobile workforce.
Adding features like GPS, image capture, dispatch, barcode scanning,
electronic signatures, push notifications, and field access to business
data such as parts catalogs and price lists will make your data more
accurate and life for your employees much easier. Need a way to im-
prove between communication among field workers and between field
workers and supervisors? No problem.

Just take a look at what mobile apps did for Clear Water Products. A
flourishing solids control equipment company serving the oil and gas
industry, Clear Water needed a better way to manage communication.

It’s not that their people weren’t talking to each other. Just the
opposite: Everyone was doing a terrific job of sharing up-to-the-min-
ute information via text. As the company grew, the problem became
one of volume. It just got hard to keep up with the torrential flow of
communication, and things got missed.

“ I had to reread text messages multiple times to get all the

information. If someone missed something in their message,
I’d have to call them to find out the answer.”

Jay Ziesler, Clear Water engineer

So Clear Water transitioned from text messages to Canvas apps via

smartphones and tablets. The results were dramatic: They improved
response times, standardized recordkeeping, and became signifi-
cantly more efficient.

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How much more? A company engineer said that it took him 90
minutes to complete a single report prior to the conversion. Now it
takes him just 10 minutes to generate a new report. He estimates
that in a single year he’s saved 220 hours on reports alone.

MANAGING WITH MOBILE

With remote or mobile workers, it can be difficult to know which

employees are carrying their weight and which ones aren’t, exactly
what people are doing during the day, and exactly how they are
doing it. Mobile apps can help you track employee work and pro-
ductivity in a few important ways.

Time cards

For businesses in many industries, such as oil and gas, manufac-

turing, and construction, time cards are crucial for tracking not only

employee time worked but also labor costs. For decades, standard
practice has been to track hours with time cards.

Ensuring that time cards are filled out accurately, however, can be
a challenge. If someone arrives late to a work site, for instance, site
managers have to retrieve a paper form from their truck or office,
note the employee’s arrival time, and return the paper form — a
slow process that cuts into the day’s workflow. For many managers,
it’s easier to estimate when someone arrived on site than it is to
report in real time.

But estimates can lead to further problems with employees. Some

may complain that they aren’t being paid for the time they were
actually on the job. Suddenly, you have to double check hours
worked before sending checks.

Time cards try to make tracking labor easy, but create extra hurdles
for businesses.
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Mobile apps make time cards easier. When an employee opens the
mobile app on a smartphone or tablet, the app can automatically
enter time. The company then gets accurate information in real
time, immediately received at the office. Mobile time cards help
businesses with hourly workers spend less on tracking employees
and more on their actual work.

Sales meetings

Many companies have salespeople who are on the road for days or
weeks at a time, meeting with potential customers. You may have
a few of these folks in your business, or you may have hundreds
of them all across the United States, or the world. Tracking these
meetings, and understanding how they go, along with many other
details, is crucial to success.

On paper, this process is a huge hassle. Information can take days

or weeks to return to regional or national offices, and companies
rely on sales employees to provide proof of the meetings. This may
work if you’re able to follow up each day with a couple employees
but why not track things more accurately?

With mobile apps, it’s much easier to track these types of sales
efforts. Salespeople can easily type in the information previously
filled into forms, but also include additional validation. Time and
date stamps can be automatically included every time the mobile
app is opened.

In addition, the salespeople can record their location with a GPS

location capture. Since these fields cannot be manipulated by
salespeople, reports from mobile apps are more accurate than
before. And because information is captured in real time and stored
in the cloud, it’s instantly accessible for others in the company who
need it. No delay or waiting for data entry. Sharing is immediate.
Going mobile has made gathering sales meeting information and
managing remotely more efficient, more effective, and more reliable
for tracking and reporting.

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Work orders

For field workers in the service industry, productive employees generate more
revenue for a business. Like tracking salespeople, tracking how many jobs each
employee does can be cumbersome and time consuming with paper work orders.
They can be hard to read, inconsistently returned to the office, and impossible to
get in real time. For an HVAC business owner, for instance, paper forms make it
time consuming to know which employees are productive and which ones aren’t.

Mobile work orders create a system that’s reliable, accurate, and accessible in
real time.

Time and date stamps can accurately show when the job occurred.
Some companies will also ask for a GPS location to prove that the
technician was at the site.

Mobile apps enable this kind of data to be stored in the cloud, eliminating the need
for manual data entry (and all the errors that come with it) and filing cabinets. The
office accesses these forms in real time, allowing managers to see how productive
technicians are that day, rather than a week or two weeks after the fact.

On-the-spot payment

Sales cycles can take days or weeks. Information has to return from the field with reps,
data has to be entered, time is lost, payment is slow. Things get even worse
if documents are misplaced or information is inaccurate.

If reps have the ability to take customer payments on the spot, imagine what happens to
the sales cycle. With Canvas’ mobile payment integration with PayPal, your technician
or field rep can take cash, check or credit card on site, shortening your sales cycle,
offering more service to customers, lowering your administrative costs, and more.
And you are on top of the revenue in real time.

YEAH, BUT …

We owe it to you to also share a little information about how things sometimes don’t
go as well as they should.

A 2012 study by Accenture revealed that 85 percent of the companies that acquired
new sales technology tools did not increase revenue from implementing sales tools.
There seems to be a little of the home-gym-equipment syndrome here. People buy
a treadmill and then wait for the weight to melt away.

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They key is, you’ve got to use the thing to achieve what you want. You’ve also got to
set yourself up in other ways to succeed. So it goes with apps and cloud computing.

How to make it work

• Up-front training for staff that is both relevant and meaningful is key. Piloting your
mobile app with just a few members of your team is a good way to get going. If
you are concerned about staff being enthusiastic adopters of mobile, test it with
the most “technologically challenged” staffer you have. Once that person is on
board, the rest of your staff is more likely to follow suit.

• Resources and support are also critical. Be available for the team when they have
questions. Success depends on your sales staff and field service workers actually
seeing managers using the new tools and receiving praise for using it themselves.

• Allow yourself (and your staff) some transition time. Make a plan to implement
over a transition period instead of in one day. This kind of shift requires thought
and work, but the investment of time and energy pass an enormous benefit for
everyone involved — you, your staff, and, most importantly, your clients.

Mobile apps that deliver data in real time give managers more knowledge in more
places. For example, using real-time time-tracking apps, managers can see what
everyone is doing as they do it. Using built-in GPS technology, they see where every-
one is at any moment.

That helps managers provide feedback when it will have the greatest impact: when
your employee is in front of a customer or a situation in need of immediate response.
Paper is an anchor. Fix a problem in Omaha. Help a salesman in Portland. Get home
to dinner in Baltimore in time for your daughter’s description of her day in school.

You can’t afford to lose momentum

Still have doubts? Give us a test drive with a 30-day free trial, no credit card required.
Choose from more than 16,000 ready-made apps. Or let Canvas help you build something
that suits just you.

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