How Sales Productivity Apps Increase the ROI of Tablet Investment
Investing in tablets for your sales force is now more justifiable than ever, thanks to sales productivity tools. While tablet sales have grown to 195 million in 2013 from 116 million in 2012, the costs to deploy them are dropping. Now we are learning that the total cost of ownership for tablets, which includes hardware, basic software suites, and services, is between $100-$120 per month. Smartphone expenses are often greater than tablets if you take the $100-$120 per month number, and tablets are now 50% less expensive to own and operate than PCs.
The justification for tablets becomes even easier with the help of sales productivity apps.
A recent study by Pace Productivity illuminates how sales people spend most of their time in an average 49 hour work week. The chart to the right is from the study and shows the breakdown of hours. If you are in sales, sales management, a president, or owner of a company, you need to be aware of this study. According to the findings, planning and administrative tasks consume 33% of salespeople’s time. The time actually spent selling only equates to 22% of daily activity. So odds are, your salespeople are spending less than a quarter of their time getting to do what you are actually paying them to do. If you can move the needle up on that statistic, you stand to gain not just cost savings, but enhance revenue generation.
On average a salesperson spends 776.16 hours per year on administrative duties and only 517.6 hours per year selling.
If you could provide your sales team with a tool that helps them reduce the amount of time they spend on these administrative activities by 10 percentage points, you could shift that time over to direct selling activities. That sounds almost impossible on the surface until you realize these administrative activities include time spent in marketing and presentation preparation. Some other studies we’ve seen point to as many as 7 hours per week spent just preparing sale material. That’s basically a day a week.
What if you could put materials in the hands of your sales team in a manner which made the information easy to find, easy to arrange, and easy to present? You would likely shift a lot of that lost administrative time into time spent selling instead of hunting for information. If you could shift 10 percentage point from admin to selling, what impact would it have on revenue and on margin contribution? In this scenario, 32% of the time would be spent in front of customers and prospects. The salesman would gain 236 hours of more productive time. That means you have the potential to dramatically increase revenue by leveraging a tool to shift time around. In today’s world, increase revenue is a very intriguing way to pay for the tool vs. just reducing cost.
4DSales has spent time researching numerous studies, which when taken collectively show the average number of sales calls needed to close a sale in the B2B environment is 5.12. If each call consumed an hour, 46 more prospects could be managed each year. That doesn’t even take into account that some of these tools can also decrease the number of calls required to close a deal.
With the capacity to manage 46 more prospects with only ten percent closing and contributing $1000 gross margin, or $4,600, the company justifies its tablet and sales productivity tools expense in approximately three months.
Leveraging sales applications, especially those which reduce the time investment and increase the effectiveness of customer engagement and presentation management, is at center of expertise in our company. If you would like to review your justification scenario with us, please contact us at 918.99.8870 or 4DSales@4DSales.com.
For further information on tablet and sales productivity, please visit these resources below:
http://4dsales.com/tablet-computers-for-sales-professionals-justifiable-and-a-competitive-advantage/
http://4dsales.com/the-good-luck-were-all-counting-on-you-team/
