Reaching Mobile Employees
October 8th, 2008 by Allen Putman
As I’m sure many of you face, engaging field-based sales employees is a challenge. One of the biggest in fact. But I think we just might be at an interesting crossroads where the proliferation of new technology and communications are reaching a better point of alignment. Sure, CEO and executive blogs are great, intranets are finally delivering against a long-overdue promise of effective and efficient internal communications, but what about our brothers and sisters in the field who are out there selling our products and services?
In almost every communications assessment we do, we hear that field sales employees don’t have the time or the inclination to ‘tune in’ to corporate employee communications. So how do we break this impasse? First you have to nail the content and in doing this help educate field sales teams about the power of corporate brand in increasing reputation and increasing their sales. But how do we break through all of the clutter when time for them is of the essence and they’re not naturally predisposed to our efforts?
It’s nice to be able to say that the answer to this question is, finally, technology – or what we’re calling mobile sales force enablement. As we thought about this with our team and some of our partners, we’re realizing that new communications platforms such as the iPhone and Google’s new Android technology are turning up everywhere. The proliferation – and acceptance – of these mobile communications tools is opening the door for what we can do with our messages to provide field-based sales and other remote employees with timely, concise and – usable – information that enables them to do what they do even better and more efficiently.
While I believed we were on to something, I knew we had a winner when I was preparing to leave for the airport for a business trip and I received a notice from Continental Airlines that I could now receive my boarding passes electronically on my mobile phone or PDA. Suddenly as I headed into the field myself I knew we could use technology to make employee communications even better than before.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:09 am
[...] another post on this blog, Reaching Mobile Employees, by Allen Putman, the idea of the many avenues of communication that are used to reach employees in [...]