iPad adoption hasn’t yet peaked in sales organizations, The Sales Management Association’s recent research shows. Only about one-third of salespeople currently use a tablet, whether it’s their own or a company-furnished device. But there is impressive momentum gathering behind company-sponsored tablet initiatives impacting the sales force. Most sales forces are expecting greater investment in tablet computing and higher adoption rates among salespeople. Here are a few things we’ve learned so far about how sales organizations are using iPads.
- 59% of sales organizations have a company-sponsored initiative to assess and deploy tablets for the sales force. Another 31% are considering one. (Only 10% have no interest.)
- Among firms who have adopted tablets for the sales organization, 70% believe tablets already represent a productive use of company resources. In fact, fully 90% of these firms’ managers believe their organizations should invest more in tablets.
What Are We Learning from Sales Force iPad Adoption
Our research points toward a few potential surprises for managers just getting started with iPads.
- Get Onboard (Or Your Salespeople Will Without You). If your company isn’t sponsoring a tablet computing initiative, expect your salespeople to beat you to it. Our research indicates that at least 35% of tablets in use by sales organizations are salesperson-owned (or “BYOD,” for “bring your own device”). We believe powerful advantages accrue to firms that anticipate and direct their sales organizations’ use of tablets, or, at minimum, collaborate with sellers to establish and communicate effective practice.
- Not Everything Works As Well As It Should. You may be disappointed with what tablets can’t yet do. We asked managers who haven’t yet implemented tablets (but expected to) which tablet applications their salespeople would use most. The number one answer: slide presentations. But the data show much lower (25% lower) actual usage of presentation applications among tablet-equipped sellers. Why? Simple! PowerPoint is horrible on the iPad. Sales Management Association underwriter Brainshark (who helped underwrite the research) has addressed this with their excellent application SlideShark. Expect additional innovation focused on closing this important gap.
- But, Tablets Will Be Better Than You Expect For Collaboration. Like our survey respondents, you may be surprised by tablets’ utility as a connected device. When we compared expected usage and actual usage by specific applications, we found communication and web applications like web browsing, email and social media ranked much higher in usage than expected.
- Yes, your salespeople are playing Angry Birds during the sales meeting. Deal with it. Just to be cheeky, we asked respondents (who had not yet implemented tablets) where Angry Birds ranked among 18 applications’ expected usage among tablet-adopting salespeople; it ranked last. But among managers whose firms have deployed tablets, Angry Birds moved up seven spots. Needless to say, tablets in general (and the iPad in particular) make a compelling entertainment platform, and developers are racing to “gamify” essential business applications to coop this capability. In the meantime, you might need to be more entertaining in the weekly sales meeting if you hope to keep your sales force’s attention.
Expect this curve to shift rightward with growing speed over the next 18 months.
Applications
As iPad adoption explodes, so too is application development. We recently hosted a web panel discussion on sales management-related applications. (Panelists were SAP‘s Nicholas Kontopoulos, Analysis Factory‘s Cliff Alper, and Jay Wilder from Brainshark. They profiled about a dozen apps (including some of their own) currently used by many sales managers.
Check Out Our Recent Webcasts
Have a listen by accessing the archived webcast below (as well as our earlier webcast summarizing our initial research on Tablet PC Usage in Sales Organizations). Members may skip the reg screens and access directly from the Sales Management Association Resource Library.
