My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 4

This is part 4 of this article series. 

I have consulted with many enterprise mobility vendors.  The new start-ups are often the most concerned with hiding all of their secrets.  They want every prospect to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and they only want to share the information that is on their marketing brochures.  They soon learn or they go away.

There are already so many new things to learn, that prospects and potential resellers have no idea what secrets you have that are worth stealing.  I have seen mobile start-ups delay or jeopardize entire sales cycles over confidentiality concerns.  The bottom line is that it is important to protect your retirement but recognize what is worth protecting.

I have had companies go through long NDA discussions with me.  They tell me they have the most important new mobile technology on the planet, only to discover weeks later that the technology they have I saw five years ago or my own team developed years ago.

There may be times when your technology is worth billions.  However, if you prevent your business from taking off over confidentiality concerns, then you will never know.  The value of your technology is based primarily upon the number of customers and potential customers that use or will use it.  Your focus should be on building a customer base - sales trump secrets every time.

I have said it before, the high tech world is littered with "better technology" that nobody bought.  If you are a mobile enterprise application start-up, the most important thing you can be doing is closing sales, building a customer base, and creating a brand through thought leadership - not protecting secrets that nobody even knows you have or cares that you have.

Smartsoft Mobile Solutions has over 400,000 mobile clients in the field.  Many of these mobile applications are B2C (business to consumer) applications that were custom developed for their large multi-national retail customers.  With 400,000 users you can be sure they don't make it difficult for their customers to use these mobile applications.  They don't negotiate non-disclosures with hundreds of thousands of mobile customers.  They recognize that the value is in the numbers of users.

If you would like to discuss this subject in more detail or discuss my consulting services please contact me. 

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 1
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 2
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 3

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

10 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Selecting and Implementing a Mobility Solution

A couple of weeks ago Gil Bouhnick and I recorded a webinar called 10 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Selecting and Implementing a Mobility Solution.  I opened with a 15 minute overview of the latest mobile technology that I have been researching.  It was a lot of fun and we had the largest audience I think I have ever seen on a webinar.

If you missed it live, you can catch the recorded version here:



http://www.clicksoftware.com/96ec7ed7-023c-4260-a063-a7d5c320dd23/knowledge-center-on-demand-webinars-registration.htm

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 2

In part 1 of this series I focused on the topics of sales channel development and marketing for mobile application vendors.  In part 2 I will focus on sales and sales strategies.

1. Organize all of your custom mobile application development projects into categories and business processes so the finished mobile applications can be demonstrated and used to show prospects your expertise.  When I was CEO of a mobile application company, we took inventory of all of our code and mobile applications and found we had dozens and dozens of different mobile applications that we had delivered to customers but had never leveraged with other prospects.  There were a lot of very cool apps on our shelves.
2. Recognize that each custom mobile application may have many different features.  Individual features may be of interest to different prospects.  It would be good to catalog specific features so you can demonstrate them quickly.
3. Use sales teams to find opportunities and qualify them, but close them with senior managers or executives.  You will save weeks or months in the sales process.
4. Once a qualified mobile opportunity is found, and the requirements are known, get your writers to write whitepapers specifically on the issues your prospects have.  Detail the issues and solutions available in a formal publicly available whitepaper.  The written word is very powerful and provides good documentation of your expertise.  The same can be done with webinars, videos or podcasts. Be a thought leader. 
5. Become experts in your field.  Don't permit your sales people to learn only 5 percent of their product or the industry they are targeting.  They don't deserve your prospects' time if they are not solution experts.  If it is not possible for your sales people to be experts, then make sure you bring experts to your customer meetings.  Time is precious and you need to trade time for knowledge.
6. Use a mobile application development tool (SDK - software development kit) to quickly provide screen shots and working proof of concepts for your prospects.  A picture or image is very powerful in helping your prospects envision a solution.  I have been very successful with this strategy over the years.  I would go to prospective customer meetings, gather requirements, and then have my team brand (put the client's logo on it) a mobile application that showed all of the screens and fields they would need and included screen navigation.  The sales prospects were very impressed and jumped straight into a deep dive discussion on how we could complete the application for them.

In interviews with companies like SAP Mobility partner Clicksoftware, I learned that many vendors use a template approach so they can quickly demonstrate mobile applications that are similar to the needs of their prospects and customers.  This is also a very effective approach.

Look for part 3 in this series later this week.

Contact me if you would like to discuss these in more detail. 

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 1

Over the weekend I had a mobile start-up contact me and share their challenges in getting a working sales channel set up and rolling in the enterprise mobility market.  Since this is a challenge that is shared by many small mobile start-ups, I thought I would share some of my thoughts on this matter.

1. One thing that I learned years ago is that resellers and systems integrators like to jump on a bandwagon. If there is no bandwagon, they aren’t motivated to jump. What does that mean? You need a bandwagon that plays music and attracts a crowd before the resellers or systems integrators come.
2. The bigger the market you are targeting, the bigger the amplification system your bandwagon needs.  You need bigger and louder noise in order to be heard. 
3. Another lesson I learned is that resellers want to focus on a repeatable model in a market they can leverage. What does that mean? It means if they sell to an SAP customer, they can reuse the SAP integration and experience with other potential SAP customers, have an SAP reference case and demonstrate knowledge in SAP environments. They can build a good reputation in a specific and defined market.
4. Understand resellers and their business models. They don’t care as much about what is the very best technology. They want the best selling technology. The high tech world is littered with better technology that went nowhere. The best selling technology is the one with a bandwagon. This is a very important concept to understand.  They are out to make money.  They want to offer solid, reliable technology that works and will make them the most money with the lowest cost of sales.
5. Some companies focus on extending SAP and other ERPs to mobile devices.  These are large and defined market places.  While other markets, like the mobile field data collection market, are made up of thousands of small niche markets with thousands of small resellers. It is hard to leverage a mobile bridge inspection application with an EPA application assessment or clinical trials project. The audiences, markets and resellers do not overlap so it is difficult to leverage success in one niche market into other small markets. It seems you are always starting from scratch in the next market. This means you cannot gain momentum and selling does not get easier over time. The cost of sales continues to be far higher than it should.
6. The marketing investment in one niche market is difficult to leverage in another dissimilar market.  The result is a higher marketing budget requirement per customer.  It is easier and more cost effective to attend one ASUG Sapphire or TechEd conference and meet thousands of potential customers, than to attend many small conferences and meet dozens of prospects in different markets. 
7. It often takes the same sales and market investment to close a $50,000 deal as it does to close a $500,000 or $5 million deal.  The difference is you may lose money on the $50,000 deal when the cost of marketing and the cost of sales is factored in.
8. A rule - The sales process must get easier over time.  You need your marketing system, your reputation, brand, reference cases, industry expertise and referrals to help you gain momentum and speed.  If your sales process does not get easier over time it is broken.
9. Once you have worked with the big boys in the ERP space you can understand why this is a good market. Good reputations can be developed through an accumulation of successes and SAP customers are often large enough to buy thousands of software licenses.
10. SAP customers within certain industries like oil and gas or chemical all belong to the same special interest groups and they talk. Not only do they talk, they attend meetings together and have regular webinars. SAP has dedicated sales and industry experts that support these markets. Success with one large customer is quickly known around the industry. With each success the work is easier and the cost of sales goes down.
11. You can replace the name “SAP” with Oracle or IBM Maximo or any number of companies and ERPs. The idea is that big markets, with large customer bases, that belong to the same industries are very good areas to invest in. It takes big markets to gain leverage and economies of scale.

You can see these strategies being implemented by SAP mobility partners like Clicksoftware, Leapfactor and Syclo.  They are focused on supporting the needs of SAP customers and developing a great reputation mobilizing the business processes of SAP users.  As their customer bases grow, so does their expertise, brand recognition and reference list.

If you are interested in discussing this topic in greater detail please contact me. 

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 2
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 3
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 4
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 5
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 6

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

http://www.clicksoftware.com/e86e075b-4fca-44c9-bfeb-4efcc978f416/knowledge-center-white-papers-delivery.htm

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Smartsoft Mobile Solutions' CEO Dan Homrich, Part 2

This is part 2 of an interview that I did with Smartsoft Mobile Solutions' CEO Dan Homrich.  You can read part 1 here.

Kevin:  What are some of the most interesting mobile applications that you have seen recently?

Dan:  I have seen some very interesting mobile business intelligence applications that give the user very specific information based upon their GPS coordinates.  Where are my customers relative to my location? I love mobile applications that provide just the information I need, when I need it, Mobile Business Intelligence applications with dashboards that show exactly what the user needs.  I have also seen iPhone applications that utilize barcodes to do things that only industrial grade handheld computers could do in the past.  I am a big fan of mobile applications that take the mobile user's perspective, rather than an office out perspective.

Kevin:  What are some of the most unusual mobile applications you have seen?

Dan:  A construction level and measuring stick mobile application.  In the mobile applications I love category, I would add the Pandora music application and the CNBC real time application.

Kevin:  When is a consumer grade mobile application sufficient for a mobile worker, and when is a ruggedized or industrial grade mobile device needed?

Dan:  It is the working environment that determines it.  How much money does the company have available to invest in devices?  How much water and dust are in the working environment?  What is the working environment temperature?  What is the drop rating requirement?  What are the expectations of the users?  What does the user believe they need?  Do you need a high volume scanning device that has large batteries that can last all day?  All of these issues must be considered.

Kevin:  What is the most complex enterprise mobility application that you have seen?

Dan:  I have seen a DSD (direct store delivery) mobile application with 350 different screens.  It was used in an offline mode by 4,835 delivery people.  Since there was not a real time connection to SAP, it required a complete mobile version of the SAP pricing module.  Yikes!

Kevin:  What are some of the biggest challenges you see in enterprise mobility today?

Dan:  The need to make internet connectivity truely ubiquitous.  Educating the market and demystifying mobility.  Helping customers develop a mobile strategy.

Kevin:  What strategies do you see the big ERP vendors taking toward mobility?

Dan:  They are taking a self-serving view of mobility.  They are not taking into consideration that many companies have multiple ERPs and business applications.  ERP vendors are concerned only with mobilizing themselves, not their customers' enterprise.

Kevin:  What is missing from most MEAPs (mobile enterprise application platforms) today?

Dan:  Missing today is a good understanding of the differences between the world of smartphones and the world of industrial mobile handheld computers. (SLAP MY FOREHEAD - I should have asked a follow-up question.  Obviously, I am no Larry King.)

Kevin:  Where does Smartsoft Mobile Solutions fit into the enterprise mobility ecosystem?

Dan:  Smartsoft Mobile Solutions has a very strong focus on supporting business to consumer (B2C) mobile applications.  We look for opportunities to provide very fast ROIs.  Often mobile micro-applications (light weight mobile applications) can provide big value quickly and be used by large numbers of people.  Companies are wanting to stay in close touch with their partners and with their customer base with mobile applications.

Kevin:  What can we expect to see from Smartsoft Mobile Solutions over the next few Quarters?

Dan:  A big focus on helping our customers communicate better with their customer bases.

I want to thank Dan for sharing his thoughts and insights with all of us!


***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.