Sales are the lifeblood of nearly all businesses. Depending on the size and scale of your business, you’re measuring sales through different lenses.
As an SMB, you track sales month-over-month, new customers, repeat purchases, and other mission critical KPIs religiously to ensure that your business is on track, that you can keep the lights on, and that you can make payroll.
At the enterprise, sales channels are fractured, the sales process is more complex, you have agencies working on your behalf on a range of different marketing activities, and you may have an array of different buyers, segments, and KPIs. If the sales cycle is long, then you invest heavily on demand generation, thought leadership, and product education; if the sales cycle is shorter, you likely invest much more heavily in SEM, display, PLAs, and even social ads.
If your business is SaaS, it’s all about COCA, MRR, time spent with your product, and other indicators of traction and growth.
Regardless of how you’re measuring sales, though, one thing is for certain; you could always have more. However, for all of the disciplines and tactics above, across all verticals, and for all business sizes, there is a new dynamic on the rise that is causing you to lose sales: that of the mobile customer.
The mobile customer is the new every customer
Whether you’re a CPG, in the entertainment industry, retail, non-profit, B2C or B2B, if you’re not hyper-focused on how your brand, content, products, and services are being explored and consumed by your potential customers, then you are leaving dollars on the table in the form of lost sales, unsatisfied customers, and churn. These sales are then, of course, readily gobbled up by forward-leaning competitors. Use the mobile data, strategies, and tactics readily available within your industry to ensure that you are selling smarter than your competition.
Across every single one of your marketing disciplines, channels, and activities, the mobile lens must be applied. Today, more people search the web on mobile devices than they do on desktop computers. Better yet, 86% of B2B execs search for information on products & services for their business on their mobile devices. Mobile apps make up 47% of ALL Internet traffic, as of early 2014. And the scary part? Only about 55% of American adults have smartphones. How many potential sales will you sacrifice due to poor mobile customer experiences with each growing percentage point of mobile penetration?
So what are some of the ways to account for this always-on mobile customer across your marketing mix? On your website, are you leveraging responsive and flexible designs and layouts that make for a great browsing and buying experience, regardless of device? Is your deep site content crawled and are sitelinks indexed optimized by Google to ensure that mobile visitors are diving into the right areas of your site right away? Are your digital ad campaigns taking advantage of all mobile optimizations that Google and others make readily available? Are you heavily involved in the juggernaut social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where upwards of 70% of usage comes from native mobile apps.
Does your business have a native mobile app with coverage across both major operating systems? If so, does that native app interact with your real-world locations, be they on your retail floor, at tradeshows, in your facilities, and at your events through new Bluetooth LE technology, which is quickly becoming the industry standard?
These questions will hopefully trigger some investigation, both with your marketing team, development teams, agencies, and vendors. If your business has a Chief of Innovation, a Creative Technologist, or a Customer Experience Director, then you’re likely out in front of the pack.
Conduct an internal audit; ensure that you’re using top tier technology partners with a focus on mobile customer experience, that you’re leveraging technology platforms that are mobile-first, flexible, and extensible, and above all, that your team has fully bought in to this new era of always-on mobile customer experience.
Your sales team will thank you.