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Salesforce has once again been identified as a leader in the Gartner Salesforce Automation Magic Quadrant.
The report looked a range of functionality including “architecture (for example, openness, flexibility, usability and workflow), and sales reporting and analytics”, but one key capability in particular has impacted the way we work:
Mobile.
Although we've been hearing the phrase "This is the year of mobile" for the past 5 years, the radical change has truly only been observed in the last 12-24 months. The world has gone completely “mobile first”. Design, interaction and commerce have all flipped in the way we use technology to a world where it if it doesn’t work best on mobile, it doesn’t work. The app experience on a location-aware, always-on device sets a new standard for how seamless technology can actually make the app fade into the background. Consider all the stuff baked into a free mobile mapping app: maps, reviews, yellow pages, navigation, social... combined to offer instant access to the best dining experience in a 3-block radius.
This is absolutely true in our personal lives and increasingly it needs to be true in our working lives too.
The reason is: Simplicity
I find that quite often I use my mobile at my desk instead of my desktop because the UI is so much more intuitive and user friendly. When I’m travelling on business, I’m surprised how infrequently my laptop makes it out of its sleeve; so much of my day to day tasks and duties can be completed on my phone.
It is no secret that salespeople follow the path of least resistance. If an interface is clunky or a process is clumsy, salespeople will circumvent it. So to help organizations empower their sales force as much as possible, we have put significant focus on listening to sales teams' feedback about how they can be more productive on the go. Our heritage in salesforce automation means we spotted this trend early and stayed on the leading edge as demonstrated by our 9 years appearing in Gartner's leaders' quadrant.
Salesforce Lightning, in which Salesforce has made considerable investment, allows organizations to create mobile-first components that enable salespeople to advance their pipeline with the least possible friction. Sales teams can now seamlessly access exactly what they need through fully contextual bespoke apps for approvals, quoting, engaging support and so on. Just like consumer app counterparts, we're allowing our customers to deliver intuitive, better than desktop technology to their sales teams that's an accelerant to business.
So Mobile is critical, but there are other factors to consider as well. Key among these are:
· ● Our relationship with Microsoft, the largest provider of productivity software in the world! We continue to deepen that relationship so the interoperability of Salesforce and MS Office tools is as easy as possible.
· ● Cloud software as a service (Saas) is our heritage, we pioneered it! Mobile apps rely on realtime access to information and you can only have that kind of dynamic and immediate system dialogue in the cloud.
· ● Social collaboration is a catalyst for the flow of information within the walls businesses and with Chatter, we provide a familiar, but private social layer on every component of our platform.
· ● Data - our introduction of Wave Analytics in 2014 remains a game changing approach to building an analytics app firstly for mobile to deliver insights into massive amounts of ANY data on a visually intuitive, intelligent and even predictive platform.
· ● Devices - with our IoT Cloud we are also at the forefront of the Internet of Things and our technology will allow salespeople to draw insights from an ever-expanding world of connected devices which all relate to human wants, needs and patterns.
We realize that in order to stay competitive businesses must be “mobile-first” and so we continue to innovate in this space to help our customers get apps to market as quickly as possible so they can respond to their customers’ needs at Lightning Speed.
Read the Gartner report here:
