If you stop to think about it, salespeople have always been mobile. That’s according to Joseph P. Smith, Product Manager of Business Development for North State, a fiber-based internet, voice, and entertainment services company in North Carolina. And it makes sense. North State’s sales team, like so many others, spends the majority of their day out in the field, meeting with current and prospective customers.

In January of 2014, North State invested in iPads for all of its sales reps. The devices are powered by the Salesforce1 Mobile App, which “gives the team the ability to treat their business the same way they treat their day, which is mobile,” says Smith, who is also the company’s Salesforce Admin. Reps can access the Salesforce CRM tools and data they need to serve the company’s residential and commercial customers, on-site and in real-time.

A huge benefit to the field team and North State as a whole has been the ease at which the Salesforce1 Mobile App can be customized. Smith shared with us four of the custom features that have made the some of the biggest differences:

1. Check-Ins

Employees of today are used to “checking-in” to locations on social media networks in their personal life. With this in mind, North State added a check-in function within the Salesforce1 Mobile App for North State’s sales reps. When reps arrive at a customer locale, they simply click a couple buttons and the customer name, address, the length of the appointment, and other pertinent info is automatically entered into Salesforce. 

2. Dashboards

The tedious job of manually generating reports had North State’s sales director tied to his computer for hours when preparing for one-on-ones with reps.  Adding custom dashboards within the Salesforce1 Mobile App provides the most current data the sales director needs every week in two-clicks. “He’s now using the dashboard in the Salesforce1 Mobile App more than the computer-based Salesforce version,” says Smith.

3. Commission

A favorite and very motivating custom feature for North State’s sales reps within the Salesforce1 Mobile App is the commission calculator. Gone are the days of scribbling down notes on new business, as well as long-form calculations, which used to take the sales team roughly 20 hours a month. Now, when reps sell new opportunities to customers they can see on the spot what the value is to them. In addition, the sales director no longer has to manually enter commissions into a spreadsheet. He gets one report in Salesforce, ships it to payroll, and he’s done.

4. Shortcuts

“The most valuable customization you can do within the Salesforce1 Mobile App is to create quick actions that mitigate all the time it takes to edit, update or create a record,” says Smith. Publisher actions, such as “Log Activity” and “Mark as Sold” with pre-populated fields, save sales reps valuable time. “All of these publisher actions give you shortcuts to focus in on just what you need, so you spend five seconds and not five minutes,” adds Smith.

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