Nothing seals a deal better than a face-to-face sales call; there is only so much you can accomplish over the phone or a virtual meeting.  This explains why sales personnel are always on the go.  However, as a sales rep, how do you stay connected to your business even when you go mobile?  The answer to this is the Salesforce1 Mobile App.

What are the features that make Salesforce1 Mobile App a boon to sales reps?

1) Feed First – get your daily dose of updates

Right when you open the app, you get to see your daily feed in the form of posts, news items, shared files etc.  You can reply, post comments and like, or upload and share content.  What better way to start your day?

2) Dashboards and reports – data at your fingertips

Dashboards are versatile and tie up with the Salesforce CRM to provide information about your sales data, your customers and also that of sales reps reporting to you.  You can view information or use it to easily generate reports.  The Drill to Reports feature allows you to analyze and get beneath any interesting metric or KPI you see on a report.  The app even gives you access to back office data including legacy data.

“Unleash the power of the Salesforce CRM with the Salesforce1 mobile app”   

3) Today and My Tasks – get organized

This feature helps you stay more organized.  Review meetings and planned activities for the day, view invitee calendars to plan future meetings and record minutes and notes.  The My Task feature gives you the list of tasks for upcoming days and you can view details of each task or sort tasks by their status as well.

4) Notification Center – get on top of your game

This feature on the app presents you with approval for requests and notifications from your team.  A quick glance through all these requires just a single tap to open items that require immediate attention.

5) Smart Search – get more productive

Closing a sale gets so much easier when all the required information appears at a salesperson’s fingertips.  With this mobile app, you can quickly search for and view customer details and review or update contact information as well as upcoming opportunities.  You can pin important objects in the search results so that they are displayed at the top.  This app also lets you escalate customer queries to appropriate personnel or view case histories for a customer.

6) MS Office Integration – create and share documents

Integrated with MS office so that you can create, view and edit spreadsheets, documents and presentations, this app lets you upload files to Salesforce directly too.

7) Offline Data Access – stay connected always

You can access data even when you are in a place with no internet connection.  Access your key accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities and custom data when you are on the move.  The app synchronizes your phone by downloading new and modified records as well as resolving data conflicts between your offline and live Salesforce accounts when you are back online.

“With the Salesforce1 Mobile App, you are always on and always connected” [Tweet it]

8) Custom Actions – Make your app your own

Create custom actions for the activities that you or your team performs most frequently.  You can choose from a library of popular actions or create your new set of actions and assign them to appropriate roles.  You can also create new apps to automate key processes and tailor them for various roles.  Partner apps that are relevant to your work can also be included.  The app can be customized to include your company logo and color, and with the App Builder, you can make use of a drag and drop interface to quickly create an app from pre-assembled components.

9) Collaborations – Go Social

You can use the Chatter REST APIs to add popular social networks that can be used to communicate and collaborate with customers and seek new business opportunities.  Customer queries can immediately be addressed from anywhere and you can comment on relevant posts and share updates as well.

The Salesforce1 app is an HTML5 platform that suits all devices and hence is particularly useful for BYOD companies.  This, of course, is a great advantage when the world is going increasingly mobile.  Gartner expects the CRM market to be $36.5 billion by 2017; and, with its innovative market-defining products, it is no wonder Salesforce has consistently ruled the CRM space.