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Office on the hip

And even this, he suggested, is a conservative estimate.  "It's probably much more than that." As the forms are intuitive, his firm hasn't had to provide any training on their use.

Securit will soon be piloting SAP CRM on RIM BlackBerry devices – an offering that has been frequently dubbed "office-on-the-hip" since it was unveiled last year.

The pilot will involve 10 -12 of the firm's sales folk in the U.K. who are already using SAP CRM sales, according to Snider. Longer term, the firm plans on rolling out the product for all its 350 sales reps worldwide.

Increased productivity is expected to be the immediate and most tangible fallout.

At Securit, the general sales territory reps (who constitute the bulk of the sales force) don't currently use laptops. All they have is notepads to jot down leads and track their progress, said Snider.

The lead-gen process itself is "very manual" right now, Snider told ITBusiness.ca in a previous interview. "A typical sales rep goes into an office a couple of times a week, and uses whatever facilities are available - telephone directories, yellow pages – to generate leads. They then make sales calls from those lists."

He said with the "SAP CRM on Blackberry" rollout the lead gen process would become automated, quicker, and smarter. "Leads would get pushed to salespersons real-time, based on certain criteria."

The other huge benefit, he said, is tracking of the sales process.
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Right now there's no record of what the sales person accomplishes against their objectives in a given day, week, or month because it's a very manual process."

All that will soon change, as sales reps will have "pipeline tracking" on their BlackBerries, Snider said.

"This means anything they do during the sales process can be followed up on. For instance, when they make a call to a prospect, the [logging] of that call would become a permanent record."

If the sales person leaves the company, he said, those records could be pushed to whoever replaces them.

And that's a far cry from the notebook jottings of these transactions that reps currently use.

But in the area of mobile CRM too, analysts note that SAP offering is by no means unique.<

"SAP is playing catch-up," said Info-Tech's Lava. "Handheld solutions for Siebel have been around for over three years."

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