How Enterprise Apps Increase Workforce Productivity

– Nitin Singh Sisodia, Director-Product-Management, InsideView

With exponential rise in number of startups and Small and Medium Business enterprises, the demand of productivity applications has witnessed an unprecedented increase. According to Gartner, employees in today’s digital workplace use an average of three different devices in their daily routine, which will increase to five or six devices as technologies such as wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) eventually become mainstream.

In the previous decades, most of the enterprise software lacked cross platform capabilities. Users were tied to a workstation and were forced to use pre-configured OS and other software packages. Because of huge dependency on IT departments the cost of maintaining hardware, network and security kept on increasing as the organizations grew. Network bandwidth was a precious commodity in this era.

Within tech, this is where corporates shall invest

Worldwide spending on enterprise application software will grow 7,5% to reach $149,9-billion in 2015, increasing to more than $201-billion in 2019, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. Analysts say that long-term growth in spending will be driven primarily by modernisation, functional expansion and digital transformation projects.

Advancements in mobile devices and availability of better communication network opened the doors for cloud hosted productivity application providers such as Google Apps. Users got ubiquitous access to use these tools on the choice of their devices and locations. The cost saving thus achieved changed the dynamics of enterprise application market and led to new business models for buying, selling and deploying these applications.

Enterprise apps can quickly drive efficiency and effectiveness in different areas of the enterprise: sales and marketing, training, and operations. Sales and marketing to improve the face-to-face sales experience with the latest information and messaging; training to deliver just-in-time, in-context learning; and operations to enable dispersed teams to work together to solve problems.

The sales and marketing teams in this new world also required thinking outside the conventional methods to reach out to new decision makers in the organizations. The marketing channels now require being able to utilize social presence of these decision makers for targeted marking campaigns.

Shorter sales cycles also makes it more vital to have warm introductions rather than cold calls by sales team. Sales Intelligence paired with Social Selling is increasingly becoming the most effective way for sales professionals to bring in more leads and close more deals

By finding the right connections and building trusted relationships, it will enable sales professionals to be better at sales lead generation, sales prospecting, cold calling, building and maintaining relationships.

Being able to display product or service information on an app can also make the sales process faster and more efficient by eliminating the need to spend time looking through computer files or brochures.

Speeding up this sales process enables employees to fit in more clients in their schedules, leading to more sales.

And this is only one of the many potential use cases enterprise apps can offer to support daily tasks. From sales to training, the possibilities are many.