With a lot of CRM buyer interest in mobile phone CRM access, we wanted to find out what percentage of salespeople actually access their company’s CRM data from a smartphone.
We recently surveyed 460 people the U.S. who identified their primary job responsibility as “sales”. The survey was conducted between January 29, 2014 and February 3, 2014.
Approximately half the respondents said they work for companies of between 1 and 50 employees, 20% said they work for companies with 51 – 500 employees and 30% said they work for companies with over 500 employees.
Smartphones Used by Salespeople
We started by asking the question, “What type of smartphone do you currently use?” 80% of respondents answered that they use either an iPhone or an Android device. It turns out that these two types of smartphones are used in almost equal numbers:
We also asked the question, “What is your company’s primary CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system?” Not surprisingly, Salesforce was the most identified brand among CRM systems. The other identified brands generally matched the results of our 2013 CRM Market Share Survey.
Our next question was, “Do you access your company’s CRM customer or prospect data on your mobile phone?” We filtered out respondents who answered, “My company doesn’t have a CRM system”. We also filtered out respondents who said that they did not own a smartphone. Of all salespeople who say they own a smartphone, fewer than a quarter of them currently access CRM information from their mobile phone:
iPhone and Android CRM Access by Salespeople
The above chart includes respondents who own smartphones such as BlackBerry or Windows Phone — devices for which many CRM vendors may not have developed mobile access.
So, we next looked at iPhone and Android users only. We also filtered out respondents who specifically said that their company’s CRM system does not provide mobile access. Keep in mind that it’s possible many people who answered “No” did not know whether or not their company’s CRM system allows for mobile access.
The results show that a higher percentage of iPhone users compared to Android users access their company’s customer or prospect information from their smartphone:
Among salespeople whose company has a CRM system and for which the respondent did not specifically say that their company’s CRM system does not provide CRM access, 42% of iPhone users said they access CRM customer or prospect data from their iPhone.
On the other hand, only 26% of Android users said they access CRM or prospect or customer data from their Android device.
One reason for this may be that CRM vendors have historically put a higher priority on developing iPhone applications than on creating Android applications.
In either case, there appears to be a lot of room for growth in the area of smartphone access to CRM by salespeople. To help foster this growth, CRM vendors not only need to make the access available, but they need to allow for the creation of compelling CRM use cases for smartphone users.
