the blog

While the idea of creating ones own apps may not take hold, it is clear that users are taking more control over the apps used to operate and manage their businesses.  The fact that more powerful apps can be downloaded and instantly used is creating more independence from IT and corporate policies that are slower to adapt to a mobile world that simply moves faster.  The message is loud and clear, the business wants better software and they want it now.

That is where Enhatch fits in, providing the things are field sales reps and teams need to be productive, while also providing the organization and IT the control they need.  But it starts by giving sales reps a technology that they will use and keep using because they find it valuable to them.

With Enhatch, we are changing that by providing a CRM tool that is meant for industries such as medical device that have complex sales environments.  We tie sales and marketing together on to one platform so that marketing can understand the effectiveness of their efforts while sales can be more productive and get a more accurate picture of sales activity.  Finally the medical device industry has a CRM product that can work for them.

This is clearly a trend that is happening for consumer based apps.  Will it come to enterprise apps like CRM?  We think so and the smart developers will intelligently add deeplinking to create better user experiences and in turn add value to their own apps.

CRM is far from dead, but there are plenty of caskets holding the remains of half-baked and poorly adopted CRM implementations.  We are indeed in a post-CRM era and it is being led by mobile apps that are much simpler and easier to implement than massive and complex suites like Salesforce.com and similar first-generation Web-based SaaS tools.

The good news is that mobile activations of enterprise apps, particularly CRM, are fast on the rise.  This is being driven by sales teams that are increasingly relying upon smartphones and tablets to do work and needing more enterprise centric tools to get the job done.

To further the point, the next generation of enterprise software will be mobile-first and be tailored not just to the industry, but to the business and to the user, all without hefty and costly customization epidemic of large business software suites.  That is exactly what we have done with CRM, created on mobile for the mobile sales rep.

Enhatch brings together customer data and content that both informs and prepares salespeople to have more engaging conversations.  We do this all with one app on a phone that provides sales information, a library of digital content, and current insight into the prospect.  By giving sales reps the power of those tools in the device they are already using, sales people have the opportunity to engage in the type of conversation that gets executives excited because they are better prepared.

Article goes on to say any sales solution has to be native mobile first.  We could not agree more!

In enterprise sales cycles where buyers are doing more of their research upfront and expecting more value in their interactions with sales, it is critical to front-load the sales cycle with compelling content.  That not only includes marketing oriented channels, but equipping sales people with content that lets them tell a compelling story when engaged with buyers.  More and more, that compelling story involves content on a tablet and smartphone.

A lack of analytics with sales activity is a huge gap in the toolkit of the modern day marketer.  That just happens to be the core of the Enhatch platform, not only do we provide easy distribution of content through visually engaging mobile apps, we also track the views of content to provide a clear view to marketers as to the relative value of that content.  This gives marketers a powerful data set by which to determine marketing ROI and ultimately to cost of sale and value to the sales process.

The question of bundling and unbundling may very well continue.  At Enhatch though, we see the idea of mass customization, agile mobile development, and lean build, deploy, and test cycles will make the distinction a moot point.  It is pretty exciting creating the future and an entirely new paradigm of enterprise business software deployment.

That is something critically important to us.  Our analytics have helped our customers understand what parts of their mobile apps (and the content wherein) are being used versus those parts that are not.  This helps them to quickly iterate on the apps they created on the Enhatch platform, deploy those changes, and measure the feedback.  The results are more valuable and useful mobile apps deployed faster to users, creating a virtuous value loop that makes the entire organization more agile to business change.