Whether you’re away from the office for a few hours or several weeks, your success at generating new leads and winning new deals often hinges on how mobile-friendly your access is to the latest intelligence on your prospects. To get the latest intel on a client or perform an accurate opportunity assessment, do you have to wait until you can fire up your laptop or can you get that business intelligence (BI) just as easily from your smartphone or tablet?

Your mobile device has likely become your lifeline to sales success while on the road, but that success is limited if it can’t effectively access and act on key sales intelligence. That’s why a growing number of organizations recognize the value that mobile BI brings to sales success and business growth.

Unfortunately, determining the right mobile BI strategy and solution can be challenging amid a mass of conflicting vendor claims, analyst reports and social discussions. As a result, some organizations unintentionally end up adopting BI solutions that actually cripple their sales professionals’ ability to grow and manage their pipeline while in the field.

To ensure your organization helps instead of hinders your sales efforts, the following four aspects of mobile BI have a direct impact on your sales success and need to be evaluated by your corporate decision makers as they consider their mobile BI strategy.

• Mobile device considerations
• Mobile BI user experience
• Staying Connected
• Unified BI Data and Interface

Mobile BI User Experience

Many BI systems provide a great user experience when accessed from a desktop or laptop, but that experience often deteriorates on mobile devices. As a result, it becomes a significant challenge for you to fully leverage your sales intelligence when going mobile.

One of the main causes of this poor user experience is a lack of consistency between the mobile and desktop user interfaces, and even a lack of consistency between differing types of mobile devices.

For example, some BI solutions present a stunning interface that looks great on your mobile device, but it doesn’t allow you to perform even basic operations. Other BI offerings might provide you some mobile functionality beyond a pretty static picture of your dashboard, but what used to be a single click on your laptop to drill down or filter could take three or four taps on your tablet to achieve the same results. Or maybe it works just fine on your tablet, but not on your smartphone.

This gap between the desktop and mobile experiences might seem like only a minor inconvenience at first, but over time it can grow from a significant irritation into a major impediment to getting the intelligence you need to feed your pipeline. You need your mobile BI experience to be as similar as possible to what you experience on your laptop or desktop—the same look and feel, the same behavior and interactivity, the same login, and the same rich experience. You need a mobile BI solution that’s intuitive and easy to use without any ramp-up time or training.

Staying Connected

Whether you’re on the golf course, poolside or in a taxi between sales visits, you need to stay connected to what’s going on back at corporate and with your different clients. Your mobile BI solution needs to not only give you easy and intuitive access to the information you need wherever you happen to be, but it needs to alert you when a new client comes on board or if one is about to jump ship. Based on that alert it should let you easily access the KPIs that show you at a glance the context for that alert.

You shouldn’t have to be in the office to get a live feed of detailed, sale-critical information. Your BI solution should also let you collaborate with your colleagues even when you’re not logged in from your desktop or laptop. You need the ability to chat, as well as give and receive instant feedback on sales numbers and metrics. When you bring up charts and graphs on your tablet, they need to represent the same numbers that your peers are seeing back home.

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Get more details on how to optimize mobile BI for your sales organization when you read the full article on Domo’s Learn Center.