Digital Notes and The End of The Yellow Sticky Pad

By David Keane, Founder & CEO, BigtincanThe seemingly unending process of enabling sales and marketing teams to be more productive – whether in selling in front of a customer or simply in organizing their tasks – has had a strong digital focus during the past decade. From the introduction of a CRM-based system, tools to help configure prices and quotes, to new ways of getting access to corporate information through the intranet, sales and marketing people have been pushed every day to digitize the entire process of working with clients and prospects.A key part of this movement to digital systems has been note-taking. Digital notes offer huge benefits compared to handwritten paper notes: the ability to easily store, search, update, and share far exceeds that of paper notes. Further, companies with sales and marketing teams using digital notes realize huge benefits: the ability to access, share and review “tribal knowledge” contained in those notes to improve performance.As we sit here near the close of 2016, how many people do you still see using a yellow notepad for their business notes? Too many. It’s time to think about a new way of enabling sales people with notes that finally fits their real use case.Most of today’s note-taking software has been created for the daily tasks of those non-sales roles – with a major focus on traditional knowledge workers who are keeping notes in a different, often time-based, structured and sequential order. And while the Internet has been abuzz with note taking software from Evernote to OneNote – something isn’t working.Sales people often don’t have the luxury of working in that structured, sequential order. Typically, they are working in an unstructured approach where it’s not possible to simply review what happened in date order. They need notes that relate to the people, accounts, content and tasks that they are working on, and that are able to be delivered and accessed by others who may also be working on the same tasks.Next generation sales enablement tools have implemented notes in a transformative way, designed with the sales person in mind. With a focus on making notes incredibly easy to create, multimedia rich and contextually relevant, notes can be associated with content that a sales person is using, automatically synced to the CRM system and related to an account, opportunity, or person that is a target of their current sales program of work. Notes can even be taken using natural language voice commands right from a wearable like the Apple Watch, and entered automatically against content that the sales person is working with – empowering the sales person to get more done faster than ever before.This new approach to enables a sales and marketing teams to easily create and access their notes, share with colleagues, and keep track of what is happening with their clients and prospects, no matter which unstructured approach they take to their job.And with the power of the mobile revolution and the Software as a Service approach adopted by leading software providers, sales and marketing teams have the potential to be more productive than ever. If you’re not already leveraging digital notes in your organization, it’s time to give it a try.[author]About the Author: David Keane is the founder and CEO of Bigtincan, a leading mobile content enablement company. David combines his experience in enterprise and deep mobility knowledge to drive a company that is powering the mobile productivity revolution.[/author]