Mobile sales tools can add value across any industry with a traditional sales structure but manufacturing companies often stand to gain the most.
Companies that adopt mobile sales tools often gain a competitive edge: stronger alignment between sales and marketing, better visibility into sales challenges—and the ability to address them—and greater confidence that their teams are prepared to handle high-stakes, in-person sales conversations with confidence and agility.
Many companies assume their mobile sales teams are well-prepared for field sales simply because they use a cloud-based sales platform. But this often doesn’t align with how manufacturers actually meet buyers or close deals on the ground. ‘Anytime, anywhere access’ to sales collateral isn’t enough when information is scattered across multiple channels, shared inconsistently, and lacks a single, centralized source of truth.
A classic example we’ve seen at Crescendo is a manufacturer relying solely on their CRM as a mobile sales tool, focusing only on data entry before and after a sales interaction. The critical ‘in-between’—the face-to-face meeting experience—is often overlooked. As a result, sales reps are left scrambling to prepare: digging through documentation, searching for prospect details in the CRM, and assembling presentations in yet another app.
Field sales in manufacturing are still largely ad hoc—relying on long email threads, forwarded PDFs, or last-minute requests to marketing teams for materials just before a meeting. When sales collateral is shared on the fly across hundreds of employees, every exchange risks miscommunication and missed opportunities to impress buyers. Worse, there’s often little visibility into which materials are actually effective—and why.
This issue is quantifiable too. Field sales reps only spend about 38% of their time selling according to recent studies. Much of their time is taken up by sales administrative burdens, creating their own presentations, or simply managing sales content every time they have a meeting.
Without a mobile sales tool that streamlines marketing collateral, sales processes and cloud storage, sales teams simply sell far less than their more agile competitors.
Realizing Mobility Sales Goals for Manufacturers
Mobile sales tools is becoming less of an add-on and more of an essential function of field sales. This is especially relevant for the manufacturing industry, which still largely relies tradeshows and traditional face-to-face sales to secure leads. Globalization and cost-of-production are increasingly competitive, and a mobile sales tool provides a quick way for these manufacturers to lower cost of ownership.
Crescendo works with many leading manufacturing brands and has found how mobile sales tools meets today’s requirements of manufacturing companies:
1. Improved Buying Experiences
Featuring mobile sales tools in face-to-face sales and trade show experiences lets manufacturers exhibit their industry-leading reputations. Synced last-minute changes to supply, product pricing, sales collateral, and other crucial information is delivered seamlessly. Every interaction is lead nurturing, and personalized to each customer’s buying journey.
2. Deal-Winning Insights
Mobile sales tools opens greater visibility into which content is working and what needs to be improved. Manufacturers use the analytics capabilities that a mobile sales tool provides to make data-driven marketing decisions down the line.
3. Fostering Better Sales Reps
Field sales reps of varying competencies and experiences can elevate their effectiveness and approach. For example, reps who spend too much time on putting together a presentation can simply collate one in Crescendo with the same curated content, articles, videos, trainings, etc. as their peers. Crescendo is designed to be simple to rollout and easy to use, so that the sales people enjoy using it and IT help is not required for the rollout.
4. Field Document Reliability
In the field or on the trade floor, it can be difficult to find a document when they are kept in multiple repositories (Sharepoint, Google Drive, Email, or even a company network drive). Crescendo connects directly to anywhere documents currently reside, so there is no additional repository or document migration required. It becomes a single source-of-truth to securely present leaflets, brochures, catalogues, training videos, etc. Even when there is no internet connection, a client facing team will still have access to their documents on their mobile devices.
5. Company-Wide Branding
Sales teams shouldn’t need a brand new app just to change a company logo or branding environment. Crescendo is easily branded and visually customizable, so it looks like your company, with an elegant, custom presentation resource.
Going Beyond Mobile Sales Into Digital Sales Culture
As time goes on, a mobile sales tool is not strictly limited to presenting the most current and accurate sales content from one place.
In the long-term, it’s an asset that optimizes the work of sales teams to provide greater efficiency in training and efficacy down the line. Marketers are empowered with data to optimize spend on specific pieces of content creation based on what sells best.
A strong mobile sales tool promises to lay the foundations from growing leads met in the field, with greater potential to move prospects to product trial, improve lead nurturing, and personalize each customer’s buying journey.
Mobile Sales Tool Crescendo refers to enterprise mobile sales technology that helps teams prepare deals, present content and close deals at the speed of digital—all from a single app. It equips sales teams with the confidence that they always have the right materials, at the right time, from anywhere in their company’s cloud storage; so they can focus on delivering impressive buying experiences with prospects.
