Road warrior CRM

A better approach is accessing the SaaS CRM system from mobile devices. Due to screen real estate and browser-cookie issues, accessing the CRM from a smartphone browser is ridiculous. Instead, the leading vendors have native smartphone UI implementations of their CRM clients that are attractive and intuitive. Watch out for the following, though:

• Support for devices is relatively narrow. BlackBerry and Apple devices probably have support from the most vendors.

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• Screen size matters more than for most smartphone apps.

• Memory constraints are a big issue. Typically you'll need at least 10MB of spare RAM, and much more than that for large CRM databases.

• If you have a lot of leads, contacts, appointments, and notes, pulling the data down can take a long time. In some device/CRM combinations, you can hold only 2000 records at a time, causing annoying delays if you need to access something that's not cached on the local device. This is an area where the iPhone seems to have a significant advantage, thanks to its available memory.

• Even though there's data cacheing on the smartphone, the CRM functionality depends upon network connectivity. If your field workers are in secure facilities or buildings with no 3G/4G access, the functionality available offline will be very limited.
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• Some of your system's customisations and extensions are not likely to be available in the smartphone UI. Of course, none of your external integrations will be available, and some of your documents may be difficult to get to (and probably impossible to read).

• Reports, dashboards, and fancy graphics may be available, but will be essentially unusable in the mobile version.

• If your mobile device doesn't have an unlimited data plan, you'll probably need to upgrade to that level.

• There may be more than one version of mobile apps for your CRM package. This is an area where you really get what you pay for: you'll almost inevitably need the most expensive version.
  

Will the iPad become the next mobile CRM client? It's a nice device with enough screen real estate and horsepower - but I don't see it as being versatile enough to be the sales rep or field tech support's only computer. That said, stranger things have happened in this industry.