It wasn't that long ago that all the big enterprise application vendors were crowing about their desire to mobilize their packaged software applications. "I think back four or five years, and there was a lot of excitement," recalls Fletcher. The vendors included Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Microsoft and SAP. However, "I don't think the enterprise application vendors did a very god job at providing mobile clients as a core part of their lines," Fletcher notes. The reasons included a steep learning curve (synchronizing back-end data with mobile devices, and screen-size issues); a reliance on browser-based interfaces (which don't work well for mobile devices when users can't maintain live browser connections); and a reluctance on the part of many of those vendors to actually invest in the space, even though there was tons of talk, according to Fletcher. "The mobility groups were, internally, always the orphan child" at the vendor companies, Fletcher says.

At Dow Corning, Reeves recalls the company's frustrating starts and stops with its CRM efforts over the years. In the 1990s, they used Siebel until it became too complicated; then they relied on Microsoft Outlook to capture generic customer data, until that showed its limited scalability. In 2002, the company went back to a Siebel system but that showed usability problems and language limitations (Dow Corning has more than 25,000 customers worldwide). In 2004, they upgraded Siebel, which fixed the language problems but offered little reporting and analytics capabilities that Dow Corning wanted. Finally, in 2006, they transitioned to the aforementioned SAP suite, which offered BI reporting, portal access to a number of sales applications, and the ability to push and receive data from mobile devices.

"I don't think [Dow Corning's] challenges are unusual," says AMR's Fletcher, meaning, many companies have struggled to find the right fit for their CRM needs.

While Dow Corning had been smoothing out the back-office infrastructure, however, Reeves and his team also had to ensure that salespeople were being listened to and would want to use the mobile devices and applications. His team approached that by "looking at a day in the life of a salesperson," he says. "Thinking through their information and task needs, what were their priorities, what were their common tasks, what were the process pain points."

One thing became immediately clear to Reeves: When equipping mobile teams (such as the sales force), less is always more. He says that he has preached a "low input, high output" strategy that has guided the entire mobile deployment. Adding dozens and dozens of input fields to salespeople's BlackBerry screens, which forces them to do a ton of extra work, is a recipe for disaster. "We've tried to weed out and simplify the processes: What are we going to need to know and how do we need that information," he says. "There's always a logical explanation for why a field is there. But then the question is: Do we really need it? We're constantly trying to move toward a simpler set of questions."