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iPads For All: One Sales Team’s Story

Posted By xyzmo On January 28, 2012 @ 8:35 am In Digital Signature Solutions | Comments Disabled

By Chris Murphy, InformationWeek [1]

Level 3 Communications just gave iPads to its 1,300 North American salespeople and sales engineers. IT didn’t take away their laptops, but it did load the iPads with software to do all the most important things in a salesperson’s life: offer price quotes, build and make presentations, send email, look up customer records, check products. ….

What’s next for Level 3′s iPad app? Taylor doesn’t pretend to know. “Enterprise IT is dead,” he likes to say–meaning IT needs to take the consumer tools people like to use, watch and learn how people work best, and then provide systems that fit. He’s convinced there’s something important and different in how efficiently people interact with the tablets’ interface, and that “we’ve only scratched the surface of using that.” …

Darrell Etherington in GigaOm [2]:

InformationWeek goes into much more detail about what the iPads meant for Level 3, but the advantages for salespeople on the ground can be boiled down to three main categories:

1. Instant on. The iPad’s ability to instantly wake from sleep and pick up right where a user left off exceed that of even the fastest SSD-equipped notebooks, and it only sips power in tiny amounts in order to provide that functionality. That, combined with its superior portability, makes it the perfect tool for doing “quick checks between meetings, at an airport, or in a taxi,” InformationWeek says. With a laptop, five minutes in a taxi might not seem like enough time to make powering up worth your while; with the iPad, that’s a nonissue.

2. Connectivity. The iPad (at least the 3G models) provides always-on cellular network access, as long as you are within coverage range. Some laptops can offer that, but the process is still often more complicated than just tapping the wake button and being ready to surf, email or chat. But it’s not just cellular radios that make the iPad great for sales; built-in GPS positioning means salespeople can get locally relevant information, like clients or potential clients in the immediate area, in only a few short steps via task-specific software.

3. On-device demo. A laptop is an ineffective replacement for a catalog, and presenting a slide show on one is awkward. Using an iPad as a presentation tool, on the other hand, is natural. The tablet is easily passed around, can be read like a magazine, and can also output to external displays with less hassle and fewer steps than a laptop.

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URL to article: http://blog.xyzmo.com/en/blog/2012/01/28/ipads-for-all-one-sales-teams-story/

URLs in this post:

[1] By Chris Murphy, InformationWeek: http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232500087

[2] Darrell Etherington in GigaOm: http://gigaom.com/apple/why-the-ipad-is-a-salespersons-best-friend/

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