By Ray Sheehan
Every salesperson faces the same challenge on each sales call. "How can I set myself and my company apart from the other guy?" The shear volume of data we may need forces us to pack our vehicles with tons of paper, such as binders and brochures. I have eighteen binders of technical data to carry. That's great to have in the car, but not many prospects let you move your office into theirs for a twenty-minute presentation.
The company also wants lots of input from us, called "sales reports." I'm not sure anybody reads them (let's just say nobody seemed to notice when I bought a language translator program and sent in some reports in Russian), but they sure get upset if they aren't sent in!
Practicality demands that we compromise between what we need and what we can physically carry.
What I've been trying to do in the technical age is find a solution that both makes it easy to make attention-grabbing presentations with plenty of technical information available for prospect and is also a method of entering important data that the company and I will need.
"Some prospects thought I was there to repair the coke machine."
I wanted to enhance my sales presentations, so my first attempt at mobile electronic media was a combo TV/VCR and videos, at a cost of about $199. Trying to lug a brochure "buffalo bag," samples, briefcase, and the paraphernalia for the TV/VCR presentation into a sales call, I had to use a hand truck to get it all in the door, as you can see in Figure A.
FIGURE A
On my way into a sales call... before. (click for larger image)
Some prospects thought I was there to repair the coke machine.
Stepping into the computer age, I purchased a Packard-Bell desktop, which immediately disqualified me as a hardware purchase consultant for the rest of my life. I shelled out $2,300 for the package with printer, then another $399 for MS Office. At least I had a 2x CD player and 14-inch monitor!
Six months later, I could type and print a respectable letter. Twice I learned the real meaning of the word "crash."
Two years later, the company gave us brand new Compaq 486 computers, with a commanding 8 MB of RAM. Our IT guy, "Minimal" Art, said you only need 8 MB of RAM to run Windows 3.11. He was right, but only until I put MS Office on my laptop for another $399. The laptop didn't have a CD player, so I bought a serial port CD player for $299. My Irish family has alcoholism problems, but my addictive behavior revealed itself as tech purchases! I then got to add a $256, 8 MB memory upgrade after MS Office locked up the system. Some "free" laptop.
