OrderPad Software

Laptops are great when you’re sitting in an office, coffee shop, or hotel room, but aren’t practical when your sales call requires you to be on your feet and able to walk around easily. What makes the Tablet PC ideal for field salespeople is that it offers all of the advantages of a laptop (they run Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP as well as standard software like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, etc.) and even look like a small laptop until you flip the screen around to transform it into a device that can be carried at your side like you would a clipboard or paper notebook.

OrderPad was inspired by the Tablet PC platform and was designed to take full advantage of its unique capabilities.Today, thousands of salespeople use OrderPad all day without ever touching a keyboard to enter orders, view rich customer data, access product information, record their visit histories, and manage their to do lists. But, there are also people in sales management, marketing, customer service, and other business functions that sit at a desk all day and use a desktop PC or standard notebook computer - and OrderPad works great on those too.

“We built a great system, but the salespeople refuse to use it.” That is an actual quote from a CIO who sat on a panel about sales force software at an industry event in 2008. I haven’t seen the system that they built, but it certainly failed because either the benefit to the salespeople was too low or the pain in using the system was too high. These aren’t absolutes, they are really a continuum which we refer to as the Pleasure and Pain continuum. It’s not rocket science; you simply need to make sure that the benefits to the users outweigh the friction the system generates for them, and if not, then don’t bother moving forward with the system because it will be a waste of money, time, and goodwill. The key to ensuring that the system provides enough benefits to the sales force is to get their skin in the game early on in the process.