As a general rule, Tablet PC’s have much larger screens than PDA’s which translates into more pixels being displayed. This allows us to present more information on the screen at one time which reduces the need for “Next” and “Previous”. It also allows us to use a portion of the screen for far easier navigation than a PDA would allow, which meant that the need for “Next” and “Previous” could be eliminated.

The rest of the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Do your customers know how much they need to order?”
Him: “Sometimes.”
Me: “So, sometimes they ask you for advice? They might ask you how much they ordered of a similar product last month or last quarter, is that right?”
Him: “Yup.”
Me: “Are you able to answer that question for them quickly?”
Him: “Yeah, real quickly. I tell them ‘Hell if I know.’”

I waited for him to laugh and tell me he was joking, but unfortunately (for him and the company that employed him), he wasn’t. I then asked what it would take to get that information and he told me he could run some reports in the office and perform some basic arithmetic, but he really didn’t have time to do all that and make all the customer calls he was supposed to make.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking – big deal, you spoke to a really bad sales rep. Perhaps. Let’s assume that is the case. That isn’t the point. Let’s assume a good sales rep would take the time to do the homework. Now what you’ve done is take a good sales rep out of the field to run analysis rather than meet with their customers – which reduces the time where they can really add value to their customers. You see where I’m going with this? For a sales rep, the value isn’t in running the analysis on the data; it’s in explaining the analysis to your customers. After all, that’s where the data (at the customer level) is truly actionable.

I did speak with other reps at the company and the fact is, the company provided their sales reps with some tools, but in many cases they were the wrong ones (for example the reports he spoke of where he would still need to do some work to give the customer the answer). What are the right tools you ask? The answer is simple, they are the ones that will make your sales reps more effective and more efficient. To borrow a theme from Stephen Covey, the tools should make them more effective when dealing with people and more efficient when dealing with paperwork. Of course, it could be a really cool tool like OrderPad, but in this case maybe a better report from their existing systems would have done the trick.

Oh, and back to the “Hell if I know” – he’d better hope his competitors don’t know either.

“The mistake most blogs and books make: they are about the writer, not the reader.”

A few weeks earlier, Jason Fried of 37 Signals said:

“Most copywriting on the web sucks because it’s written for the writer, not for the reader. Write for the reader. That is all.”

Both observations were simple, obvious, and profound – and have a clear parallel to sales. The salesperson that empathizes with the customer and the customer’s needs (along with their goals, hopes, and desires) will almost always win (especially in the long term).

For those of you not familiar with Electric Pulp, they are a small web development firm from South Dakota, brought to recent fame by Guy Kawasaki and his infamous ARSE test (I’m happy to report that I scored fairly low). Guy also hired them to build Truemors, the worst website ever, and said this about them, “Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.” We agree wholeheartedly.

We look forward to the conversation…check back soon.