Since 1998 Tilbury provides the best softwares and solutions for mobile sales reps and our clients often ask us our opinion on the hardware they should equip their teams with. This issue has even become more important since smartphones and tablets became an alternative or a complement to the laptop.
We have a complete museum of the mobile sales rep’s equipment at Tilbury: 20 years of laptops, hardened or not, PDAs, phones, tablets, smartphones… The tablets-laptops want us to believe that at last the ultimate all-in-one device for the sales rep is at hand. Well, maybe, maybe not.
In 2019, 3 situations can be found: Smartphone alone (rather a phablet, a big screen smartphone halfway to a tablet); smartphone + laptop ; smartphone + tablet + laptop. The laptop must be seen as a content creation tool: if your sales rep prepares its sales pitches from models or templates, he’ll need a keyboard and mouse; try doing Powerpoint in touchscreen mode, the loss of productivity is striking. If the sales rep does not prepare his one specific content on the other hand, the device is rather more a presentation and input tool, and there a phablet can be enough, if one accepts to let one’s client use the tool directly. This is indeed the most frequent case. But be sure that your client in this case cannot access content he should not see! A real tablet with a wider screen allows the sales rep to keep the lead on his presentation if he so wishes.
All these scenarios suppose that your sales teams are trained to using their devices and software in real-life sales situations, a basic yet often forgotten training for them. And last but not least, having several OS brings several devices that need to get their own dedicated training with a risk on costs and loss of efficiency if not done. In all cases, Tilbury’s tools work seemlessly on all 3 major mobile OS, Windows, iOS and Android.
