If you’re chained to your desk 24 hours a day then you probably don’t need everything we’re about to detail – although it could be argued that getting you out of the office and meeting a few new customers could be a better use of your time.
However, if you or your sales people are constantly on the move then the following products and services will be very useful to you, and your business.
The moment you leave the office you become disconnected from your organisation. A mobile phone is pretty much a must-have on any business list, but getting the wrong network, the wrong sort of phone and not knowing how to get the most from the phone effectively negates any usefulness. There are a few tick-boxes in choosing a mobile you should look for: coverage, voicemail, conference calling, group texts and call waiting. Coverage should be 100% or as close as you can get. Voicemail should be always on, even when your phone is disconnected or in a dead-area, should be personalised and identify you, and where appropriate should give advice about contacting other people in your organisation. Many companies don’t switch calls to voicemail when a phone is off or unobtainable: this is inexcusable.
Conference calling is a boon to anyone out on the road. It takes seconds to do, you don’t have to book a call like you did with landline conference calls, you can include landlines as well as mobiles and it could save you a lot of money in the long run. Group texting is the same; a text can be sent quickly and can be useful if you just want to make a point. If you’re waiting for an important call, then call waiting allows you to carry on using the phone, safe in the knowledge that you’ll be interrupted should another call come through. Lastly, make sure your phones are up to date. Old phones don’t support all the new features like group conferencing, Bluetooth, email and so on, so get them updated every year.
THE PHONE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE PDA
If you are going to get a new phone then don’t just think of the phone as a thing you make calls from. A combined PDA and phone – aka a smartphone – can do some of the core practical things a laptop does at a price and in a size and shape that’s much more pocket-friendly. Your calls, calendar, contacts, email and basic web-browsing can all be done on one small handheld unit. The smartphone systems are fantastic to use if you specify them correctly. However get them wrong and they’re next to useless.
Rule one: Get a built-in keyboard. Without a keyboard the system turns into a glorified address book, while external keypads are okay but tricky. Rule two: Get a system that synchronises with Outlook, particularly your address book and calendar. Synchronising with your email is great to have but most systems won’t have enough memory for all of your attachments (such as Microsoft Word files, Powerpoint slides, Excel spreadsheets and so on), so if you want to be able to do all of that, get a true PDA or a laptop. Rule three: Buy enough memory. 64Mb should be just about enough for an intelligent user.
Of the systems we’ve looked at, the brick-like Nokia 9210i is still the best. It is straightforward to operate and has a usable keyboard. Unfortunately it’s a little bulky if you intend on using it throughout the day. An alternative is the PalmOne Treo 600, which is smaller pocket-sized format, although it does have a very small keypad.
If you’re looking for ease of use and a good size then the BlackBerry handheld allows you to synchronise with your email, calendar and your address book, plus it’s a phone. The system is very easy to use and the simple interface BlackBerry has developed is perfect for 90% of users, but may disappoint technologically-minded gadget gurus. Its small keyboard may look impossible to use but it’s actually quite easy, unless you have large fingers. The GPRS version of the BlackBerry system synchronises with your email in the background at regular intervals, works with most email systems, and more importantly it doesn’t need a ‘techie’ to set it up. The only downside we found when synchronising via web mail was a tendency for the BlackBerry to mark emails as ‘read’ on Outlook, even when you hadn’t read them.
The next step up is a true PDA (personal digital assistant). These are ideal if you want to synchronise the entire contents of your email inbox for the last two weeks, with the attachments included. However they’re really just very expensive address books with larger screens than the smartphones. To get the maximum benefit out of a PDA you have to use them in conjunction with your phone, so you can do things like email and browse the web. And here lies the problem. There are so many different types of phone and so many different PDAs, you’ll need someone with extensive technical knowl- edge to get the two working together. Which is why all-in-one smartphones have the edge: they work straight from the box.
When you do manage to get them working, the next advantage of a PDA is that they allow you to not only view the attachments you receive, but also to edit them, especially if it’s running Pocket PC. However, most Windows PDAs don’t have keyboards, and those that run Pocket PC tend to crash or hang frequently. Most also don’t have back-up batteries, so when your battery dies you lose all of your data. There are also lots of problems with synchronisation on the Pocket PC; even though the synchronisation software ActiveSync is four years old, on version 3.7 it still fails to work correctly or behave logically. Incidentally, the Psion 5MX, which I have been using for seven years and have written over 250,000 words on, has crashed only twice and has never lost a single file due to a dead main battery. It also reads and edits Excel and Word files, sends emails and browses the web, plus it’s still got the best keyboard in the business. Generally the rule should be to ignore PDAs unless you know a ‘techie’ with exactly the same make and model of PDA and phone, and who uses the same phone network.
LAPTOPS
At best PDAs are a cut-down halfway-house, at worst they’re an address book with a middling MP3 player built-in. Go and buy your sales force and yourself iPods and a decent smartphone; it’s cheaper, better and you’ll all be happier. Better still, buy them a laptop. A high-end PDA will cost you £350-£500, a laptop with 20 times the memory, power and capacity, and a built-in wireless can be bought for £600. True it probably won’t look so cool and it won’t have as good a battery life, but do you want to do some real work while you’re out on the road? Or do you want to do everything with one hand tied behind your back? If you’re specifying early enough in your business, then it’s not really an extra cost as most laptops will replace desktops as long as you also buy a separate monitor and mouse for work. In addition, it’s much more cost effective and easier to lease computers, so perhaps you should be dumping your PCs and replacing them with leased laptops anyway.
Just as PCs have become commodities, laptops are starting to go the same way. There’s little to distinguish between them in terms of speed, power and screens – and it really is foolish to buy on processor-speed and screen quality, as deep down they’re all the same. What you really need above all is battery life. A good laptop should give you a battery life measured in hours rather than minutes, a new Intel Pentium M Centrino system should give you a battery life of three to five hours. Ideally it should take you there and back to your furthest client. But if it doesn’t there’s always the ability to swap batteries, so that you can do the whole trip without having to plug-in. If you use your laptop day-in and day-out, then good build-quality and a no quibbles on-site repair guarantee – where ‘on-site’ includes your clients’ offices, not just yours – is your next port of call. The other criteria you should look at is weight – the lighter it is, the more likely you are to take it with you. Big screens are great for watching DVDs, but is that really what you’re trying to encourage? If you want to do a slide presentation then get a projector, your customer is going to take more notice of a big projected presentation than a smaller presentation on a laptop screen.
Next you’ll need to get your laptop connected to the internet so you can send and receive emails. If your laptop has wireless built into it, you can then connect via wireless access points (hotspots), meaning you can access your company network without the need to plug-in. It’s great technology when it works, but you are limited to the areas where there are wireless access points, and that means you have to be within 20-200 metres of a hotspot depending on whether you’re indoors or outdoors. A much better bet, therefore, is to use a datacard such as the Vodafone GPRS Mobile Connect, which connects you to the internet via the mobile phone network. The Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G card is currently the best datacard solution on the market. It allows you to access the internet at broadband speeds of 340Kbps or via GPRS at 64Kbps, and the software is excellent. 3G, however, is currently quite expensive and a good GPRS service with an unlimited download is a very acceptable alternative. The Vodafone cards are also ideal for situations where you are literally on the move. My current train-commute has four tunnels spread evenly through the 70 minute journey, and the card reconnects automatically at the end of a tunnel or any area where it’s lost the signal, plus it would constantly scan for a 3G signal (you’re limited to large urban areas for 3G) and move to the faster rates when they become available.
SOFTWARE
Lastly you want some software that helps you out while you’re on the move. CRM (customer relationship management) software is something we’ll be looking at in detail in a future issue of Growing Business, but here’s a quick guide. CRM software has gone through various different guises. It was at one point called contact management software but over the last 10 years it’s mutated so that as well as just handling names and contact dates, it’s now capable of being a little more proactive. Truspars, a spa pool company, uses its CRM software to handle taking customer details at trade shows. The Ideal Home Exhibition is on for a month and during that period the company would collect all the details of anyone who had approached them at the show. Then at the end of the show they would send out brochures to all the potential customers. But by using a web-based CRM they now log the details on handheld devices in front of the customer and these are then forwarded to the remaining sales staff back at base, who then mail out the brochure. So the next morning, the customer receives a brochure while the information is still fresh in their mind, and a day later they get a phone-call prompted by the CRM system to follow up on the brochure.
The CRM system will also be able to tell the salesperson what details were taken at the show and they’ll have a record of the particular products the customer was interested in. So the company no longer has to ask the same irritating questions over and over again, and sales aren’t lost. CRM systems don’t have to be expensive, either. The system Truspars uses is Accpacc CRM which costs £39 per head per month.
Another downside to being on the road is not having access to the most up-to-date documentation, so losing track of the status of projects. The answer is to use web-based collaboration software that allows you and your staff to share files, set up discussion groups and even to open certain parts of the groups to external clients so that they can see the project status. One piece of software that does this is OfficeMaster, which works out at just £10 per head per month.
Finally, being on the road means that there’s a greater chance of you losing or damaging your precious data. Using web-based software like OfficeMaster and AccPac means none of this data will be lost or compromised so you can pick up where you left off, as long as you can get access to the internet. But there will always be a few files that you were working on that will be lost.
The simple answer is to never store anything locally and instead to store everything on the web, but it’s not always possible to get a connection and you don’t want to stop working just because you’re in a tunnel. The next best answer is to store everything on a USB memory key. This takes seconds to do and it means you always have a memory-backup that’s so small you can take it with you everywhere.
