Message Strategies: Proposals [LO-3] Your boss, the national sales manager, insi
ID: 428595 • Letter: M
Question
Message Strategies: Proposals [LO-3] Your boss, the national sales manager, insists that all company sales reps continue to carry full-size laptop computers for making presentations to clients and to manage files and communications tasks. In addition to your laptops, you and you colleagues have to carry a bulky printed catalog and a variety product samples—up and down stairs, on and off airplanes, and in and out of your cars. You are desperate to lighten the load, and you think switching from laptops to tablets would help.
Write an informal proposal, suggesting that the company equip its traveling salespeople with tablets instead of laptops. Making up any information you need, address three questions you know your boss will have. First, can sales reps type at an adequate speed on tablets, without a conventional keyboard? Second, can sales reps make informal "table top" presentations on tablets, the way they can on their laptops? (Currently, sales reps can sit at a conference room table and give a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation to two or three people, without the need for a projector screen.) Third, do tablets have a sufficient selection of business software, from word processing to database management software?
Explanation / Answer
Proposal:
With this world becoming more and more techological friendly and moving forward rapidly with new inventions to help the people in carrying out their official and household work with ease, is it logical and sensible for our sales representatives to carry unnecessary burden in the form of catalogues, documents and heavy laptops and accessories? Do they really need them, when there are other better alternatives available today? The answer is no, if the organization is really serious in making progress alongwith effective use of technology. The company should look after the concerns associated with the sales representatives and problems faced by them for carrying out their work.
To properly utilize the existing manpower of sales representatives and increase the efficiency in their working, we should equip them with the tablets and straight away throw the bulky laptops and catalogues. Tablets are easy to handle and comfortable to carry as they are very lightweight and takes very less space. They can be carried in small handbags or pouches also. Those who are aware and know to work on the laptops can easily work on the tablets as well. The typing on the tablets is also not much hard as the typing platform of a tablet consists of a qwerty pad, the same which is available in mobiles, laptops and conventional keyboards. So, the concern that our sales representatives cannot adapt to the typing on tablets is really meaningless, instead they can do the same with good speed.
On laptops, our sales representatives have to first prepare presentations and have to explain and deliver them to the clients with the help of projectors. These presentations cannot be customized during explanations and they are not subject to be changed/modified during presentations. However, with the tablets, our sales representatives will not need the help of any projectors for giving or delivering their presentations. They can do so with the help of a small tablet table also. Further, tablet may allow them to make necessary last minute changes in their presentations or also during their delivering of presentations. Such is the advantage of the tablet over laptop.
Laptops use operating system for functioning but tablets use same android or ios operating system that are used by the mobile phones all over the world. In these mobile operating system platforms, there are numerous business softwares available ranging from word processing to database management. These softwares work effectively on tablets also. Our sales representatives need not carry heavy loads of documents with them that they are carrying now. We can prepare our catalogues in soft copy and save them in the tablets and with the use of business tools available on tablets, they can deliver the presentations to the clients in a better way than laptops.
While we look for customer satisfaction, we should be employee friendly also and should remove the problems faced by them in their daily routine and working. The first step in that will be stopping the use of laptops and starting the use of tablets. This will definitely lead to increase in the productivity and efficiency of our sales representatives.