OVERVIEW

Certainly a salesperson is one of the more obvious candidates for wireless. Salespeople are almost always on the move and every minute counts towards their potential earnings, so tools that can help them meet or beat quota are invaluable. In many cases, sales representatives don t wait for a company-wide initiative to implement wireless and mobile applications whatever works and helps them make more sales or save more time is worth the personal cost. Many companies may find that their sales reps are already equipped with handheld devices that they ve purchased themselves.

Very often, it s the sales force that spawns the idea within an organization about how they can do business more efficiently, get higher commissions with the least possible effort, says Steve McDonald, a consultant with Optimus Solutions. McDonald says sales force automation tends to be a high percentage of the mobile application work he does.

But a company-wide mobile sales-force application has numerous benefits beyond those of individual solutions. Companies can link sales teams up to important backend data, such as inventory and order status information. Valuable sales data can be collected more easily from a device than from an employee s manual records, which makes corporate forecasting and analysis richer.

According to the research firm Yankee Group, field-sales personnel is the largest segment of mobile workers among major U.S. companies. Yankee forecasts that U.S. sales of mobile field-sales applications will grow from $132 million in 2002 to $825 million in 2006.

Salespeople are out in the field, meeting with...