Message Strategies: Proposals

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 communication tasks. In addition to your laptops, you and your 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 cars. You are desperate to lighten the load, and you think switching from laptops to tablets would help.

Your task: 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? (Using an accessory keyboard can be part of your solution.) Second, can sales reps make informal “tabletop” presentations on tablets, the way they can on their laptops? (Currently, sales reps can sit at a conference 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 softwarev?