Gift Rep Sandy

Posts Tagged ‘Laptop’

As you continue to grow your business, you may decide to use additional technological tools to work more efficiently and make it easier for your customers to contact you to place orders.

Establishing a toll-free phone number is a tremendous aid to your customers.  Wanting to eliminate all obstacles to taking sales should be a priority for your business.  Supplying customers with a cost efficient way to contact you, such as a toll-free phone number, meets this need.

Purchasing a laptop computer for your road trips is a great help in contacting vendors and/or customers during ‘down time’.  Technological advances over the last years make it possible to have internet access in nearly every area in the U.S. either via dial-up connections or wireless programs.  Like with your toll-free phone number, email is another way to aid your customers in contacting you.  Laptop computers can also be used to store customer and vendor contact information, sales or bookkeeping information, sales flyers or product pictures and numerous other documents to aid your sales efforts.

Fax machine or virtual fax is an important tool for customers that prefer to fax orders to you.  If you start with a standard fax machine, hook it to a dedicated fax line – a phone line that will always be open for faxes and will not be used for frequent phone lines.  Or rather than having the added expense of a fax machine or dedicated fax line, contract with a virtual fax service and have your faxes sent to your laptop. Virtual fax systems are quicker, easier, and more efficient than standard machines, and you can access the faxes while on the road.

Old fashioned catalogs and flyer are quickly being replaced by business website. Setting up a website can be time-consuming at first, but the rewards are worth much more that the time to develop a website.

A scanner with a photocopy function is very useful for preparing sales materials.  Often a vendor has photos of their products but no flyers.  With a scanner, you can scan their pictures, format them into your own flyer and photocopy them with your own machine.

If you hadn’t noticed, the days are starting to get shorter, the nights are cooler, the kids are heading back to school … change is in the air!  Late summer is the time of year that my sale rep business starts transitioning from tourist season to holiday season.  Even though we have some of the hottest days of the year in August, I need to start thinking about Christmas, holiday products to offer my customers, and new products from my list of vendors (lines I represent)

With all these changes, comes new pages and updates to my website:  www.idahogiftswholesale.com.  I will be spend large chunks of time over the next weeks to gathering information, taking pictures, and offering new products to my retail buyers for October/November buying.

On the home front:  I need to take my laptop back to my friends at Cactus Computers in Moscow.  The crazy machine is running slow and crashing programs even after I doubled the RAM capacity a few weeks ago.  We bought a Toshiba laptop in March of last year — a change from our usual Dell purchases – because we were told that Toshiba made the best laptops.  Well, you could not prove that by my experiences with this one!!  Hopefully, my friends can fix the problem and I can go about my business.

We are still spending everyday at the downtown office to access the internet.  It looks like we will not be able to replace our high-speed internet at home.  Malcolm has set up a dial-up service, but I have not yet tried it.  I suppose I will want to go to sleep waiting for it to load up, but at least we will have service at home again.

So enjoy these last days of summer.  I get back with an update on the fall changes as they unfold.