Presentations on the Go

By Geoffrey James

Most sales professionals are used to firing up their laptops when making presentations from the road. But what if they could use their iPhones or BlackBerrys to drive home the message? According to a recent Forrester survey, an increasing number of tech-savvy consumers are making online purchases using their mobile phones rather than computers. The report notes that “while mobile commerce is nascent — just 14 percent of US Web buyers with a mobile, Internet-enabled device say that they have used it to make a purchase without speaking to anyone — there is reason to believe that it is poised for rapid adoption.”

This is big news for consumers, but the trend could have enormous implications for B2B commerce, as well. There’s an identifiable pattern in high tech, where new technology that’s adopted among consumers ends up moving quickly into B2B environments. The most recent and visible example of this has been social networking, which has become a standard sales and marketing tool.

As B2B buying and selling moves from the computer to smart phones, sales teams will need new tools for communicating both internally and externally. One tool that’s already positioned to play this kind of role is Brainshark Mobile.

Brainshark’s standard PC-based solution allows sales teams to create dynamic presentations that combine voice narration, PowerPoint slides, video, and other media. Brainshark also offers analytics capabilities that track where presentations were viewed, who viewed them, and on what kind of device it was displayed.

Brainshark Mobile is a native application that allows marketing information and sales presentations to be viewed on smart phones in a streamed video file. Unlike the company’s PC-based product, Brainshark Mobile translates the presentation into a format that can be viewed on any smart phone that supports streaming video. (Those platforms and devices currently include the BlackBerry, Palm Pre, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Android.)

As smart phones become even more critical for keeping both sellers and buyers connected, it seems clear that there will be a huge demand for up-to-date sales and marketing information on these platforms.

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