A tablet is an amazing technology tool for salespeople, provided you know how to use it properly. So here are practical tips that will teach you how to use your tablet effectively and deliver more successful results from customer meetings.

Many companies today provide tablets to their sales staff. Instead of your salesperson lugging around bulky catalogs and an outdated laptop, the tablet puts a marketing sales presentation right in their hands that vividly demonstrates the product, along with innovative tools that enable closing more deals in less time and with less effort.

The tablet can be a remarkable work tool, provided you know how to use all the functions it offers correctly.
To that end, we have gathered in this article important and very easy-to-implement tips that will help your salespeople create a winning customer experience with the tablet!


How to Hold the Tablet Correctly?

We were created with two hands so we can use the tablet properly. This is especially useful when you are using the tablet while standing or walking with a customer. In such a situation, use one hand to hold the tablet firmly and stably, and use your other hand to navigate and operate the presentation and other applications on the touch screen.

Remember – if your right hand is your dominant hand, hold the tablet in your left hand and navigate with your right hand, and vice versa if you are left-handed. The advantage of the tablet is that it is lightweight, so there is no need to exert excess force to hold it, because if you strain too much you may eventually suffer from muscle fatigue and even cramped hand muscles, which is an undesirable situation.

Adjustable Tablet Stand for Long Meetings 

An accessory you will find extremely useful during your work as salespeople is a tablet stand. It will come to your aid during meetings where you are sitting with a customer, whether in an office, a conference room, a coffee shop, or even at the customer’s home. When you are sitting at a table, there is no reason to hold the tablet in your hand – in this case, use a dedicated tablet stand.

These stands are made of aluminum, lightweight, hold the tablet securely, and allow viewing angle adjustment up to 180 degrees. You will be able to set the tablet height in the clearest and most efficient manner, and most importantly – it frees up both your hands for other things. There is no need to carry the stand with you all the time; you can leave it in the car and, only when needed, take it with you to a meeting and use it.

Adjusting Screen Brightness and Color Balance

Tablet screen brightness – set your tablet’s screen brightness to the desired level. Today there are advanced tablets that come with an automatic brightness function that adapts the screen brightness to ambient lighting. Still, it is worth making sure the brightness is comfortable for you.

Optimal brightness is not too dark, so you won’t have to strain your eyes in a dim setting, and not too bright, which creates light reflections and glare. If you are meeting a customer in high external lighting conditions such as sunlight, it is worth temporarily setting the screen brightness higher so that you and the customer can enjoy a vivid viewing experience even under direct sunlight.

How to Clean Your Tablet Screen?

Keep your tablet clean, and especially the screen. Tablet screens, as you know, are operated by touch with fingertips, and therefore very quickly start to show signs of “smudging” and fingerprints. As these accumulate, they make it harder to see the presentation and other elements on the screen. Between us, what kind of message does it send to your customer when the tablet is dirty and neglected?

Therefore, it is important that several times a day you make a point of cleaning the screen, and especially before a meeting. It is a good idea to always have a useful screen-cleaning kit with you, which usually includes a special cloth, cleaning solution, and a dust brush. It takes exactly one minute and the difference is significant. By the way, it not only looks clean and nice, but cleaning also disinfects the tablet from all kinds of microbiological contaminants you would not want reaching your fingertips.

Automatic Screen Rotation – Don’t Let It Spin You Around!

Automatic screen rotation. You are probably familiar with this function from your mobile phone, and it is very useful on the tablet as well, especially for salespeople. Sometimes it can be a great feature that works well, but sometimes it can be really annoying if it rotates the screen when you don’t want it to.

In most cases, when you reach customer-facing sales situations, you want the screen to always stay in a uniform display mode and not start “dancing” every time you move the tablet. Our advice – disable automatic screen rotation in advance, and that way you will be able to deliver a complete and continuous presentation to the customer without any unnecessary rotations, complications, or awkward moments.

An Organized, Minimalist Desktop

Let’s talk for a moment about the desktop displayed on your tablet’s screen. It’s true that you wouldn’t want to work in an office at a cluttered, disorganized desk where you can’t find anything, right? The same rule applies to your tablet’s screen – keep it as minimalist as possible. On your desktop you should have the sales presentation, a meeting calendar, and additional dedicated folders for further materials. Keep everything in a dedicated folder – presentations separately, images separately, videos separately. If you have other useful applications such as data analysis, allocate another folder for them on the desktop. With this working method, you will be able to find anything easily and quickly.

Touch Gestures – It’s in Your Hands

As if using a touch screen wasn’t enough, what’s the deal with the gestures? Tablets, similar to smartphones, enable simple hand gestures – such as flipping back and forth in a presentation, zooming in and out, displaying images in galleries, moving 3D product models, switching between recent applications, returning to your home screen, and more.

It’s easy to get lost among all these gestures if you are not familiar with them. But it is even easier to invest a few minutes in learning them thoroughly, practicing them in your free time, and arriving prepared at the customer meeting. These gestures not only make the meeting time more efficient and improve the quality of the presentation, but they also make a great impression on the customer and show them that you are professional, skilled, and swim like a fish in water when it comes to technology.

Accessibility Features Worth Trying 

It is worth getting to know the features that will allow you to further upgrade the way you present and sell to the customer. For example, text size. Sometimes, what can you do, it’s a bit hard to read the small text on the screen. In the middle of a meeting, a customer suddenly complains that they can’t read what’s written on the tablet screen, the product description, or worse – the price. What do you do to prevent this embarrassing situation? Go into the display settings and make sure in advance that the text is displayed large and clear enough.

Another “advanced” feature is voice commands – speaking instead of typing. Most of you know this from voice search on Google or when you talk to Siri. On the tablet too, salespeople can streamline their field work and replace long, tedious typing with voice commands. Search for products and items, search for and upload important documents, locate customers, manage the meeting calendar, and more – all with your pleasant voice.

Preserve Battery Life

What is more frustrating than the battery running out in the middle of a workday or during an important meeting? This situation is easy to prevent in several effective ways. The first – close unnecessary applications running in the background that “eat up” your battery. Web browsers, social networks, videos you forgot to turn off, Google Maps, Messenger.

Animated backgrounds may be cool but they consume a lot of resources, so switch to a standard wallpaper. We even recommend turning off Bluetooth when not in use; it is a known battery hog. You can also disable push notifications you don’t really need – they both clutter your mind and drain your tablet’s battery.

In parallel, remember to charge the tablet at every possible opportunity – at the beginning and end of the day, and also in the car when you are on the way to another customer meeting. And don’t forget to always carry a fully charged portable battery in your bag; it can save you in a situation where the tablet’s battery is about to run out. 

Do Not Disturb!

The applications on the tablet will continue to display notifications throughout the day, whether about upcoming meeting times, messages arriving via email, and all sorts of other things. This can be annoying and unnecessary when you are in the middle of a meeting.

Therefore, you should consider disabling notifications before entering a customer meeting. Some tablets have a “Do Not Disturb” mode (unlike airplane mode – in this mode the tablet is still connected to the internet, you just don’t receive notifications). You can even configure which applications continue to deliver notifications in this mode and which do not. This way, you will have quiet to focus on what you do best – selling.

Don’t Let It Shut Off Mid-Meeting

It happens more than once that the tablet’s screen goes dark, switches to “sleep” or “screen saver” mode, and locks after a short time of inactivity. When does this become a problem? When you are in a meeting with a customer and haven’t touched the screen for 30 seconds while explaining something to them, and without you asking, the screen turns black and you have to enter a passcode to get back into the presentation. It’s annoying to wake it up and unlock it every time.