Selling wireless to salespeople

I'm just back from Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art where I was one of the presenters at an event called "Unwired Success." Hosted by Salesforce.com, Telstra & Intel, the breakfast seminar was designed to help sales & marketing execs understand how to take advantage of wireless.

Interestingly enough (err, actually, I was stunned), it seems that while wireless technology and hotspot use is skyrocketing in the Asia/Pacific region, plenty of sales types are not familiar with many wireless "basics" I thought were assumed knowledge. For example, one guy asked me what hotspots were and what "Wi-Fi" meant. Wow.

Audience questions during the panel were predominantly about security and integration (both issues are largely resolved, we assured them), and others I spoke to were concerned about wireless costs. For example, $0.75 per MMS message is unsustainable for most companies.

Anyway, the gist of my talk (here's the PPT that contains local market stats etc. It's 3837KB. Download file) was that I believe we're at a point in time where we have the wireless networks, devices and applications to make the wireless computing experience closely mirror the office computing experience. There are of course plenty of issues to resolve, like Wi-Fi roaming & the cost of wirelessly enabling the sales force. But the industry is getting there - WiMax is the latest innovation buzzword, for example.

So at the end fo the morning, we had around 160 to 170 people sitting down for the event (which IDG helped market). I'd call that a success.