A study by the Berman Institute of Selling found the average salesperson spends 17 hours a week in their car.
Last Tech Bit, I suggested using Podcasts to take advantage of that time for product training or other news about your company.
There’s another way to use audio to make your sales force more productive.
Most salespeople are buried in paperwork, especially if they are multiple line sales (e.g. distributor or manufacturers’ representative). There are memos to be read, manuals, emails—a huge amount of reading that keep salespeople from doing what they are hired to do—sell your products!
Before you freak out about having to take the time (and expense) to have your paperwork read into an audio file, there is a technology solution (what else would you expect from me?).
There is inexpensive (less than $50) text to speech software, even a free service on the Internet (http://beta.blindspeak.com/).
The software I use is TextAloud by Nextup Technologies (http://www.nextup.com). This inexpensive ($29.95) software takes text files and converts them to speech, either using your audio card, or saving them as an MP3 file that can be played through a MP3 player (like this inexpensive player for a car, http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.14378).
I would also suggest getting one of the option voices from AT&T or Acapela ($35.00). I found that the voices that have a British accent seem to hide the mechanical sound of the text to speech best. My personal favorites are AT&T’s Rich16 and Acapela’s Peter22.
You can adjust the speed and pitch of the speech. I only wish you could shorten the inter-word gaps, which is what appears to be the biggest component of the mechanical sound to the converted speech. Otherwise the voice quality is amazingly clear and easy to understand.
Text Aloud will convert batches of text files, allowing you to take a whole directory of memos (or saved emails) and convert them to MP3 files. Those files could be transferred to a website, perhaps in a hidden directory, to make them available to your sales people.
Anything you do to minimize paperwork increases the amount of selling time for your salespeople, which increases sales. Converting memos to speech using TextAloud and letting them listen to those memos in their car is a good use of otherwise down time.