Note from Kelly: The following is a post from Cynthia Ebrom, President, Cynthia’s Cakes, LLC. As I discussed earlier, we asked Vostro product previewers to blog about their systems in their own words.

It's not everyday a huge corp like Dell looks to a small business like us for feedback on their products and services.  I am just elated!  So with that premise in mind I went on a mission to perform an unscientific experiment selling outside of my realm...away from my shop.

Cynthia's Cakes sells couture wedding cakes and my customers are extremely visual when it comes to selecting their own wedding cake. They want to see photos of our actual work and lots of them before making up their mind. 

As a test to see how my customer would relate to a computer versus paper photos, I took the Vostro 1510 loaded with cake photos along with an album and about twenty-five 13x19 glossy photos with me to meet my customer appointment.  I found it to be an eye opening experience for me.  Although my customer did look at the paper photos, they kept going back to the slideshow photos and photos on my website.   Maybe it was because at my shop there are photos everywhere...on the walls, in albums and in frames. 

Being away from the shop, a customer doesn't have that stimuli around them so they look at the computer slideshow instead.  Whatever the reason, I can see that doing an appointment away from my shop has to definitely include a notebook as part of the visual effect to secure the sale.   It's a great selling tool! My only complaint is that the sound could go up higher.  I had it on maximum and when showing the slideshow along with a video, one of my customers had a hard time hearing the video.