By 1984, the team had identified Fujitsu, Norand and MSI as potential vendors of HHCs for use by the field salespeople (who also delivered the products). The project was slated to cost $40 million (including hardware, development and training costs). "That was a fair piece of money back then," recalls Feld, now CEO and president of the Feld Group, a Dallas consultancy. Although the benefits of moving to an automated sales data collection system were huge, the CEO of Frito-Lay parent PepsiCo told Feld it would have to be self-supporting. If Feld wanted to go ahead with the project, he would have to get each of the sales divisions to agree to reduce their selling expenses by one percentage point, from 22 percent of sales to 21 percent of sales within one year.

The genius of the one-point program was that it forced Feld to get rock-solid buy-in from each sales division right out of the box. If sales managers were willing to cough up cost savings or precious sales increases, they had to want the HHCs pretty badly. And they did, because Feld’s team sold them on the idea that the wireless system would cut down--if not completely eliminate--the hassles of toting around clipboards and reams of paper every day.

Feld selected Fujitsu as his partner on the project and rolled out the HHCs to a handpicked pilot group. This initial group was only about 50 people, or half of 1 percent of the total field force. That was no accident. Feld wanted to ensure the application was in perfect shape before he widened the rollout. Since salespeople are famously resistant to change, Feld interviewed sales managers across the country until he came up with people who seemed to be open to new ideas and practices. Once the pilot was deployed, Feld and his team lavished the pilot group with extra care and attention, making sure problems were solved quickly and taking their suggestions for application improvements. "This small group felt pretty special because we had technicians working with them and responding to their problems on a daily basis. They developed a sense of pride that they were part of the invention process," says Feld.

Getting it right at the pilot stage was absolutely critical. "Once you get outside your small test group, people get discouraged if things don’t work right," he says. "The application needs to be rock-solid from the start." With a happy group of pilot users to spread the word throughout the organization, it would have been understandable if Feld had just left it at that. But Feld did more to cushion the rest of the group against the deleterious effects of change. Well in advance of the high-profile Priceline ads, Feld hired actor William Shatner to make a training film for the Frito-Lay field force. "Shatner interviewed a number of the salesmen from the pilot group. They talked about how they were scared of the [HHCs] at first but how they’d never go back to paper. It really broke down the resistance to see their peers talking about it like that," says Feld.