Sales Companion — Competitive Differentiation v0.1

Status: v0.1 product guardrail Date: 2026-07-03 Area: Sales Companion / Product Positioning Related Knowledge File: 05-knowledge/market-intelligence/hvh-differentiation-companion-v0.1.md

Product Boundary

Sales Companion must not become a generic Handelsvertreter tool.

The product should be designed around a different promise:

Companion helps sales people understand and develop their market, not just administer their work.

What Sales Companion Is

Sales Companion is a mobile, AI-assisted field companion for people working inside the Interior ecosystem.

It supports:

• planning a city or regional trip,
• discovering potential partners,
• building and adapting a route,
• capturing visits through voice, text and images,
• extracting follow-ups and file needs,
• preserving relationship memory,
• recognising product-market signals,
• turning field work into reports and next actions.

What Sales Companion Is Not

Sales Companion is not:

• a CRM with a nicer interface,
• a mandatory visit-report form,
• a representative administration system,
• a manager-control dashboard,
• a static account list,
• a generic sales productivity tool.

Experience Principle

The user should not feel:

I have to document my work for the system.

The user should feel:

I can tell my Companion what happened, and it helps me carry the work forward.

Product Experience Rules

1. Capture First, Structure Second

The field user gives raw input first: voice note, rough text, photo, impression, objection, contact detail, next step.

Companion extracts structure afterwards.

2. Uncertainty Must Be Visible

Companion must never invent certainty.

When contact details, company names, product interests or follow-up files are unclear, the system should mark them as uncertain and ask for confirmation.

3. Routes Are Living Objects

A route is not just a list of stops.

It is a living field plan that changes when a visit takes longer, a store is closed, a new tip appears or only 30 minutes remain.

4. Photos Are Context

Images should help Companion understand taste, atmosphere, product fit, brand fit, store quality and relationship relevance.

They are not only attachments.

5. Follow-ups Are Outputs, Not Afterthoughts

Every useful field capture should create a next-action layer:

• email draft,
• file pack checklist,
• sample task,
• contact verification,
• next visit suggestion,
• field report signal,
• product-market learning.

6. Interior-Specific Semantics Matter

Companion should understand concepts such as:

• planning studio,
• concept store,
• Scandinavian design dealer,
• architecture office,
• hospitality lead,
• public-space project,
• curated retail,
• product fit,
• material sample,
• brand environment,
• visual merchandising.

Strategic Sentence

CRM stores accounts. Companion understands field reality.

Alternative:

Traditional sales software documents what happened. Companion helps the field team understand what it means and what should happen next.

Feature Implications

This differentiation supports the current Sales Companion modules:

• mobile-field-companion-principle-v0.1.md defines the product identity.
• route-intelligence-flow-v0.1.md defines the beginning of the field day.
• mobile-capture-flow-v0.1.md defines the post-visit capture moment.

Together they form the first real product loop:

Plan → discover → visit → capture → confirm → follow up → learn.

Acceptance Test

A feature belongs in Sales Companion if it helps the field user do at least one of these:

• understand a market better,
• remember a relationship better,
• prepare a better visit,
• generate a better follow-up,
• recognise a better product fit,
• create reusable field intelligence.

A feature should be questioned if it mainly adds administrative burden without creating learning, memory or action.