Looking for a holiday gift for the sales person in your life. The following web tools are those that have proven the most popular and most productive for individual sales people using them on their own behalf. Tools that will make the sales day more productive and more rewarding. This means that “platform” tools for CRM or Marketing Automation are not considered. Some have free versions while others offer monthly or annual plans.
Animoto eases the effort to create videos that can include Powerpoint slides, photos, graphics and video clips if available, and transforms them into a professional quality video for sales presentations, testimonials, promotional information, product launches, event invitations and more. If you want to get your information into a quality video format, Animoto will get it done easily, quickly and affordably.
Dropbox provides an online “cloud” storage drive for you to keep all your important files in. Never show up at a client meeting and realize that you forgot to move your file from your desktop to your notebook. Or realize the thumb drive with the important information is still at your desk. Also benefit from full file access with any internet connected device including iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry.
Evernote solves the problem of remembering where you stored important information, giving you the proverbial memory of an elephant. More and more of a sales person’s day is doing online research about a client or prospect, storing product data sheets, an interesting website with necessary information held within. Using Evernote, you simply click and the information you are viewing is stored in your Evernote account. You are able to create folders for projects and clients, and can retrieve your information from any internet connected device including iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry.
Gist has the potential to become the most used tool in your professional life. Connected to your contacts within your Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn and more, Gist treats your screen as a palette, allowing you to filter, sort and organize those people, appointments and communications. Your history is always only a click away, and it can remind you of those most important to your efforts. Accessible in numerous formats from iPhones to Browsers to email clients and can also be used as a plug-in within Microsoft Outlook. Use it for a month and you will never let it go.
When I saw IntroMojo for the first time a few months ago, I tweeted about IntroMojo: “The best new tool for sales pro’s this year” Do You Know Who You’re Talking to? In our sales 2.0 world, success in sales demands that we know who we are talking to before we ever meet. Not only what their email address and phone number are, but if they tweet or blog, what groups do they belong to, what are the passions in their life. By simply entering an email address, IntroMojo presents details about their professional life that would take hours and days to assemble. Once completed, they wrap it up into a tight package they call a dossier and you are able to save it as a pdf file. The research is wide and deep, evening providing information such as what music or bands they prefer on Pandora. If new client acquisition is important to you, or your business is built on a relationship foundation, you cannot do without IntroMojo.
The social web is here to stay. Those in sales that choose to embrace it will discover a distinct advantage over the competition. PeopleMaps takes all of your connections established using social media and your contact database, and visually maps out a path from you to those individuals or companies that will be beneficial to you. Clearly identifying the connection paths, labeling what type of connection it is, and the role of the individual prove very powerful. It also applies it’s own logic when multiple paths are showing, which is common, to identify what the “best” connection path might be. Seeing all of this in a visual people map vs. the traditional spreadsheet or database view is what allows PeopleMaps to stand out from the crowed. If you do your best thinking and planning visually, you will love PeopleMaps!
Video is clearly a platform that all the experts agree has become a foundational piece for all sales activity. The ability to see and hear your message and information is not only more effective for the viewer, it is also scalable. When you create that perfect presentation, you should be able to capture it and have it available for other prospects and clients to view at their convenience. Vimeo serves the same purpose as YouTube, but with a business professional in mind. You have full ability to upload much larger video files, password protect them on an individual basis, use High Def, and share them with the world or keep them private to protect your investments and strategy. Most of us in sales simply want a high quality vehicle to share our video work. If you want to share your newest lip-sync to Lady Gaga’s latest hit, then YouTube is the way to go. Most of the major social sites and blogging platforms have full support for easy up/downloads and viewing of Vimio videos. Combined with your masterpieces created with Animoto above, the sky is the limit.
Workstreamer is to company information what IntroMojo is to individual information. When you have identified a business entity that you would like to do business with, Workstreamer is the place to begin. Everything that your target company is involved in will be made available with just a few mouse clicks. The information includes LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter links as sell. Need deeper information or source materials, just click on the live links and you will be able to drill down into the original sources of the most relevant information. Things like annual reports and other SEC filings, executive hirings and dismissals, growth strategies, presentations to shareholders can all be found using Workstreamer to learn as much as is necessary about those companies most important to you.
That wraps up the list of the most popular web tools that sales people would benefit from in 2011. If you know someone in sales, click on the logo of the tool you would like to gift, and register it under the name and email address of your favorite sales person. Who knows, after they have been using the web tool for the entire year, you might be receiving an extra large gift in appreciation.
(Please note that several of the links above, if selected, create a small payment to me equivalent to one of my favorite latte’s at Starbucks.)