Everyone should understand by now the reasons and benefits of doing research on your prospect or customer. Recently, sales experts and advisors have written that up to 30% of a salesperson’s time is being spent on this research. Are you falling into that trap? In order to lower that percentage dramatically, you should consider web tools that can provide you with current data in as fast and convenient way possible.
Tweetbeat Firsthand is such a tool. This simple yet powerful web tool automatically brings you recent tweets from whoever (or whatever) is mentioned in the web pages you’re looking at. During your normal work efforts, just mouse-over the little blue icons inserted next to names to see firsthand updates. It will appear like this on your screen (magnified):
So while you are working on normal activities throughout the day, Firsthand findsTwitter context to the web, scanning pages for proper names—people and organizations alike—and connecting them to Twitter
accounts. You can them place your cursor over the T icon to see a slick, lightweight list of recent tweets.
Link to install Firsthand on Firefox
Link to install Firsthand on Chrome
Firsthand is installed as a tool within your browser (Firefox, Chrome) and the tool itself is free. Fast, efficient, built-in to your current workflow and free. Give it a try and tell us what you discover in your web travels. Once you have it installed, you will forget it is there until you are reading online. It has had the added benefit to me of helping identify the twitter addresses of those that I would like to follow. No longer having to search on Twitter to find what the Twitter address is for someone that I read about online.