Being in sales isn’t just having three martini lunches and playing golf. You really need to do what you say you’re going to do. This means managing the entire sales process from your promise to the after sale maintenance. When you’re in sales, essentially you are a project manager and everything in between. Frankly, sales can be a lot of work.
Many salespeople have turned to technology to help get more done and help remember everything they need to do. That’s what we are going to talk about here.
Park The Car For The Big Meeting
Productivity benefit: Save time with a mobile payment solution for quick parking.
Part of making sales calls is driving to the client and meet face to face. Unfortunately, may businesses are in areas where you will need to pay for parking. Parkmobile is a mobile payment solution that streamlines paying for parking. Consider it to be a digital parking meter you pay for with your phone. A great option if your territory is in larger cities.
Parkmobile is available in the U.S, U.K, Australia, Canada, and Turkey right now. Download the free app for your mobile platform. The introductory video also explains how Parkmobile works.
Track The Sales Process
Productivity benefit: Lessen complexity and manage contacts, customers, companies, and business processes.
Tracking where your individual clients or prospects are in the sales process is just as important, if not more important than the final handshake to complete the order.
Insightly is a super easy to use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) cloud based application to make sure you aren’t missing a potential sale. Where Insightly stands out compared to many other CRM apps is in its project management abilities. Creating milestones, pipelines and tasks for projects saves you time because you are using a single app, and not jumping between two or three apps. Saving all your information in the same place means you are less likely to overlook something and losing the sale or client.
A small business is not likely to need the power of Salesforce or its pricing tier. Insightly fills the gap with its easy intuitive interface and competitive pricing. The basic version is free for three users. Insightly makes learning CRM easy with helpful resources.
Download the free apps for iOS and Android.
Phone Calls Are Essential
Productivity benefit: Quick recall with reminder notes for phone conversations.
No matter how ubiquitous and useful email is, the good old phone call to the client is still an absolute must for any salesperson.
Call Reminder Notes ($1.99) for Android lets you either set reminders to call a contact at a specific time or set a reminder to pop up the next time you call them or they call you. Sometimes information might need to be relayed to a client, but isn’t urgent for a special call. Use Call Reminder Notes to add a popup with talking points for your next conversation. You’re given the option to make a note or set a reminder right after you disconnect the call so all thoughts will be fresh in your mind.
Speaking of phone conversations, Sanity (Free) lets you record your phone conversations.
Recording your sales calls is a great way to learn where you are fumbling, see how you sound when talking about a service or product or use the recording to double check the order before it’s invoiced and shipped. Check the legality when recording your phone conversations.
Present Your Pitch
Productivity benefit: Showcase elegant presentations smoothly across any platform.
Sales, despite what many people believe, is not all slick talking and overcoming objections. Sales is difficult. It’s convincing someone why you have the solution to their problem. Sometimes they aren’t even aware they have a problem and you need to educate your prospects.
Presenting your solution is done easily with SlideRocket. Create a presentation by yourself or collaborate with your team. Once it’s perfect, share the presentation with your client. SlideRoclet’s analytics will let you know how well done your pitch is by tracking how many views it receives and what the viewer did as a result.
The presentations can be shown in SlideRocket’s HTML5 viewer in case you need to use your tablet or phone to present to a client on the fly. SlideRocket Player is also available for iPad and iPhone. It is one of the best alternatives to PowerPoint. SlideRocket is free for the basic version and as a subscription for advanced features like offline mode.
Secure Your Information
Productivity benefit: Access sensitive business data safely from public hotspots.
The professional salesperson will work anywhere they have a mobile data signal or better yet, Wi-Fi. However, not all Wi-Fi networks are safe for sensitive business data. Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service like VyprVPN will help protect your information and even increase your data speeds. It has apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. The service provider comes in two flavors, Basic ($9.99) and Pro ($14.99). VyprVPN’s footprint covers 45+ worldwide server locations across 5 continents.
Traveling abroad? You might lose access to your social networks or other sites. Killing time at the coffee shop before a meeting or the airport on a layover? Reply to corporate emails on your mobile with confidence when using a VPN on your mobile.
For all privacy-promising services, be mindful about privacy policies.
Your Favorite Business Productivity Tools?
The sales process is long and stressful all by itself. Anything you can do to automate or simplify business tasks will free up your time to prospect more clients or give your current clients more attention.What are the must-have apps you can’t make it a day in sales without?
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