5 Must Have Apps to do effective sales

Coming from a technology/product background I have always been a sucker for automation. It is never easy to jump from being a core hands on technology guy to a sales guy. I have seen it being a culture shock initially for me as well as a lot others I have seen. I have been doing enterprise sales since sometime now and would like to list the top 5 apps which have come in handy for me to generate the traction.

1.    Zoho CRM

It is one of the quickest CRM to get started with. When it comes to start-ups doing enterprise sales I would advice that they get started with a CRM immediately and try and form a practice around it. It may initially look like an added effort but will save a lot of your time later when you start scaling (Something which every start-up aspires to do) Most start-ups after launching the product get so passionate and busy with selling that they ignore setting up a CRM, it not only helps you get more organized in your efforts but also gives you a grip on the numbers, reports where one can take strategic calls when the pipeline increases.

2.    GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting, is a web-hosted service and is a remote meeting and desktop sharing software enabling users to meet with clients via Internet in real-time. With the app freely available it’s a boon to start-ups. Consider a resource crunched start-up (which always is the case) with a SaaS based product traveling all the way to a different city just to give an effective demo! This will help you do atleast your first level of demos and meetings at virtually no cost (I consider the founders time as a cost)

3.    DRONA Mobile

DRONA Mobile is our flagship product and we eat our own dog food. It’s a cross platform mobile app using which is used by sales guys in enterprises as a content delivery platform specifically for mobile devices. It enables our team to showcase mobile optimized product decks, screenshots, product demo videos, customer testimonial videos and plug it on to the projector and showcase making the meetings and pitches more jazzy and interesting. The best part is all that is available offline even if we don’t have network

4.    LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the platforms I have used very effectively for prospect research. It’s a known fact that linkedin helps in lead generation, but something that has worked fantastically for me is that it gives the past history and activities of the prospect which helps a great deal in modifying your product pitch to him. It has also worked amazingly well to ask for references and to get introductions from people you know which otherwise becomes really difficult.

5.    CamCard

CamCard is one of those off-hand apps which I use regularly to scan business cards on my phone and convert them to contacts. Meeting so many people who may not always be prospects or customers and so they don’t get recorded in the CRM. But I definitely felt a need to maintain their contacts without having a mess on my desk and scrambling through them whenever I felt the need to touch base with someone.

Just as a disclaimer, none of these tools or apps would help you if you don’t have a kickass product which REALLY solves a problem to your users!

The opinions expressed in this article are that of the author and does not reflect the opinions of YourStory.in