Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs speaks in front of a display showing icons of various apps during the iPhone OS4 special event at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California in April 8, 2010.ROBERT GALBRAITH/Reuters
A salesperson's life usually involves lots of time away from the office, combined with the need to keep track of multiple contacts and a constant stream of new leads. No wonder people who work in sales rely heavily on smart phones such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone and similar devices that run on Google' Android software or Microsoft's Windows Mobile (lately replaced by Windows Phone 7).
There are phone apps for everything these days, and the particular needs of salespeople are no exception. Whether it's managing contacts and deals or tracking those pesky expenses, there's an app for that - or in most cases, several. Here are a half dozen that are worth a look.
Gist is an iPhone and Android app that presents a single view of information about your contacts, drawn from social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, blog posts and news services. It also helps you send notes and meeting confirmations to your contacts, says T.A. McCann, chief executive of Gist, which is based in Seattle.
Lisa Collins, a sales representative with Sutton Group Admiral Realty Inc. in Toronto, likes Gist for getting a quick update on contacts before talking to them. "If somebody sends me an e-mail and I'm not really sure who they are ... then I can go into Gist and find out a little bit more about them before I call them back or whatever," she says.
Gist is still in beta testing and free. There will eventually be a professional version with a price tag, Mr. McCann says. And the company is considering a BlackBerry version.
SalesNow is a customer relationship management app that combines a smart phone component - available for BlackBerry and iPhone - with a hosted service allowing salespeople to share information with co-workers. It tracks contact information for customers and leads, appointments and other information about deals and relationships. The app can be customized to suit specific businesses' needs, says John Durst, vice-president of sales and marketing at SalesNow in Markham, Ont.
"Having this application on my phone gives me instant access to all the deals that I'm working on," says Raymond Byrne, a mortgage sales specialist at Northwood Mortgage Ltd. in Toronto - "contact information, all the details and specifics of where each job is at any point in time."
Randy Demchuk, director of sales at Arnold Brothers Transport Ltd. in Winnipeg, says SalesNow makes his iPhone more useful on the road and saves him time entering information. "When I'm out on a business trip I almost don't need to take my laptop," he says.
SalesNow costs $19.95 (U.S.) a month, with a one-month free trial available.
Mr. Demchuk also likes CamCard, an iPhone app that can scan business cards using the phone's built-in camera and enter the information into the iPhone contact list.
CamCard is one of several apps that do this, and online reviews of most of them suggest users have mixed experiences. Some say such apps make enough errors in recognizing text that they don't save time. Mr. Demchuk says he tried several and likes CamCard best - it usually captures information accurately, he says, provided he takes a good picture in adequate lighting.
CamCard is available for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile from IntSig Information Co., a Chinese company, for $10 to $15 depending on the device and version.
Salespeople who are rarely in the office often face the aggravation of adding contact information to their smart phone address books. "All that retyping just frustrates people and you really end up with a situation where people end up underutilizing their contacts," says Nicholas Maddix, founder of Anagram Technologies in New York.
So Mr. Maddix developed Copy2Contact, an app that adds a specialized copy function to a BlackBerry or iPhone. Highlight any content on the phone's screen - most likely someone's name and e-mail address - and along with the Copy option the menu now includes a Copy2Contact option that will create a new entry in your contact list and plug in the information you copied. It's good at putting information in the right fields when you copy from something structured like the sender information in an e-mail, but less predictable if you grab unstructured information from the body of an e-mail.
Copy2Contact for the BlackBerry costs $9.99 (U.S.) per year, while for the iPhone there's a free version that will process a limited number of contacts, or a Pro version with a one-time cost of $4.95.
Another app for capturing contact information is Xobni Mobile. Currently the only smart phone it works on is the BlackBerry, but there's also a version that works with Microsoft Outlook software on PCs. Xobni, from Xobni Corp. of San Francisco, automatically captures contact information from the BlackBerry's e-mail and phone logs and adds it, along with all the contact information already in the device's address book, to your Xobni address book.
Xobni Mobile is available for a one-time fee of $9.99 (U.S.). You can also get it with Xobni One, which integrates the mobile app with Xobni for Outlook, for $39.90 a year or $6.99 upfront plus $3.99 a month.
Another constant issue for salespeople and other business travellers is tracking expenses. IXpenseIt is an iPhone app designed to make it easy to record expenses wherever you are. It can track expenses against budgets and produce customized reports as well.
"I think that we've all fallen victim to losing receipts," says Mr. Byrne, who finds using iXpenseIt while travelling helps him avoid that problem. In fact if he loses the paper receipt, he can still have a digital copy: "It even lets you take snapshots of your receipts."
IXpenseIt, from FYI Mobileware, Inc., costs $4.99 (U.S.).