8 Sales Apps to Boost Your Productivity

In the not-so-distant past, sales people had to be highly organised individuals that relied on office-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems to maximise their sales productivity.

But with the evolution of smart phone technology, there is now a plethora of mobile applications that can make the sales process much easier and less time consuming.

Here we look at 8 sales apps that will help to boost your sales productivity and effectiveness with just a few swipes of a touch pad.

Salesforce Mobile

Dubbed “the world’s #1 sales app”, Salesforce Mobile provides you with instant access to Salesforce products such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Giving you the ability to access and update your CRM data from your mobile, this is the perfect app for spending less time in the office and more time out in the field doing what you do best - selling.

Salesforce Mobile Lite is free to download and works with any Salesforce product. Salesforce Mobile (full version) is also free to download but you need to be an ‘Unlimited’ customer, otherwise there is a fee involved. Salesforce packages range from between $5 per user per month (Contact Manager package) to $250 per user per month (‘Unlimited’ package). Given the large fees for the high-end packages, this app is not for the feint hearted. But you can sign up for a free trial to ‘test the water’ and make sure this is right for you.

Price: £3 to £178 per month

Dossier

This is a great application that will help any sales professional to get more organised and prepared for sales appointments. Dossier allows you to add notes, documents (including Office, iWork, PDF and Text/RTF documents), voice memos and images to contacts in your phone book and track events from your calender.

This means that you can have all the necessary client-specific information and documents to hand when you meet or contact your clients - saving a lot of time in the process. By linking notes and documents to your contacts and tracking events with you calender, this sales app enables you to build your own personal CRM system with ease, at a relatively low cost.

Price: £2.49

ScanBizCards

Gone are the days of rummaging in your pockets for that client’s business card that you misplaced. The ScanBizCards app allows you to scan business cards with your mobile on the spot and automatically adds the processed information to your contacts.

While many other apps on the market provide similar features, ScanBizCards is somewhat unique as it supports double sided business cards, allows you to add notes and send Linkedin invites to contacts, and you can automatically send intro emails with your own contact details to the contacts that you add. Although it does not always accurately detect all of the business card’s details, you can have the information sent for manual transcription for a fee of £0.12 per card to ensure 100% accuracy.

Price: £2.49

Handshake Sales Rep Order

This application is ideal for quickly taking sales orders when you’re at a trade show or on the road selling. All you need to do is add products to the app’s database, along with images and descriptions. You can then navigate with ease to your products (via SKU, name or category) when taking orders outside of the office.

Handshake Sales Rep Order is a real time saver, taking away the need to write orders by hand or pull out a hard copy of your prduct catalogue when selling outside of the office. This simple little app is also free, so you can download and discard it as you please!

Price: Free

SalesVu Point of Sale

SalesVu Point of Sale is a free, cloud-based app that can make many of your sales and other business activities a lot easier. As the name suggests, it is a point of sale app that allows you to carry out a number of sales-oriented functions, such as track cash and credit card payments, send email receipts to customers, post coupons on Facebook walls, and track your business performance through reports and graphs.

It also allows its US-based users to process credit card transactions for a flat rate fee of 2.7%. Unfortunately, however, this feature is yet to be available in other countries. Aside from this inconvenience for non-US users, this app has almost everything you need to stay organised and conduct your business activities when you’re out of the office.

Price: Free

Writeboard Lite: Collaborative Drawing

This app is great because it allows you to collaborate with colleagues from your own mobile device. Allowing two devices to draw simultaneously on the same interactive whiteboard,
Writeboard Lite: Collaborative Drawing is a much easier and more fun way of visualising and brainstorming ideas than more conventional methods. This app is particularly great to use on an iPad due to the larger screen size and, hence, bigger area in which you can formulate your ideas.

Another great alternative whiteboard app is ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard. Like Writeboard Lite, ShowMe is free but gives you the added functionality of being able to record voice-overs to make tutorials that can then be posted online.

Price: Free

Profit Story

Another simple little app that can help you with your sales activities and save you a lot of time is Profit Story. This app lets you input a few variables to calculate unit sell price, cost, gross profit margin, markup and break even. You can also use the app to make comparisons between existing prices and prospective prices.

Of course, you could do all the sums yourself or make a spreadsheet to perform the same function. But what’s the point when you can simply download this app for next to nothing, plug in a few numbers and have the relevant figures within seconds.

Price: £1.49

Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase