7 tech tips to help you sell more

Selling hasn’t changed since Willie Loman, right? You knock on doors. You dial the phone. Eventually, if your pitch has any merit, you’ll sell something. It’s all a numbers game.

While that may still be true, salespeople today have tools that Willie never dreamed of. Tools, gadgets, gizmos and resources abound to make every salesperson more effective, more efficient and, if all goes well, more prosperous. Here’s our quick roundup on technological tools and techniques to help you sell more.

Surf your prospects

Take a cruise on your prospects’ Web sites and learn what they want customers to know. Subscription databases all over the Web will give you even more — the low down on your prospects, financials, names, phone numbers, even e-mail addresses. Hoovers and Harris Info Source are a couple of the less-expensive options.

Another source of sales leads is switchboard.com, an online telephone directory that you can use, for example, to find all the barbershops, banks, dentists or hardware stores in any city or state in the U.S.

Connect your sales force, wherever they are

If your sales force keeps your prospect list in a database like ACT or Goldmine, they need to lug around a computer with a copy of the database on the road and periodically synchronize it back to the company database. And the data is only as good as the last time your entire sales force synced.

What’s even better? Live, real-time data instantly accessible all over the world by storing your prospect database on the Web. Everyone sees changes immediately. ACT for the Web, SalesForce.com and other services offer simple online databases or more sophisticated CRM options.

Stay in touch without really trying

Say you’ve got a list of 500 prospects that you want to reach at least once a month. That sounds doable until you realize that you also still have to service your existing accounts and make the occasional sales call. What do you do? ACT and other sales software programs let you generate individualized letters and e-mails to hundreds of prospects at a time. Just write the letter and push a button.

Create a virtual armory for your road warriors

Equipping your network of dealers or salespeople all over the country with your latest brochures and teaching them all the ins and outs of your products used to involve lots of printing, mailing and traveling. Not anymore. Now you can post PowerPoint presentations and PDFs of product brochures, slick sheets, sales handouts and almost anything else on your Web site. Your sales force has constant access to the materials and can print them on an inexpensive color printer.

Make your prospects experts on your product

Inform your customers by posting in-depth information about your product on your site — drawings, specs, manuals, comparisons, etc. You’ll have an advantage over competitors because you make it easier for customers to get what they need.

You can also offer webinars, which allow you to educate potential customers over the Web the same way seminars do in person. As budgets for training and tuition reimbursement are cut to help companies meet the bottom line, time-starved, knowledge-starved executives all over the country are looking for a cheap, convenient way to learn.

Offer your prospects a one-hour free webinar on a subject they want to know more about. They simply log onto a Web site for an hour and watch and listen to your presentation. Your prospects will be grateful, plus you’ll get an hour of their time.

Cover less road, warrior

What if some or all of your sales trips could be avoided while still having the meeting? Video conferencing and interactive meetings were too expensive. Now Web cams and services like Microsoft’s Netmeeting and Live Meeting let you hold a video conference or run a PowerPoint presentation or software demo for someone thousands of miles away at a fraction of the cost of renting a video conference room or buying your own system.

Equip your road warriors with the right weapons

Here are a few gadgets that make it easier to track, manage and stay in touch.

• AddressGrabber is an inexpensive software program that instantly enters contact information from any e-mail, word processing document or Web page into Outlook, ACT or other software packages. Just highlight and click.
• Card scanners such as CardScan from Corex scan each business card and enter it directly into your contact management or sales software. Just feed the cards through and push a button.
• Get your Palm or other PDA to share data with Microsoft Outlook, ACT or other PIMs or sales software. Even better, with special software from Dataviz, your PDA can hold and edit Word and Excel files and even show PowerPoint slide shows. Garmin makes a Palm PDA with built-in GPS.
• Smartphones like the Palm Trio 600 combine a digital camera, PDA and cell phone into one small package that can even wirelessly check e-mail and surf the Web.

Need better results? Boosting sales with technology is just one business communications solution we’ve provided over the past 25 years. To explore some innovative ways to reach your specific sales communications goals, e-mail Matt Harlow or call 800-800-9547.

Ideas are our product. We work to analyze your markets, isolate your key brand benefits and send clear, focused messages right to your target audience. Messages that build your brand image and achieve what you're really looking for … measurable results. We call it Communication with insight.^sm