Low cost sales enablement apps

Given my background in using Sales Enablement solutions inside large complex enterprises or helping enterprises with their Sales Enablement challenges, quick and light solutions for very small companies, with only a few products and a small sales force, have not been the focus of this blog.

However, I have always tried to cover even vendors that target small companies in my list of Sales Enablement market players.

That list had 59 companies on September 28, 2012.

In the responses to the following question on quora, Tobin Harris wrote a good one:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-the-iPad-as-a-sales-enablement-tool

[...] you can get good mileage out of the iPad using apps like this:

Low cost sales enablement apps

• Prezzi mobile for presentations / slide shows
• DropBox [or Google Drive or box.com etc] for storing images, PDFs and videos
• iBooks for PDFs (without needing WiFi)
• Apple Notes or Evernote for capturing meetings notes
• Paper app for drawings and scribbles

[...]

CRM integration will become more important for sales teams. Who wants to double enter their meeting notes via the laptop?
The fact that the iPad is instant-on, lightweight and has good battery life makes it a very viable replacement for paper based sales aids [...]“

Image credit & copyright: BizSphere AG, http://www.BizSphere.com

Of course, sharing many different Prezzi / presentation files, PDFs, forms, documents, images, and other media files across a sales team of more than one person will require a lot of discipline in order to achieve that everyone presents a consistent story / look&feel as well as only the most up-to-date version. As this becomes a problem, the more sophisticated Sales Enablement solutions, that sit on top of document management systems with “version control”, “tagging from controlled vocabulary”, and “user access rights management” or can integrate with all kinds of sources, come in.

See my list of Sales Enablement market players.