Sales reps spend a lot of time on their smartphones—to coordinate with clients for meetings, to set reminders for upcoming meetings, and to make important calls. However, there is a lot more that can be done with the smartphone with the right apps on it. In fact, they are loaded with various features that make them a powerful sales tool. If you want to know how, then read on.
Efficient Schedule Handling
GPS Will Help With Your Itinerary
You might have set up a meeting with your prospective client but you might not be aware of the exact whereabouts of the office or meeting spot—more so if you are new to the region. Instead of calling the client once too many times, all you have to do is to use the GPS and the Google Maps app will lead you to your destination. In fact, you will also be able to know which route is relatively free of traffic and what alternatives you have. This will aid you in reaching on time and making a good first impression with the prospect.
Keep Track of Your Schedule
Sales reps typically don’t set up just one meeting in the span of an entire working day. More often than not, reps are juggling with numerous appointments. This has become truer during the pandemic time when all meetings are happening virtually over emails, calls, and video conferences. Keeping a track of all of them, seeing that none overlap, and remembering them all can be quite a task. Here is where the smartphone comes handy. It helps you to set up reminders, tell you which is the client you are going to be calling, and even the stage of the sales funnel you are with the client, thus helping you with your sales pitches.
Efficient Handling of Contacts and Leads
Upload and Extract Contact Information
If you have business cards lying around, all you need to do is to download a business card app on your smartphone, like ScanBizCards, and click a picture of the physical card. The app then scans the information and saves on your address book or uploads it to a centralized database system. This will help you because when you have all contact details in one place, it is easier to make calls or send emails to the leads; not to forget that you can even analyze the status of each and how best you can close deals with them.
This app will also help you to capture contacts from your emails and export to popular CRMS such as Salesforce. It is one of the best productivity apps on the market today.
Get Rid of Duplicate Contacts
Sales people have thousands of contacts on their address book. One of the most difficult and time consuming tasks that people never find time to check off is cleaning their phone;s address book. But there’s an app to help you with it. The CleanUp Duplicates app is one of the best productivity apps for the iPhone and iPad. It runs on multiple sources like Gmail and iCloud, helps to remove duplicate contacts easily and quickly without any errors. This app can check around 5,000 contacts getting checked in 45 seconds!
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- The app allows you to choose the merge level – you can choose a complete matching or various types of partial matching.
- After this step, the app checks for duplicates post which you can remove all double entries from your address book.
- CleanUp Duplicates creates a backup of your address book before cleaning. Hence, you will never lose any information.
The premium version of the app comes at a cost. However, you can analyze your address book and get a full preview of duplicates for free before you upgrade.
Keep Contact Information Organized
CircleBack, a professional address book manager for iOS and Android phones is the only contact management app you’ll need to keep your address book both up-to-date and free from duplicate entries, thus keeping all contact information organized. It also helps to capture contacts from email signatures.
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- It can be easily connected with various networks like Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, and social media sites like Facebook, and Twitter as well.
- It takes a backup of all contacts before syncing the address book and hence, no data is lost while using this app.
- Any change made within CircleBack gets directly reflected on the contacts wherever they are present.
Know About the Client
Last Minute Research
It is not enough to just fix an appointment with a lead. Be it a face to face meeting or a video call, knowing a little extra about the prospect is always useful as it creates good first impressions and establishes a personal connection with the client. So, if you have some time in hand before the appointment, you can use your smartphone to research your client.
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- You can look up more about the client on Google.
- Read more about the client’s business on various blogs and news articles.
- Access social media apps like Facebook or professional networking apps like LinkedIn to know more about the prospect.
Take Down Meeting Notes
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- When you are talking to your client, it is always helpful to take down notes. If you do it on sheets of paper or on notepads, there is always the possibility that it will stay there and be forgotten about or get lost. Also, often, typing out all notes becomes quite a time consuming and cumbersome task. Rather, if you take down the notes on your smartphone, you can quickly add it to the database soon after the meeting is over. You use various note taking apps like Apple Notes, Google Keep or Evernote.
- This is true for interviews as well. If you are in a question-answer session with your prospect, instead of writing with pen and paper, a voice recording will be far more useful as then no point will get missed out when you are transcribing it post the session.
Work on the Go
Quick File Sharing
The best productivity apps are those that help with quick file sharing. For instance, use Dropbox to share important files and presentations while you are at the meeting. File sharing apps get the job done faster than email or chats. With your smartphone, you can also make changes to an existing presentation even minutes before your meeting starts.
Brand Building on Social Media
Social media marketing has, nowadays, become a very important mode to communicate with the audience and to generate leads from them. Hence, if you have some spare minutes before your meeting starts, you can use your smartphone to post updates on social media or reply to comments on your posts. Keeping in touch will always help you to create opportunities for sale.
Stay in Touch
Virtual Meetings
During the current time when the world is still just about opening up and not too many face-to-face meetings are happening, most interactions still remain virtual. While you can use any mobile phone to make phone calls to stay in touch with your team and your clients. it is only a smartphone that will help you to hold video conversations with the help of apps like Google Duo, Google Talk, Skype, and others.
Quick Response Time
Most clients expect a quick TAT on their queries. So, even if they are spread across geographies – each in a different time zone – you need to be there for them round the clock. This is where a smartphone acts as a powerful sales tool because you can respond to their messages and calls, no matter where you are or what time of the day it is. This leads to an increase in the levels of customer satisfaction and thus builds on brand equity as well.
Get Answers to Tough Questions
It often happens that during a meeting you get asked a question you don;t have an answer to, or it involves making a decision on the spot but you can’t take a call on it without a higher up’s permission. During times like these, your smartphone can help you make a quick video call or Slack the decision maker. This will go a long way in closing your deals then and there rather than keeping them hanging, which can lead to you losing the prospect.
Summing up
Mobile devices have revolutionized the way sales is being done today – it is no longer about sitting in front of stationary desktops, everything is going ‘mobile’ now.. Sales is all about interpersonal relationships – the better the customer service, the more the rate of conversions. The smartphone, with all its features, helps a sales rep to take care of this, thus acting as a powerful sales tool.