Every week it seems that I either run across, or I am introduced to, some really great new apps and articles that pertain to social selling. Then there are those apps that I have used for an extensive period of time and they are worthy of a shout out!
While I can’t do extensive research or a full review on each, hopefully you may find some gems for your own use that have been hidden inside this regular curation. Please note that I do not endorse, or represent, apps unless indicated. I do, however, feel that all are worthy of your inspection![Tweet “Catch our newest #social #selling app and article roundup!”]
Apps
MileIQ – Available for iPhone or Android ,,, Automatic drive detection makes it easy to capture every mile you drive. Say goodbye to the headache of manually logging every trip. Goodbye to the heartache of leaving dollars on the table when you forget. Hello to the ease of automatic mileage tracking. If you are in sales and you need to track your miles, particularly for the IRS … this is for you!
Found.ly – Found.ly is a very interesting sales prospecting app. It is basically comprised of a chrome extension which you can use to capture leads, primarily from LinkedIn, and then send those to the main application where you can assign each to a campaign of scheduled emails. Emails are tracked for opens, replies, and clicks.
To capture a lead you will enter that person’s name and company name or domain and Found.ly will determine (a % of accuracy is generated) that person’s email address. What is cool about Foundly.ly is that it does not sit on top of LinkedIn and, therefore, will not anger the “Gods”. Visit to learn more!
Teamgate CRM – Teamgate is CRM product that has specifically been designed for inbound sales and particularly for startups and SMB’s. It addresses: leads management, contact management, sales pipelines, time management, analytics and reports, and it even includes a smart dialing system. All of this is combined with a very attractive pricing model!
StageX – Currently under development, StageX is designed to Train your sales team in interactive and gamified virtual reality. Yowser! Visit the site and watch the video!
Articles
Even sales managers need love so, here is a special sales manager’s edition!
This Is How You Identify A-Players During An Interview – Over the last 15 years I’ve probably interviewed close to 1,000 people for all sorts of roles. From sales to marketing to engineering to customer service to management and even CEOs and board members.
When I started interviewing, I’d estimate my hit rate was right around 50%, which means only 1 in 2 candidates would be a good fit for the role. Over the years and as I continued to interview and hire, I started to see the “real life” impact of hiring A-players.
Top 50 Sales Management Tools on the AppExchange – We created this list of 50 top sales management tools available on the Salesforce AppExchange. With an eye toward closing more deals, reducing inefficiency, and increasing sales effectiveness, we have organized the apps in key categories that make managing sales a more streamlined process.
While we have listed our picks for the top 50 sales management tools on the AppExchange here in no particular order, we have included a table of contents to help you easily access the tools best suited to your team’s needs.
The B2B Sales Manager’s Playbook for Improving Performance and Accelerating Sales: 130+ Game-Changing Resources for Top B2B Sales Leaders – We’ve put together this comprehensive playbook jam-packed with useful tools, guides and resources to help you manage every aspect of B2B sales management and accelerate sales.
From recruiting and hiring to training, motivation, gamification, sales metrics, choosing the right tools to foster sales acceleration, and facilitating better marketing-sales alignment to improve lead quality and results, we’ve covered it all to provide you with a complete resource to hone your leadership skills and cultivate winning teams.
How to Solve the 3 Sales Challenges Every Manager Faces – When your sales team is still young or inexperienced, even relatively minor challenges can have a huge impact. As sales manager, you don’t have much margin for error.Fortunately, some of the most common obstacles that plague growing companies have relatively simple solutions.Here’s three recurring sales challenges and simple strategies for fixing or preventing them.
An Inconvenient Truth In Coaching Salespeople – Most managers who have been around for a while understand that if salespeople are going to grow their skills they are going to need some coaching. If you think about it, every endeavor that involves performance against a standard, winning or losing, or rising to significance, begins with a talented performer coached by someone who provides accurate feedback and helpful coaching—from athletics, to music, to business.
If you watch how real coaching actually happens, you see the coach is always in a position to observe the performer first hand. Athletic coaches coach their people on the field, not in the office. The same goes with any other discipline—except for sales.
How Your Salespeople Measure Up in the 21 Most Crucial Sales Competencies for Modern Selling – Over the years I’ve debunked a number of articles that cited nothing but junk science. The authors often relied on observation, anecdotal evidence and personal opinion while proclaiming traits, competencies, skills and differentiators between top salespeople and everyone else. Today those articles would qualify as fake news.
My rebuttals to those articles, many of which can be found here, are always based on science.Speaking of the difference between fake news and real sales science, the next topic downright amazes me and should amaze you too.
The Importance of Performance Management as Part of Sales Management – How important is coaching? Coaching truly is performance management–and it is the only way to get peak performance out of salespeople and sales management. Join renowned consultant Alice Heiman as she briefly but powerfully informs us on this subject. Understand the importance of sales performance management as part of Sales Management.
How a sales leader can develop a remarkable team – How well an organization performs is not governed by the quality of talent at the extremes of the bell curve.Individual superstars will always make a noticeable contribution; ineffective employees will always drag results down.
When organizations are superstars, it’s due to the performance of the mass of people in the heart of the bell curve; the teams of passionate turned-on employees who relentlessly pursue excellence and who are driven to achieve exceptional results.“Wonder” sales teams are critical to any organization. Here are 6 steps sales leaders can take to evolve them.