.KEYWORD sales
.FLYINGHEAD BOOST YOUR SALES
.TITLE Easy Palm device add-ons that will help boost sales
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT cover.gif
.SUMMARY While the four built-in Palm applications alone are great tools for sales people, there are a lot of third-party applications you can add to your device to make you an even more efficient sales machine. Steve Niles surveys some of the cool products available today that are specifically intended to help you boost your sales success.
.AUTHOR Steve Niles
Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll find articles on Palm’s initiatives in the sales force automation arena and on understanding the sales process. Here, however, I want to get a little more concrete by briefly surveying some of the cool products available today that are specifically intended to boost sales success. The Palm device is much more than a PIM (Personal Information Manager), and while the "big four" built-in Palm applications are great tools for sales people, I want to showcase applications that go way beyond the PIM.
.H1 Sales Warrior
Iambic alone has a ton of great products, but the key one for this discussion is Sales Warrior. You can find it at http://www.iambic.com/pilot/saleswarrior/default.htm. SalesWarrior, pictured in Figure A, lets you track sales opportunities, leads, referrals, actual sales, profits, costs, sales tax, and commissions.
.FIG A Sales Warrior has easy-to-use views where you can record your sales data.
Some of the information you can record with SalesWarrior includes the name of the sales account, the item or service for the sale, quantity, the sales price, profit to be made, the stage of the sale, the probability of the sale occurring, and, most importantly, your commission.
.H1 Action Names Datebook
If you’re more of a lone-wolf sales person or you’re more into tracking contacts and activities, Iambic’s Action Names Datebook might be for you. You can find it at http://www.iambic.com/pilot/actionnames/. Action Names Datebook enhances the built-in Date Book, To Do List, and Address List applications with more advanced views designed to make managing your schedule easier. You can see the enhanced To Do List in Figure B.
.FIG B Action Names Datebook enhances the built-in applications.
.H1 Strategy Mapping Palm/CRM
McMahon Worldwide offers a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application for the Palm device at http://www.mcmahonworldwide.com/PalmCRM.html. This application, called Strategy Mapping Palm/CRM, offers opportunity management and tracking, account management, and contact management. It also offers territory and account planning, event management, and opportunity assessment tools. Figure C will give you a look at its user interface.
.FIG C Icons make the Strategy Mapping Palm/CRM application intuitive.
.H1 The $alesLink Suite
The $alesLink Suite from Encompass Software can be found at http://www.encompassoft.com/index.html. It’s a desktop-based sales force automation program for Lotus Notes and Domino. The various products that come in the $alesLink Suite offer, among other things, electronic order entry and processing, automated customer correspondence and proposals, and sales summaries and histories. The advantage for a mobile workforce is that the programs allow your PC-based data to be synchronized with your Palm device.
.H1 Sales Tracker
For something on a smaller scale, you might want to check out Sales Tracker, a bit of freeware created by some guy named David who, by the way, is awfully proud of his home entertainment system. You can find David’s Sales Tracker application (as well as his DVD collection) at http://home.primus.com.au/dhein/Pilot/Pilot.htm.
As David himself describes it, "It’s basically a simple application to record details of Sales Team members and then track their Sales progress against targets." Figure D shows an example of what it can do.
.FIG D Here’s an entry for the heroically-named team member, John Citizen.
.H1 Product Manager
Product Manager, at http://www.product-manager.com basically lets sales people tote around complete product information on their Palm devices. Or, as it’s described on the product Web site, "Created for the mobile sales professional, Product Manager transforms your Palm computer into a fully featured product information reference tool."
What it does is store and arrange your information on your desktop PC, and when it’s time to go out on the road, Product Manager will download all your product data to your Palm device so you can access it whenever you need to.
.H1 FlipChart
FlipChart is a very cool application from Middle Cross Software at http://www.middlecross.com/flipchart.html. It allows you to create little slideshow presentations you can display right on your Palm device screen. You might even think of it as a pocket version of PowerPoint. As such, it’s ideal for use with the color Palm IIIc, as you can see in Figure E.
.FIG E This sample screen gives the history of the application.
FlipChart would be a great tool for making short sales presentations out in the field. You can even add images to the presentations if you have FirePad’s FireViewer. That’s available at http://www.firepad.com/products/viewer/index.html.
.H1 Call Tracker
Call Tracker at http://www.standalone.com/palmos/call_tracker/ helps you manage your calls, making it an application every sales person could find useful. It’s pictured in Figure F.
.FIG F Call Tracker helps you manage your calls.
With it, you can track, log, and schedule new calls, as well as add notes to existing calls and relocate them to your Date Book. The application was reviewed in depth in the December 1998 issue of PalmPower Magazine at http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199812/calltrack001.html.
.H1 Project Planner
With Project Planner, you can manage the steps in a project, their dependencies, and resources. While there are a bunch of tools that link to other PC-based project management tools, Project Planner does it all on the Palm device. This would be a great application for planning sales projects, like getting ready for a trade show, working on a big deal, or delivering on the deal once sold. You can find it at http://www.pathcom.com/~carolron/PDA_soft.htm.
In Figure G, you can see how you might plan a project using Project Planner.
.FIG G Project Planner helps you manage your big projects.
.H1 TravelPal
TravelPal at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Campus/7631/TravelPal.html is a travel companion application that keeps track of times across different cities and time zones while synchronizing your Palm device time to your trip itinerary. It also has a currency converter, handy for the international business traveler. TravelPal can also help you manage your flights, hotel arrangements, and auto rental reservations.
TravelPal’s informative Time screen is shown in Figure H.
.FIG H Keep track of the time around the world with TravelPal.
.H1 Palm Zone Pro
Palm Zone Pro at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Campus/7631/PalmZonePro.html is an easy to use, professional time zone changing application for the traveling businessperson. It, too, can automatically display the local time by changing your Palm device’s internal clock according to your itinerary.
.H1 General-purpose tools
The applications I briefly covered here are just the beginning. A ton of general-purpose tools like Palm-based email programs, expense managers, To Do List enhancements, list makers, travel guides, auto mileage trackers, GPS systems, and more could also be enormously beneficial in the sales process. We’ll talk about some of applications in later articles.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Sales Warrior, visit http://www.iambic.com/pilot/saleswarrior/default.htm.
For more information on Action Names Datebook, visit http://www.iambic.com/pilot/actionnames/.
For more information on Strategy Mapping Palm/CRM, visit http://www.mcmahonworldwide.com/PalmCRM.html.
For more information on $alesLink Suite, visit http://www.encompassoft.com/index.html.
For more information on Sales Tracker, visit http://home.primus.com.au/dhein/Pilot/Pilot.htm.
For more information on Product Manager, visit http://www.product-manager.com.
For more information on FlipChart, visit http://www.middlecross.com/flipchart.html.
For more information on FirePad’s FireViewer, visit http://www.firepad.com/products/viewer/index.html.
For more information on Call Tracker, visit http://www.standalone.com/palmos/call_tracker/.
For the review of Call Tracker in PalmPower Magazine, visit http://www.palmpower.com/issues/issue199812/calltrack001.html.
For more information on Project Planner, visit http://www.pathcom.com/~carolron/PDA_soft.htm.
For more information on TravelPal, visit http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Campus/7631/TravelPal.html.
For more information on Palm Zone Pro, visit http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Campus/7631/PalmZonePro.html.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
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