While smartphones alone changed the game for sales professionals on the go, there are numerous smartphone apps and hacks that empower reps to make even better use of their time. In fact, maximizing productivity was the catalyst for the recent revamp of our Sales Navigator mobile app.
In addition to the immediate productivity boost from the Sales Navigator app, here are eleven more ways to optimize your smartphone for selling.
How to Optimize Your Smartphone for Selling
1. Plan Your Calls
Though much of today’s selling happens online, there’s a time and place for making calls, whether to prospects or existing customers. Keeping these calls organized is essential to making the most of each day. By taking advantage of smartphone apps that make it easy to create call lists and schedule calls, you can be sure to capitalize on every opportunity to connect.
2. Schedule Meetings Online
Easily track and schedule meetings and appointments without wasting time going back and forth via email. Just include a link to an online scheduler in your emails and the recipient is taken to a web page showing your available times. Once the prospect picks a time, the meeting is automatically added to your calendar.
3. Streamline Note Taking
After talking with a prospect or customer, it’s essential to document the key points for future reference and planning next steps. Using a note-taking or voice dictation app or the record function on your smartphone, you can easily preserve your thoughts and action items as soon as the meeting ends. You’ll be sure to capture everything while it’s fresh in your mind and eliminate the need to keep track of or make sense of handwritten notes after the fact.
4. Get More Mileage from Voice Mail
The voice mail feature on your smartphone is good for more than receiving incoming messages. It’s also a valuable tool for practicing your own calls and voice messages. When you have a few minutes to spare, dial your own number and record a voice mail to rehearse for an upcoming phone conversation. Or, if you plan to call someone who never answers their phone, run through the voice message you intend to leave. By recording and listening to your own calls, you can pinpoint areas that might need strengthening and polish your delivery.
5. Easily Launch Videoconferences
Your company probably contracts with a videoconferencing provider. But sometimes you need a quick and simple way to enable a face-to-face interaction via your phone. Take advantage of a video chat app to easily connect with others, eliminating the need for dial-in numbers or logging into a URL.
6. Collaborate Online
Even if you think of yourself as a lone wolf, you need to collaborate with others to move deals through the pipeline. Whether you are trying to work through the details of a presentation or a proposal with colleagues, or are helping a prospect develop a business case, you can do it all from your smartphone using an app for storing, sharing, and editing documents.
7. Voice-to-Text Translation
With voice-to-text, your voice mails are automatically converted so you can read them as text messages. Not only does this save you from dialing in and listening to your voice mails, it makes it easier to respond and keep track of incoming and outgoing communications.
8. Save For Later
As you browse the web, you likely find interesting articles, reports, infographics, and other content that
pique your interest or would be worth sharing with prospects or customers. Rather than lose track of all that interesting content and information as you get distracted by an incoming notification or email, use an app that lets you bookmark and save the content you discover. Unlike traditional browser bookmarks, these apps are designed to help you collect and prioritize your follow-up to-do list so you will be sure to catch up when you have a moment.
9. Streamline Social Media Monitoring and Updates
Since social media plays such a big role in your sales success, you don’t want to be limited to monitoring and updating social media channels only from your laptop. Using a social media management app, you can follow social media streams to keep track of prospect activities and top-of-mind industry topics, and also schedule updates and posts from anywhere. That way you stay in the loop and maintain the momentum of your personal branding efforts online, even when out of the office or away from your desk.
10. Manage Your To-Do List
With so many activities to juggle, you need to stay highly organized to optimize your daily and weekly productivity. A streamlined, user-friendly to-do app will keep you on track so you never let an important task slip through the cracks.
11. Track Prospect and Industry News
Use Google Alerts to get notified when Google finds new results that match the search term(s) you want to track, such as about a person or company. You can indicate how often you get notifications, the types of sites you’ll see, and how many results you’ll see, to name a few. Whenever Google finds a match, you’ll receive an email. That means even while on the go, you’ll know when to reach out to a prospect or customer at just the right time.
Your smartphone is an essential sales tool. By taking advantage of all the ways you can use it to take care of your key selling activities, you’ll soon find your productivity soaring to new levels.
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Topics: B2B sales strategies and trends
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