App Attack!
Today is the monthly Meetup for the Sales Performance Group in Vancouver, and I’m here to liveblog it. Here’s the writeup from Meetup.com:
From conference calling, to video broadcasting and business card scanning iPhone’s and iPads are becoming the hardware of choice for many sales professionals. For those that want to fully maximize their use of social media and social networks these tools are some of the most effecient for doing so. (It’s not just about “Angry Birds”)
If you use these tools already or are sitting on the fence and pondering a jump to the world of Apple and their 1000’s of apps this Meetup will help you get the most out of your iPhone and iPad.
Your speakers will be Shane Gibson author of Sociable! And Guerrilla Social Media Marketing and Kyle Bennet, Apple Business Specialist and Director of Technical Services at Simply Computing.
Setting up right now. Agenda:
5:30pm Arrive and Mingle
6:00 pm Guest Speakers: Top 10 iPhone/iPad Apps for Sales Professionals
6:30 pm-8:00 pm – Share best practices and social mixer
Not entirely sure what the best practices for a social mixer are, but I guess we’ll find out.
Here is the CoverItLive coverage of the tweets. Coming soon:
Getting set up with Kyle from Simply as laptop jockey. Always good to have some experts on your team.
Tom from ThinkTomDotCom says: it’s an honour to intro Shane Gibson, because he’s a guy who practices what he preaches. He’s amazing. Kyle Bennett is at Simply.ca and they’ve been selling Macs for 20 years. I didn’t even know they were around for 20 years.
Shane says the selection process for these top ten apps was very scientific. “We looked at our phones…”. Now, who has LinkedIn? Pretty much everyone. Who has a LinkedIn app? Lots.
We spend a lot of time on the invitation side, but who has used the Reconnect button? One of my faves. It sees who I’ve been talking to and suggests connections. It’s different from the web-based app, searching recent contacts. It’s almost psychic. I look in there a couple of times a week. Be careful: if you really don’t know them, don’t ask for the invite, because they can and WILL report you for spam.
Has anyone ever connected in person via the LinkedIn app? Nobody. It’s a button at the bottom center. It’s an in person networking tool, like Bump.
You also have your entire database in your hand, and you can also of course look at updates. And a beta version: News. It takes popular links shared just within your network and gives you a pulse of top trending topics of your own network.
BusinessCardReader is the next. We tried Cardcam, and that’s kind of a swiss army knife but BusinessCardReader is specialized. works better with iPhone4. Take Photo of the card, then runs OCR over the image. Who’s got a card scanner in the office? Do you ever let those cards pile up, though? Do you take it with you to conferences? nah. You can quickly scan them and drop them into the address book and away we go. Way more mobile. I can actually take a picture on my computer screen of their signature and drop it in your database that way, too.
It’s also really accurate, and you can sort it by name or recency. It synchs with iPhone address book immediately. You can click on the picture icon and it brings up the image of the card, so if you’re a visual thinker it will help you.
GoodReader Kyle is talking about this. It’s the Swiss Army app: Dealing with attachments on a mobile device is challenging. GoodReader allows a hierarchical file system and take those files, send to goodreader and then open them and it’s often better than the specialized apps, and even send them out to different apps.
It works really well with DocumentsToGo, which allows great flexibility, frees you from having to use a computer with cloud documents or creating powerpoint, word, etc.
If you have trouble keeping organized, try OmniFocus. The Omni Group makes fantastic software. It’s a great interface, works on GTD principles, if you know that. It lets you create tasks tied to other tasks, eg meeting with Shane to develop presentation. You can also organize tasks by where you are. You can physically map them. Unlike anything else I’ve seen. You can make quick entries for tasks on iPad or iPhone. Best of all, it synchs through MobileMe or DropBox straight back to the computer.
MyNote: for collaborative work or mind mapping. Really easy touchscreen interface, that synchs really easily. Now back to Shane for Voice memo.
I use VoiceMemo which comes standard. It records audio, which is pretty basic. I like to use it for podcasts, or just record thoughts on the fly. Really easy to use and Share via MMS or email and then it ends up in the inbox.
Yammer: I would have liked to have Steven Jagger here to talk about it, but he’s catching a plane. It’s one part Twitter, one part calendars, one part project/task management/sharing. It’s within a closed team. You can collaborate on the fly in realtime.
Kyle: iWork. It’s probably the best suite of productivity tools for iPad. Numbers, Pages, Keynote are full-featured apps for spreadsheets, word processing, presentations. Shareable, and the best thing is when you need to make quick edits it’s easy. Apple makes its stuff look good, unlike some other things. It integrates with the photo library built into the iPad. You can do really advanced stuff with it, like advanced builds for presentations.
Shane: iMovie. How to use it as a sales tool. I did a pitch and once I was done, realized it was dry. It was a PDF with two screen caps. UGH. I can now record a message to my client, pull in photos, pull in pieces of presentation. The iMovie on the iPhone is significantly easier to use than the iMovie on your Mac! There is a real professional polish to the stuff you do on the fly, thanks to this app! This app makes you look good, fast. Shane gives the eg of being at a conference, taking some pix with the client, and making an iMovie and uploading it to their FB page while on the plane home. Talk about knock ‘em dead!
The PDF is nice, but it’s not going to share the tone and committment. The passion will come through in the movie.
The QR Code app OptiScan is like four bucks. One of the things Corning Cable Systems do is all their components have QR codes, so their techs can scan things and give them all kinds of details. Optiscan enables you to embed a couple of paragraphs, business card, etc easily.
Shane: iPhone and iPad apps are pretty fluid. We discovered a lot of them by “I wonder if someone has made one of these…” and then you find out eight people already have. It’s all there, in the palm of your hand. These tools enable you to do this without a ton of money and without being chained to your desk.
Kyle: It’s a tremendously freeing platform. You can collaborate with your peers, get things done. I know it’s an amazing revolution as Apple terms it. We expect a lot from iPad, it’s only been around a year, but the best is yet to come.
Some questions from the audience:
Is there a list of all the apps? Here’s the liveblog! Thanks for the shout-out, Shane.
When is Sociable for Realtors coming out? (the new book from Shane and Steve Jagger) We’re wrapping up the interviews for raw data. We’ll see, miracles do happen, June 1 is the deadline, but it WOULD be a miracle.
How do you get people off email and onto Yammer? Steve Jagger is always trying to train people to do this, but he has to repeat himself a lot, still, very effective.
Is there anything good for funnel management? Salesforce is kind of it at this point. There are all kinds of contact management systems, but in terms of sales management or good social crm they’re coming but it could be years, maybe months. They seem to rely on the desktop. Daylight is big on the Mac, but you’ve got to set it up on the desktop, it’s not standalone by any means. There is no tool specific to the mobile platform that doesn’t require your having the desktop version to anchor it.
Wrap-up. We would find so many different apps in each space, but the key is whether you’re a sales performance expert or social media maven, the less you can be tethered and the freer and more realtime you are, the more effective you can be at whatever it is that you do.