Low cost sales enablement apps

Given my background in implementing Sales Enablement solutions at large complex enterprises, quick and light solutions for very small companies – with only a few products and a small sales force – haven’t been the focus of this blog.

However, I have always tried to cover even vendors that target small companies in my list of Sales Enablement market players.

List of free or low cost Sales Enablement apps:

Kbee kbee.app @tryKbee Knowledge Base Software. Kbee lets anyone create a searchable & branded knowledge base straight from Google Docs. Turn your content into a fast, searchable space for you, your team, or your customers. Create instantly: Turn your existing Google Drive folders & files into a professional knowledge base. Find answers quickly: Full-text search across all of your content. Match your brand: Customize your domain, logo, color schemes, & layout. Horatio, Inc. San Francisco, CA, USA

• Prezzi mobile for presentations / slide shows
• Canva
• Zoho
• Slack (Salesforce)
• DropBox for storing docs, images, PDFs & videos
• box.com for storing docs, images, PDFs & videos
• Google Drive (works for PDFs & presentations) and the stand-alone apps for docs & spreadsheets etc
• Microsoft Office apps
• iBooks for PDFs (without needing WiFi)
• Apple Notes or Evernote for capturing meetings notes
• Evernote for other use cases like scanning business cards and connecting on LinkedIn with one click
• Paper app fiftythree.com/paper for drawings & scribbles
• Immediately immediatelyapp.com cross-platform email tool for sales people
• AnyDesk as a free (for personal use) alternative to TeamViewer for remote desktop at a better performance & sharper displaying of graphics (at the moment Windows only)

http://anydesk.com:

AnyDesk is the world’s most comfortable remote desktop application. Access all your programs, documents and files from anywhere, without having to entrust your data to a cloud service. Your perso­nalized AnyDesk-ID is the key to your desk­top with all your applications, photos, docu­ments and files. And your data stays where it belongs. On your hard drive, and nowhere else.

Update November 5, 2014:

immediatelyapp.com is was a cross-platform email tool for salespeople designed to enable closing deals from anywhere, as opportunities happen. From both your phone & computer, you can track when your emails get opened, get reminders to follow up with leads, offer suitable meeting times in a couple taps, and use email templates for sales pitches. Automatically syncs your prospect emails into Salesforce, and pulls relevant contact information from LinkedIn, so that you always know who you’re talking to at-a-glance.

Sales enablement is a huge space with a lot of players and fragmentation.

If you’re a salesperson, you most likely use a CRM system, lead gen software, a campaign tool, and a bunch of email tools. Email is where the action happens, and there should be no need to have five apps opened to be able to reply to a sales prospect’s inquiry.

Sales, or closing deals in general, is no longer a 9-to-5 job. You’re always selling, always closing. If you don’t, your competition will. And so having perfectly-timed actionable information, and the right tools to take action, is the winning formula. We give you both, as opportunities happen, immediately. […]

Currently, we are free for individual users, and have a paid tier for enterprises. Very soon, we will be coming out with a ‘Pro’ version of the product, which will have a much deeper integration with CRM systems, and which will require a monthly subscription to use.

Update November 04, 2014:

Dropbox partners with Microsoft to offer Office integration in the next few weeks. iOS & Android users will be able to edit Office docs from Dropbox. Office for iPad users will access Dropbox files within apps and share via Dropbox.

Access Dropbox files from the Office app and save new files to Dropbox. You can now sync your docs and keep them safe without leaving the Office app.

Update October 6, 2014 on the evernote blog:

Scannable
[…] mobile app called Scannable […] For the on-the-go experience, our goal is to transform business cards and receipts into something immediately actionable and sharable. When you’re back at your desk, the app lets you control the desktop scanner and allows others on your network to scan, turning the ScanSnap Evernote Edition into an Evernote-friendly office scanner.

Presentation Mode
Evernote is making meeting faster and more collaborative by eliminating the need for slides. Connect your computer, click on presentation mode, and the same note you’ve been working on is now beautifully displayed on the big screen. As you talk your team through your work, the note stays open on your computer allowing you to immediately take feedback and make changes. Of course, you may want to control how text and images flow on the screen, so we’re adding handy tools to define breaks so that just the right amount of words and images appear per screen. […]

Penultimate
[…] handwriting app for iPad is getting a complete redesign. […] the app is rebuilt and reconsidered with a focus on creating the most lifelike writing experience […] also enhancing the connection between Penultimate and the Adonit Jot Script Stylus.

In the responses to the following question on quora.com, Tobin Harris wrote a good one:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-the-iPad-as-a-sales-enablement-tool

“[…] you can get good mileage out of the iPad using apps like this:

Low cost sales enablement apps

• Prezzi mobile for presentations / slide shows
• DropBox for storing images, PDFs and videos
• iBooks for PDFs (without needing WiFi)
• Apple Notes or Evernote for capturing meetings notes
• Paper app for drawings and scribbles

[…]

CRM integration will become more important for sales teams. Who wants to double enter their meeting notes via the laptop?
The fact that the iPad is instant-on, lightweight and has good battery life makes it a very viable replacement for paper based sales aids […]”

Of course, sharing many different Prezzi / presentation files, PDFs, forms, documents, images, and other media files across a sales team of more than one person will require a lot of discipline in order to achieve that everyone presents a consistent story / look&feel and only the most up-to-date version. When this becomes a problem, the more sophisticated Sales Enablement solutions come into play as they can sit on top of document management systems with ‘version control’, ‘tagging from controlled vocabulary’, and ‘user access rights management’ or can integrate with all kinds of sources/repositories behind the corporate firewall.

See my list of Sales Enablement market players.