Seven Must Have Apps For Sales Managers

If you work in sales, chances are you’re not the kind of person who thrives on routine and working in the same place day in day out. Sales involves thinking on your feet, adapting to new situations and people, and packing your bags at a moment’s notice to travel. The best sales managers are also efficient and organised. While some are born with these traits, others might need a helping hand. Luckily, an abundance of apps exist to help sales managers live out their full potential. Here are seven apps we think are ideally suited to the busy lifestyle of a sales manager:

• 1) Evernote

Jotting down ideas, information or important contact details in a spiral notebook might have been (and still is) the go-to solution for many, but the thing is, a notebook can be cumbersome. And what if you lose your pen? Remove these items permanently from your briefcase and download Evernote. The app is your portable, digital notebook and then some. It lets you write and record notes (by hand or with voice recognition), take pictures, store documents and access them across all your devices – even your desktop computer. You won’t have to manually transfer handwritten notes from a notepad to a CRM – instead you’ll be able to copy and paste the notes from the app straight into your system, saving you a lot of time and frustration after meetings.

• 2) Dragon

From Star Trek to Her, sci-fi films are filled with virtual assistants that require nothing but voice commands to carry out all kinds of tasks. Mobile assistance app Dragon has turned fiction into reality by converting voice memos into text messages, emails and social media updates. Simply tell the app what you want to do and it’s done. This is a brilliant app for those who live by multitasking, or those who hate typing on touch screens. You can also set reminders, surf the web and check the weather. The best thing is, with Dragon’s Attentive Mode, you don’t even need to unlock your phone to activate the app.

• 3) Slack

Keeping in touch with colleagues is essential to the proper functioning of any team – especially sales teams that move around a lot. You might think that email is doing the job just fine, but isn’t your inbox crying out for a detox anyway? Slack offers an easy way of communicating with your team. It’s user-friendly, has an attractive interface, and lets you share documents too. You can even create chatrooms and send direct messages. Think of it as Skype and email rolled into one.

• 4) Dropbox

Dropbox might not be anything new, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an indispensable piece of software. Being able to access all your documents at any time and from anywhere is pretty important for the travelling sales manager. True, you could always email that PDF to yourself and access it via email, but what happens when you have large folders you need to mobilise? With Dropbox installed on your desktop, laptop and any other mobile devices you might have, you can view and share anything you need to – pretty handy for when you’re squeezing in some pre-meeting prep on the train somewhere between London, Euston and Birmingham New Street.

• 5) DocScan

How many times have you taken a photo of your passport, a business card or an important document and sent it on via email to whoever needed it (I know I have)? This method is far quicker and more convenient than scanning, but it does come with some flaws. Sometimes the lighting isn’t ideal, or you just can’t fit the whole document onto one page. Hello, DocScan. This nifty app lets you take a photo of what you need in PDF format – documents, business cards, notes made on whiteboards, excerpts from books – and lets you edit, crop and annotate it until you’ve got a near perfect copy of your document. You can then export it to Evernote, Dropbox or email.

• 6) DocuSign

A bit like DocScan, DocuSign bridges the gap between offline and online with its offering that lets you sign documents electronically. Gone are the days of printing out forms, signing them by hand and then scanning them – because what are the chances of you accessing a printer and scanner when you’re on the road? The great thing about DocuSign is that multiple people can access a single document, if several signatures are required, and it works across any device. As well as letting you sign documents, you can use the app to store and manage them too.

• 7) Insightly

Want all the perks of a CRM, but don’t want to stop using Gmail? Then you need Insightly. The app integrates with email, DropBox, QuickBooks, Box, Outlook and MailChimp, amongst others, to bring you a tool that lets you manage leads, contacts and vendors, view email history, track project activity and performance, tap into social CRM and much more. No matter what your level of experience of CRM is (newbie to expert), Insightly can cater to you. It’s free for up to two users, and thereafter you pay on a sliding scale according to how many users require it.