iPad - the guerrilla sales meeting companion.

I’ve not taken a laptop to a sales meeting in over 2 years. Nope, these days the iPad seems to have everything I need. The key selling point is convenience - it’s easy to carry, has a long battery life, and is instant to launch. It also has a great selection of apps for note taking and presentations.

What apps do I use for sales meetings?

Unlike some of our much much larger enterprise customers, I take a guerrilla approach to using the iPad for sales meetings. I’m still experimenting, but so far I get great value from these apps:

• Apple Notes for simple note taking
• Paper for quickly sketching ideas
• Prezi for presentations
• DropBox for ad-hoc images and PDFs

Keeping it simple with Apple Notes

I absolutely love the built in iPad notes app for taking notes during sales meetings. It’s simple, fast, and just works. It also keeps in sync with the OSX desktop version if your on Mountain Lion.

There are literally hundreds of notes apps out there, many with handwriting recognition, freehand sketches etc. Personally I find this to be all too much crud. I just want to take notes. If I really want to sketch an idea, I’ll flick into Paper app.

DropBox for ad-hoc resources and PDFs

If I want to present video, images or PDF’s, I tend to use DropBox to flick through resources. This works well for me, except when I don’t have WiFi. Then I tend to copy important PDF’s to iBooks.

Prezzi for non-linear presentations

Prezi is a presentation tool in the same vain as Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. However, Prezzi takes a different angle and allows you to build presentations online, and in quite a unique way. Check out the web site for examples.

It’s even more handy if you have a projector in the room. And you can download presentations to work without WiFi which is handy.

Collecting content guerrilla style?

I was chatting to our chairman, and we discussed the idea that the smartphone and iPad could be not just great for showing content and taking notes, but also for collecting content. For example:

• Taking quick short videos of customer thoughts and testimonials
• Taking images of products in use in the field

I think this would work great for my business, what about yours?

Should you use more advanced sales enablement apps?

There is a lot happening in the sales-enablement space. This is something that we’re focusing on heavily.

The general idea is that your company uses an app that is designed specifically to support your sales team during meetings. For example:

• An app that connects to your CRM to get customer details
• An app that let you post meeting notes directly to CRM
• An app that let’s you curate the best sales collateral in your business - PDF’s, videos, micro-sites and more

I’ll be talking more about this, since we’ve developed a number of these and they’re well suited to larger sales teams.