Sales Portals, Business Research, Leads, Proposals, Presentations, Web Conferenceing, CRM Software, Organization, Portability, Map Services, Channel Selling Tools

Sales Associations

http://www.upsa-intl.org/ - This site provides you the tools and methodology you need to get the most out of any business transaction. It includes free articles, tips, opinions, and links to other points of interest on the web in an effort to define "What" Professional Sales really is, and what it's not.

http://www.smei.org/ - SME-International is the worldwide association of sales and marketing management. Founded in 1935, SME is the primary forum in which the world's top sales and marketing managers meet.

http://www.strategicaccounts.org - National account management evolved in the 1960's out of the need for sellers to devote significant corporate resources to large, complex accounts having special requirements. This site is a member-based association for those sellers.

Sales Portals

http://www.saleslinks.com/
Mentor Associates Inc. maintains this exhaustive listing of sites of interest to sales professionals, including techniques, careers, personal development, use of e-mail and the Internet, sales technology, discussion groups, and inspirational material.

http://www.sales.com/
This site amounts to a subscription-based on-line sales automation tool for small and medium-sized businesses. It also includes training and motivational material, and information services intended to promote more effective selling.

www.justsell.com
This on-line magazine and discussion forum for sales professionals that selects a different topic each month (such as phases of the sales cycle, or selling as a career) and offers articles and software tools addressing it.

http://www.sellingpower.com/
This portal, maintained by Selling Power Magazine, includes links covering many topics of interest to sales professionals.

http://www.smartbiz.com/
This site amounts to an online encyclopedia of business-related articles. Of course, many concern sales and selling.

http://salesheads.com/
This is a great site for sales career planning, finding the new job you want and articles for salespeople. Check this site out!

http://runresumerun.com/
A great new web site to look for a new technology sales career. This service can send your resume to companies, recruiters or publish it on web sites.

Business Research

http://www.hoovers.com/
This company has both a free and a subscription Web site offering corporate information, including financials and names of executives, on thousands of public and private firms. The subscription service offers more in-depth information but the free service will suffice for corporate phone numbers and addresses.

http://www.excite.work.com/
This business information portal includes business and industry news, articles on business-related topics, links to sources of business and financial news. It boasts of having profiles on more than 11 million firms.

http://www.edgar-online.com/
Want to read a company’s annual report? You can do that here, and look at all its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

http://www.prnewswire.com/
Press releases put out by corporations often end up here, where you can follow the news and search archives. (The same press releases are often posted on the corporation’s Web sites as well, but there you can’t compare them to the competition’s press releases.)

http://www.individual.com/
This division of office.com provides individualized news via the Web, free of charge, delivered in the morning via e-mail.

http://www.office.com/
This news site and discussion forum follows news and trends in 150 different market niches.

http://www.findsvp.com/
This site offers access to live consultants for quick advice and research. Plus you can contract for customized research, such as customer satisfaction surveys. Obviously, this is not a free site.

http://www.companyslueth.com/
Free, customized information on companies you select is sent to you as e-mail daily by this site. It combs not only SEC filings, but also patent and trademark filings, message boards, and other niches on the Web.

http://www.census.gov/
The Census Bureau does more than count heads, and the result is a lot of business and demographic data, which you can find at this site.

Leads

http://www.usadata.com/
Through this site you can specify and order mailing lists, and buy a wide variety of market research reports and demographic profiles.

http://www.infousa.com/
Specify and order mailing lists drawn from files of more than 12 million American businesses and 161 million households,

http://www.dnb.com/
This is the Dun and Bradstreet site, and besides business credit reports there are various business analysis tools.

http://www.harrisinfo.com/
The Harris InfoSource site boasts of a database covering more than 400,000 manufacturing establishments.

http://www.superpages.gte.net/
This “phonebook” site lets you search for businesses nationwide, by name and by phone number.

http://www.cyberdirect.com/
This site offers information on the direct marketing business and links to businesses that offer direct marketing services, including mailing list services.

http://www.postmasterdirect.com/
PosterMasterDirect offers e-mail mailing lists, with e-mail addresses of people who have “opted-in” at one of their corresponding e-commerce sites. (In other words, the people on the lists at some point indicated a willingness to receive e-mail promotions. E-mail sent in bulk to people who have not opted-in is considered spam, and can get you in trouble.)

http://www.leads-link.com/
This site, too, gives you access to opt-in e-mail lists.

http://www.justleads.com/
This site is a branch of justsell.com, and offers free access to its database of companies.

http://www.myprospects.com/

This site allows you to search and download marketing lists based on pre-defined profiles that you select yourself.

http://www.thomasregister.com/
You may have seen the 14-volume Thomas Register in the library. Well, now you can access its contents at this Web site, for free.

http://www.zapdata.com/
This site sells lists, company profiles and industry reports from various sources.

http://www.bidradar.com/
You can see what RFPs are being issued by the U.S. Government through this site, using material from the official Commerce Business Daily.

http://www.daily-leads.com/
This site provides a steady supply of qualified leads generated when people opt-in to any of their network of business-related Web sites.

http://www.findmorebuyers.com/
This service offers customizable mailing lists in a number of consumer and business niche categories.

http://www.americanmanufacturers.com/
The International Manufacturers Gateway includes a tool for analyzing market chains, plus an extensive database of manufacturers.

Proposals

http://www.santcorp.com
Sant Corporation offers tools for generating proposals, sales letters, RFP responses, and sales presentations.

http://www.salesproposals.com/
This site offers, for various prices, tips, tools and books about designing and analyzing sales proposals.

http://www.pragmatech.com/
Pragma Software offers proposal automation software, especially its “RFP Machine.”

Presentations

http://www.spinitar.com/
SPINITAR sells, integrates and support presentation systems, including communications and A/V units.

http://www.presentationuniversity.com/
This site offers tutorials in effective presentations, plus software and clipart for PowerPoint and other formats.

http://www.presentationmaster.com/
This site covers news in the A/V industry, and includes hardware reviews and shoppers’ guides.

http://www.presentersonline.com/
This service produces graphic presentations, which you then access over the Web.

http://www.webex.com/
This service lets you set up online meetings and presentations. All each participant needs is a browser and a phone – they conference call while looking at the on-screen material, which each user can annotate. The service can also be used for software demos.

http://www.placeware.com/
PlaceWare similarly offers multi-seat Web conferencing with an emphasis on PowerPoint material.

http://www.blox.com/
A merger of AlphaBlox Corp. and HalfBrain.com, Blox has software that lets you turn existing presentation files into Web presentations.

http://www.mshow.com/
This service sets up Internet video presentations, handling everything from content development to after-show reports.

http://www.brainshark.com/
Odd name, but this firm offers multi-media authoring software that, among other things, lets you adds voicemail to a PowerPoint presentation.

http://www.webconferencingdepot.com/

Conduct online presentations, share software applications and web-pages via a standard web browser. Low prices with no contract.

Customer Relationship Management Software

http://www.crmcommunity.com/
News, articles and discussions about CRM and CRM vendors are on tap here.

http://www.crmguru.com/
Find out what all the excitement is about concerning customer relationship management. The site is maintained by Front Line Solutions, a CRM consulting firm.

http://www.upshot.com/
I think that UpShot is probably the best package available today for large account management. It boasts of being a customizable but complete end-to-end sales management application that lets you see into your sales pipeline and focus on the best deals.

http://www.salesforce.com/
I have found this site’s service to be very effective for small sales teams. It offers integrated customer support management, marketing reporting and analysis, best-of-breed sales force automation, and lead management.

http://www.agillion.com/
Agillion emphasizes two-way collaboration and customer interaction, and provides a way to offer customers Internet access to customized account information.

http://www.salesnet.com/
Salesnet boasts of having a feature-rich, user-friendly Web-based sales management application.

http://www.xsellsys.com/
This service touts itself as offering mid-range CRM, along with sales training, skills development, and multi-channel and vertical market integration.

http://www.viasync.com/
ViaSync is a fully integrated online Customer Relationship Management Service -- integrating sales, support, and marketing.

Organization

http://www.officeclip.com/
This service lets you share documents according to your routing rules, and also share a calendar, bulletin boards, project tracking, CRM features, time management and expense reporting, paging, and other office automation features with members of your “virtual office.” The service is free.

http://www.magicaldesk.com/
MagicalDesk lets you keep your calendar, address book, message center and stored files on a Web site.

http://www.interact.com/
The company that sells the ACT! contact management software package also maintains this site, emphasizing the ways that ACT! can be put to use.

Portability

http://www.palm.com/
Forget laptops, the world is going to palm-top computers. In the U.S. this increasingly means PDAs (Personal Data Assistants) running the Palm operating system. You can find PDA information at this site and at the site of their competitor, www.handspring.com. (PDA data entry is typically done from a desktop, so don’t be put off by the tiny virtual keyboards.) With add-ons, they also offer wireless communications and cellular connectivity. (WAP phones also offer cellular access to the Internet, but they don’t run applications like Palm devices, while costing as much,)

http://www.palmgear.com/
Like I say, the advantage of Palm PDAs is that they can run applications, and you can find thousands of them here.

http://www.paypal.com/
This electronic payment system includes a way to beam money from your PDA.

http://www.blackberry.net/
An alternative to the Palm, the Blackberry PDA is increasingly popular, thanks to its real (albeit small) keyboard.

http://www.igo.com/
One-stop shopping for accessories for mobile devices is the theme here, including accessories for notebooks, phones, and PDAs, camcorders, two-way radios, and voice recorders.

http://www.point.com
If you are interested in getting a cell phone, this site will let you research the service plans and phones available in your city.

Map Services

http://www.mapquest.com/
There’s nothing like a customized map showing the exact location of your destination, so that getting lost becomes one less thing to worry about. You can even download the maps to a PDA, and there are driving directions and a road trip planner.

http://www.mapblast.com/
This service is similar, except it will also add fast food restaurants to your map.

http://www.travroute.com/
This site offers products to help with complicated, long-term travel planning, or to map out sales territories.

http://www.garmin.com/
This is a good place to go if you are interested in consumer electronics that let you get around using GPS (Global Positioning System) technology.

Channel Selling Tools

http://www.partnerware.com/
Partnerware offers PRM (Partner Relationship Management) software to manage indirect channel sales.

http://www.channelwave.com/
Channelwave offers PRM software with an emphasis on its “Partner Loyalty System.”

Great Product Links

http://computers.kontron.com
Kontron offers industrial PC products such as rack mount computers and servers, single board computer, PC104 plus, embedded systems, atx motherboards, computer telephony, and more.

http://www.binomic.com/
WebTracker is a powerful service that shows you the names and details of the organizations that visit your website.