Five Great Free iPad Apps for Sales Pros

In my experience, most free things are worth almost exactly what you pay for them. That's also true of iPhone and iPad apps. Many of the free ones barely function, are chockablock with ads, or are simply advertisements for the full version of the product.

There are exceptions to that rule, though. Here are five free iPad apps for sales professionals that users have rated three stars or above. There are others, but these are the ones that struck me as particularly useful. Note: the first first on the list, Brainshark, got 4.5 stars, making it far and away the highest rated free app for sales.

• Brainshark. Plays multimedia presentations on your iPad or iPhone. To build the presentations, you upload a PowerPoint presentation to the free myBrainshark.com site, add your voice by phone or microphone, and then enhance your content with video clips, photos, surveys, polls, attachments and so forth. You use the app to display presentations, share links to presentations via email, and post links to your presentations on social media sites. Typically uses include sales presentations or on-demand sales training.
• MileBug. Keeps track of the miles you drive for business, charity, or medical reasons. This is a very simple application that can track the miles that you use for multiple activities, even if you use different vehicles. You can set up frequent destinations and even supports international travel. More importantly, it can create reports that you can use in your expense accounts or for the IRS. The free version is limited to 10 trips, but you can make a report of those 10 trips and then start over.
• Hoover's Near Here. Finds companies based on proximity to a particular location. You can refine the search to include ranges of revenue, number of employees, keywords, and so forth, and save those filters for future searches. Once you locate a prospect, you can place a phone call, visit the company's Web site, get step-by-step driving directions and find local competitors. You can even bookmark your favorite locations and favorite companies.
• Sales CRM EZi Lite. Probably the best free CRM package available on the platform. It has many of the features that you'd expect, including contact management, pipeline managements, sales process support, historical sales, and forecasting, all collected into a series of easily understood dashboards. The lite version doesn't have the full functionality, but there's plenty in this free version for most sales pros.
• The SellingPower Podcast. This isn't a "app" per se, but rather a podcast that's a power resource for sales professionals and sales managers. Over the years, publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner has interviewed dozens of sales gurus, marketing mavens, and sales executives. The result is a complete video library of the best thinking in the sales industry. Since most of the interviewees are professional communicators, these are very easy to listen and absorb.

READERS: I'm open for suggestions about other hot apps that are useful for sales pros, especially free (over very inexpensive) ones.

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[Akabord]

Hi,

Thank you for this useful information.

The MileBug app is quite handy if you're on the roads. By the way in their recent update (version 2.5.1 - released on Nov. 8th 2012) you can finally separate the date and time columns in the report.

I also came across a relatively new app called Superep by Wrnty.com.
It's a very handy app for displaying your products on the iPad and manage quick order taking.
The nice thing about it is that it hooks into your inventory database so it is always up to date in terms of quantity, pricing, etc. Here is their App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/superep-catalog-order-management/id454059554

Hope this helps.

[greatrat00]

I work for Blue Orange Apps in Panama City, Panama. We made iPO.

It's an app that a bunch of people with sales reps teams, tradeshows, wholesale and retail business have been using. iPO - Catalog & Sales (http://ipo-app.com). It's for iPad. It has a bunch of features a lot of people have found useful, such as:

Freemium model - very few, or no other apps do this - that I've seen. We actually just implemented this to get word of mouth out - like Dropbox did.
Very quick to set up. Just fill an Excel sheet and drag product pictures into your Dropbox
Pictures are displayed upfront and products are given priority, like a Catalog app should be. No head-akes setting up a bunch of other stuff
Really easy to integrate with any CRM through a flat file API - products, clients and orders all importable and exportable with CSV files
The app is pretty quick, navigation-wise.
Categories, subcategories and even multifiltered subsubcategories
Global product search
Camera barcode scanning - we'll be looking into laser barcode scanning soon
Interface is really intuitively designed
Purchase orders are sent to client and back end office
You can sell offline - products are all local on the iPad - this is critical
You can take client and sales rep signature with really good digital signature technology