Sales tools, do your sales reps have what they need?

As a sales representative I started working with the internet and a crm tool(customer relationship management) for prospecting. I used Yahoo, AltaVista, Google and others to search for companies websites and than start dialing to get the right contacts. Of course you almost always had the gate keeper, you know that salesblock that sent you to the right person sometimes. This was over 12 years ago now, if you're in sales and this is your method of calling still you need some tools to help you with your success.

(As I noted in one of my early posts, you can use the web to get past the gatekeeper and also take a cold call to a warm call very quickly with Web 2.0.)

Except for a short period of time working for PC Connection, I have had limited open resources to tools that assist with getting to the key contacts at a company. However I have been a long time user and subscriber to Jigsaw.com and recently added the paid service to Linkedin.

So a question I have to ask, who should be paying and providing the tools to help a sales representative be successful? Is it the role of the rep, or the company?

Both sides of the argument have valid points, lets review them:

Sales representative pays:

Money motivates a sales rep! (or at least it should) So as an agressive representative you would go out and make sure your spending your time wisely. Jigsaw only cost $1 per contact or 5 points (see how it works here), Linkedin is free, however there are benefits to the expanded service starting at only $24.95/month.

So easy to say, if you want to make more money spend some money to maximize your time. A drawback with this however is that you are likely to only get 20% or less of the representatives willing to invest in their success.

Company pays:

Investment in your team, every company provides training and resources to their employees. However as mentioned above only one company that I worked for provided Sales Tools to the team. Harte Hanks was a tool that provided a great wealth of information including contacts, titles, company infrastructure and planned upgrades. Information that when used and trained on can help the organization increase revenues. The key here is that the tool is available to the entire sales organization, of course you won't have 100% adoption but even 50% is a wise investment in the companies success.

So if your a company looking to increase revenues you should provide the resources to assist your entire team.

Here are a listing of some of the tools:

Jigsaw.com - Available through individual accounts or Enterprise wide services.

Harte-Hanks - Here is the B2B site for IT decision maker information.

One Source - Free trial available on the site, similar to a Harte-Hanks

Hoovers.com - Another database for contacts and customer information.

There are many more tools out there, if you are using one with your company that you feel is a benefit please add it to the comments below.

Thanks for reading, smile and dial!