Google Now is presented as an intelligent personal assistant that delivers the right information at just the right time. Pretty awesome. After reading about it, it’s clear that there’s a market opportunity for a similar service targeted at sales reps.
Here’s how the service might work:
- Tight integration with CRM (Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Nimble, etc) and calendar (Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange)
- Analysis of rep’s top opportunities and prospects based on score, grade, timeline, and likelihood of closing
- Monitor prospects’ social media activity to determine if a contact is online so as to prompt the sales rep to make a call or send an email
- Review sales rep’s daily activity and automatically build recommendations based on previous success (e.g. a sales rep might have a higher close rate when doing demos in the morning and cold calls in the afternoon, so the service figures that out and prompts accordingly)
- Seamless geographic and timezone integration to make recommendations based on GPS location of the sales rep (e.g. out in the field for a meeting, automatically reference another prospect that’s in the area)
- Connection to phone systems (cell and VoIP) that both manually logs dialed calls as well as automatically initiates calls (e.g. there’s a 2pm conference call and the service rings the sales rep’s phone at 1:59pm)
Perhaps the functionality is a bit too broad but the general idea remains the same: analyze everything related to a sales reps and make intelligent recommendations at the right time and place. Sales reps are always looking to close more deals with a shorter sales cycle and smart software will help make that happen.
What else? What are your thoughts on the opportunity for a Google Now-like service for sales reps?
David Cummings on Startups 
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