10 Tools For The New Economy: How to Work Better, Faster, and Cheaper

A wide range of new tools exist to help you do business faster, cheaper, and better. Discover ideas here and start making a difference in your sales and marketing program today.

1) Online meetings save time and expense. Use the online service GoToMeeting.com to set up quick conference calls and make your computer desktop viewable to your audience. This format of meeting can be helpful when you have a sales presentation to review with an audience. The service more than pays for itself if it assists in closing a single sale or saves even one occasion for travel.

2) Video Conferencing, similar to conference calls with a shared computer desktop, are another way to span great distances without great costs. The most popular solutions provider in this area is Webex. Cisco Systems has also introduced a compelling service offering under the brand name Cisco TelePresence.

3) 'Google Maps' and 'Google Earth' are two relatively new, amazing applications that can help you identify the surrounding benefits of a property. Identify topography more easily than ever, access to recreation and travel routes, access to civic areas, proximity to landmarks, and more. The free Google Maps service is available online at Google.com. Google Earth is a free application you can download to your computer and begin to use immediately.

4) Protect your digital files and your business. Mozy.com is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.

5) Understand your buyer better than ever. Need to know what a buyer paid for a currently owned property? Odds are that this public information can be found in one free, online source, Zillow.com.

6) Read blogs from others in your industry. You may subscribe to a journal or other trade publication, but what are people just like you finding to be successful. Odds are, there are some folks blogging about your particular geographic market, your target market, or your sales and business style. Use Google.com to search for and find those bloggers; then bookmark them or subscribe to their RSS feed using the free personalized home page option at Google.com.

7) How much should you pay employees? Salary.com is a combination free/premium online service for identifying prevailing salary levels by skill level, job position, and zip code. Use it to better understand what your competitors would pay to recruit your best people away from you. Conversely, insure that you are not over-paying for labor to a degree that could make you less competitive in closing sales.

8) Need a lawyer, or just a legal document? LegalZoom.com has helped some clients save money in common legal matters. Created by top attorneys, it helps you create reliable legal documents online. You answer a few questions online and your documents are sent to you within a day or two.

9) Google Alerts is a free service from Google.com that provides a free, emailed notification when any topic of interest appears on the Internet in new web pages or on a new website. Use Google Alerts to monitor a developing news story that affects your area, keep current on a competitor or industry, or discover new website links to your lot, home, commercial sales efforts or other projects.

10) Get an iPhone. Are you still using the cell phone you got a couple of years ago and just seem to be used to using? You can have Google Maps and the entire Internet in your pocket for less cost than you think. Using the widely supported Edge Network, a conglomerated web data service of AT&T and other cell providers, this handy tool is built for access. Have a large team to optimize? Mobile to mobile calls on AT&T are all supported. With recent steps by Apple to open the iPhone for developers, the iPhone is turning out to be quite a platform for business.