I recently complained, er, wrote about the massive amount of noise online and the headaches associated with sorting through it all. Mining through blogs, email, social media, etc. to find relevant information about my clients and prospects is a huge part of my role, so I am always on the look out for tools that make it a little easier. Today I stumbled upon a web application called Gist that appears promising. Gist is one of many emerging online contact management applications out there, but this one deserves a closer look.
The set-up is painless, you simply enter where your various contact lists could be found — Email, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. and then the system pulls all of that information into one place quickly and intuitively. While I need to test drive it a bit more, I can already tell that this could be a great tool for those of us in sales.
The application is divided into three sections 1) Dashboard 2) People and 3) Company.
Dashboard
The dashboard view gives you a snapshot of everything going on within the companies and contacts you manage. You can control the information shown to include companies and contacts, Facebook feeds, recent tweets, etc. The dashboard would be a great way to prepare for a phone call or a meeting because all of your conversations and the contacts activity is right there.
People
This tab is a great way to manage accounts for your contacts and those you wish to connect with. You can keep an eye on their recent tweets, see their updated LinkedIn profile and check out that contacts latest blog before heading out to meet them.
Company
Great pre-meeting research tool. Simply add the company and their url to your contact list and Gist will supply you with their recent blog posts, Tweets and breaking news.
Interesting application. Going to give it a try for awhile. Stay tuned. Are you using Gist? What do you think?
