Selligy: The iPhone personal assistant for salespeople

Selligy, an app launching this month, promises to get salespeople to meetings prepared and on time by automatically integrating scheduling data from calendar, Salesforce, Google maps, and more.

Founders Usman Muzaffar and Nilay Patel quit their hectic jobs in sales after one too many professional imbroglios. “I’d walk into a company’s lobby and forget the customer’s name I was visiting. Or the receptionist couldn’t find the customer’s mobile number,” said Patel in an interview with Venturebeat. “I needed a service to pull all this together for me.”

According to the founders, your smartphone should function more like a personal assistant, with all the data you need in one place. Currently in beta, Selligy will account for local traffic and tell you when to hit the road to get to a meeting on time, save info to your address book, and connect you to a conference call in seconds, with no dial-in necessary. Patel said he shadowed salespeople for months to learn how they prepare for meetings and adapted the design accordingly.

It’s a huge market opportunity, but the biggest challenge will be to overcome customer-relationship management giants, including Salesforce, and established project-management veterans like Basecamp. But Patel is confident about the app’s prospects. “Vendors are doing a terrible job on mobile,” he said.

Selligy is one of 15 mobile products competing today for best in class at the Innovation Competition at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco.