ToutApp adds team news feed to help salespeople get along

Like athletes, salespeople are constantly getting tips on how to run the race faster.

But, although they’re also highly competitive, salespeople can benefit by seeing what works for others on their team.

For sales productivity app ToutApp, the race is centered on email, presentations, and the occasional phone call. Today, the San Francisco-based company is releasing a new feature so individual sales people can get real-time tips about what works for their compatriots in sales or marketing.

Called Sales Beat, it provides a news feed that offers the most effective email templates, a leaderboard of top performers, tips on which content is getting the most responses, deal status updates — and a virtual gong to celebrate deal closings. Sales reps, marketing personnel, and managers can add comments and share content.

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Working together can matter. A 2013 study by the Miller Heiman Research Institute, for instance, found that 91 percent of top-performing sales teams say collaboration makes a difference.

Above: ToutApp’s new Sales Beat news feed, which appears on the side of a page

Image Credit: ToutApp

Sales Beat, launching on Windows and Mac computers, is the newest step in CEO and founder Tawheed Kader‘s vision that the company become “the Bloomberg terminal of salespeople,” where all of a salesperson’s relevant information is available immediately at a glance.

Of course, his company is not alone in that vision. Virtually every vendor with a sales software component intends to help salespeople cross that finish line just a bit sooner. The question is how.

For ToutApp, it begins in the inbox. “Most [of a salesperson’s workflow] to get a deal done is done inside an email,” Kader told me. Even though younger salespeople may be more inclined toward messaging, he said, “the people that they’re selling to love email.”

In the coming months, Kader said that the communication channel of the new Sales Beat feed will be complemented with social tools, potentially getting ToutApp closer to becoming a Bloomberg-like all-in-one utility.

Salespeople have no shortage of productivity options these days. Some, like Outreach, focus on scheduling pitches and followups via email or phone. The content-sharing LiveHive, centered on inside sales, now also offers customizable and trackable email templates. Others, like DemoChimp, concentrate on presentations, while MindTickle and similar applications want to keep sales reps up on their product knowledge.

Kader said that point solutions to salespeople’s needs, like Yesware for email tracking, are limited and do not offer ToutApp’s new collaborative feed or its emphasis on what the salesperson needs today.

At the higher end, he said, SAP, Salesforce, and other major marketing and sales platforms are oriented toward managing and interacting with their customer relationship management (CRM) databases-of-record, and not on the salesperson’s daily workflow of finding, nurturing, and selling.

In March, ToutApp announced $15 million raised in a series B round, and released an API for integration with contact info apps. The company says it currently has over 100,000 customers.