For any modern entrepreneur I`d suggest the sweet spot of Cloud applications you should master is the holy trinity of these three killer apps – Linkedin, Salesforce.com and Google+ Apps.

In short these cater for the end-to-end requirements of a sales operation, so you can begin selling and closing deals.

Establishing successful sales teams is naturally a milestone you want to put in place as quickly as possible, and so having the tools as equally as quick as possible is one of the primary benefits of on demand IT.

Getting these three running gets you out knocking on doors, capturing prospect contact details and submitting initial proposals and even hooplah customer contracts.

As things evolve you can add everything else: E-contracting for speeding up return of those contracts, better e-marketing automation and social media publishing. These are also staples but the first three gets your beachhead established.

Google+ Apps

You probably already have a good understanding of the value of Linkedin and Salesforce.com – One is a public market where you meet every one and network to find and work with contacts, and the other where you record the details of those transactions to better manage the overall process.

The most interesting point to note about the Google proposition is that i) there are many different component parts, and ii) this includes both a public market as well as internal automation tools.

By this I mean Google+ is a social community akin to Linkedin, you can share links into groups on a broader, global basis, but then you can also add different levels of privacy settings so that these are restricted to various groups of business contacts, eg. your ‘Office Team’ or `Sales Network`.

Google+ calls these “Circles” and it`s a very quick and slick way of managing that aspect of information privacy. In short it`s like your own “private Twitter” where you only send Some Type of tweets to a controlled group of Some Type of people.

It also then bridges in Google Hangouts, the uber-slick desktop videoconferencing app, so that this flow of information can evolve into more in-depth dialogue as and when needed.

With the bread and butter of Google Apps then being the office productivity suite (Word type editor, spreadsheets, etc.) as well as email, calendaring et al, you can see how they cater for the remaining part of the spectrum where you need this mix of desktop tools to work on writing client proposals for the contacts you meet.

If you are interested in learning more on this topic, check out our Small Business eBook, and if you`d like to see it hands on in action, check out our seminar series.

The next scheduled event is Municipality as a Service. This will showcase Google+ Apps for the towns and cities of Canada.

Related articles

• Enterprise Social – Ensuring Your Sales Team Stays Ahead of the Curve (cloudbestpractices.net)