It reminds me of the Wall Street Journal that I had subscribed to for many years init’s front page function. If you recall the front page had two columns of teasers. One had content that was of business focus, and the other was of mainstream news. You might see twelve to eighteen within each of those columns and you were then able to scan quickly down each column and jump to the rest of the article buried back in the pages of the paper. iGoogle works in the same way but is available to any Internet connected device, the teasers are simply links that take you to the online source of the rest of the information. Select RSS feeds from your competitors and customers sites and blogs, as well as for the Twitter feeds of those key search terms and they will be automatically fed into your Google Reader and your iGoogle page for review and action.

Gist: If you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client, Gist will provide a wealth of information that is connected to anyone in your contacts database, both individual or company. Gist is one of the tools that I call an “aggregator”, a tool that pulls in or aggregates information from many sources across the Internet on a 24 x 7 basis and makes it available to me in a format that I already spend much of my day with – email. Gist scours mostof the social sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as a number of news services and web sites, scrubbing any relevant information about those contacts contained in my contacts database. When I open my calendar and see I have a meeting with Scott today, Gist will provide a screen of relevant and fresh content about Scott’s recent online activity, news information, along with my history of messages, notes and meetings involving him in the past. Quite a time saver and provides me the ability to deliver on expectations business analytics

There are plenty of other tools, most of which I have written about on the Fill the Funnel blog, that will help you learn how you stack up against the competition, the level of satisfaction of your customers and prospects and what you can do to deliver what you promise, when you said you would, and at the price that you quoted.

Miles Austin is recognized as one of the leading authorities on Web Tools for sales with deep experience in the selection, strategy and tactics necessary to maximize sales productivity. By packaging both hands-on “how-to” training for sales Web Tools and the leading social media platforms, he delivers real world results in any sales environment.