Creating A Google Alert

Creating a Google Alert is easy

The greatest sales planning tool ever invented

I am often surprised how many people don't know about the greatest sales planning tool ever invented. It's free, easy to use, and will provide you with information that will help you "Wow" your customers. The tool I am speaking of, is Google Alerts. Once created, a Google Alert quietly keeps an eye open, ready to let you know the moment your customer gets mentioned anywhere on the web. This can include press releases, blogs, financial reports, news items, or any other posts that will be of interest to you as you prepare to visit a customer, or potential customer.

For example, let's say I am selling a major software package for business. Every time I made a sale, I would create a Google Alert with the names of the main individuals I dealt with during the sale. In this way, if one of those individuals goes to work for another company, the moment the announcement hits the web I will receive an alert about the announcement. I would be sure to send a congratulatory email to the individual and let him or her know that I will be in touch once he or she has settled in. I could then plan to visit that individual at their new company knowing that I already have an "In" there.

In the meantime, I would create another Google Alert for the company the individual has just joined. In this way, I will gain knowledge about the company while I prepare to visit them.

I will demonstrate this by picking on Brad Wilson at Microsoft Dynamics, because CRM is one of my favourite topics. I have created a Google Alert under the criteria: "Brad Wilson", "Microsoft"

I have just received the alert for today in my email. I will paste it here.

If I am interested in reading further, I can click on the link which opens the story.

The interesting thing in this situation is that Brad Wilson was simply mentioned in someone else's blog. The fact that I am doing the same will mean that once I publish this post, the alert for tomorrow will include this post as well.

I will continue to build on these ideas in upcoming posts. For my next post, I will create a video on how to create a Google Alert.