Research Your Sales Prospects with Clipmarks

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When doing sales pre-call planning and research, many of us use online bookmarking tools like del.ico.us.

Not too long ago, we wrote an extensive post about how that could work for you so if you’re unfamiliar with this free service, you may want to read that post first.

The problem with bookmarking as we know it today, whether online or in your web browser, is that you’re essentially saving a full page of text and images for later review.

And that seems a bit overkill if you consider that you’re often only interested in one sentence, a paragraph or a small section of the online article or news report you found. Think of a quote from the CEO, a two line announcement of an acquisition or the appointment of a new VP.

With a potentially high number of saved bookmarks related to each potential prospect and a long list of prospects you may be interested in pursuing, you run the risk of becoming a full-time researcher. And all of that takes away from valuable selling time.

Clipmarks, a free online service, offers a solution for this information overload problem.

Instead of saving the whole page in a manner described above, Clipmarks.com allows you to select bits and pieces of relevant text from web pages and it lets you combine all of these individual clippings, from multiple pages, on one single Clipmark page. This page cites the source of the clipping, so it’s easy to track back to the original article should you need more information.

Now, this Clipmark page - which can optionally be shared with the Clipmark community - can now be bookmarked to a service such as del.icio.us.

You know have all relevant prospect research material on one single page and, most importantly, you’ve just saved yourself a tremendous amount of work.

While Clipmarks offers, as far as we could see, the most extensive service, it’s not the only offering in this „web highlighter” market. Google offers Notebook, there’s a powerful tool called iLighter and there are services such as CiteBite and Diigo.

If you decide to play around with any of these services, we’d appreciate your feedback. Use our contact form or simply post a comment below.

For more pre-call planning ideas, check our overview page.