It happens to the best of us. Few things are scarier for an ad sales rep than being caught totally unprepared for your ad sales presentations. Perhaps you forgot your laptop in the car that is at the shop being repaired this week, grabbed the wrong presentation materials rushing out the door, or you happen upon a great lead on the train ride home. These incidents don’t have to thwart your chances for getting the sale. In fact, played correctly, this can show your potential client-to-be how well you work under pressure. Your smartphone or tablet armed with the right apps is all you need to knock their socks off with an amazing sales pitch. Here are our recommendations for the ad sales person’s mobile must-haves:

• Cloud Storage (ex. Dropbox, Box, Skydrive): Saving your documents, presentations, marketing materials, etc. to cloud storage allows access to them anytime you need them from any device.
• A CRM or Project Collaboration App (ex. Salesforce, Basecamp, Sugar CRM, Trello, Podio): Access client contact profiles on your mobile device by downloading your company’s CRM app.
• A Mobile Hotspot: Most of us have at one time tried presenting in a place without Wi-Fi. Well this can save the day: most cell phone plans offer, for an additional fee, the ability to turn your phone into a wireless hotspot allowing you to use your laptop or tablets everywhere.
• Business Card Scanner (ex. CardMunch, Google Goggles, CamCard): No data entry. No mountains of business cards. With just a click, contact info is entered automatically.
• Mobile Card Reader (Square, NCR Silver, Intuit): Take credit card payments to your device.
• GPS (Google Maps, Scout, Navfree): Get directions or even suggestions for a close restaurant.
• Presentation app (Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, SlideRocket): Present anywhere on the go.

Igniting ad-sales growth.

Read last month’s tip, “Native Advertising: The Marketing Chameleon.”