I'm not in inside sales, I'm a consultant, but 95% of my interaction with prospects and customers occurs over the phone and Internet, so I think I can bring some insight to inside sales pro's, consultants and particularly SMB salespeople working from home.
In the past 18 months I have used Glance, Fuze, Webex, GotoMeeting, Adobe QuickConnect and Join.me, either as a tool provided by the company, or as a personal subscriber. I have no financial affiliation with any of these providers. This assessment is application-specific based on my work profile and may not be relevant in your work environment.
If you require fast screen-sharing and hassle-free, download-free interaction
with prospective clients and customers, then tools that require a downloadable client are sub-optimal. I don't use a Webcam in my conferences, so I don't need the higher-end video capabilities that come with Webex and Gotomeeting. If I want to do a face-face Web meeting I will use Skype, but the dynamic is usually social with a friend or acquaintance and the connection set up in advance.
Containing costs
Containing cost is important in a small business and the overhead of CRM, web conferencing, phones, survey software, marketing automation, and all of the other ancillary monthly subscriptions can quickly run into thousands of dollars a month. High cost and an intermittent usage profile that is what led me to explore alternatives to the conferencing heavyweights Gotomeeting and Webex I had used in the past. My subscription to Gotomeeting when I canceled was $39.00 per month. Join.me is free for up to remote 10 viewers.
"I'd like to share my screen with you now"
If you have a prospect on the phone and you determine that it is appropriate to show them a demonstration screen, report, visual confection or some form of sales aid, you need a tool that will in a matter of seconds, enable your prospect to view your screen, regardless of the browser, firewall or security settings on either computer. This is where Join.me shines. Join.me has evolved from LogMeIn, which you may have experienced if you have had a specialist provide remote support to diagnose a problem on your PC or Mac at some point. A brief story to illustrate.
Frustration
Have you ever had a Gotomeeting or Webex with an important prospective customer and you just couldn’t get both parties to communicate over the link?
Well it happened to me. I had developed a one page visual confection to show the prospective customer how their sales team could tell their story on a one page visual, instead of using their traditional 10 slide PowerPoint sales deck.
The first 20 minutes of our scheduled 30 minute meeting were wasted as we tried multiple video conferencing tools and browsers….nothing worked, no visual communication through their firewall.
Resolution
This does not happen with Join.me, because there is no client download to install on the other end and there are no network or browser dependencies. The prospect is viewing your screen.
Let's continue our example. "Ms. Prospect, are you sitting in front of a computer? You are, - great. I'd like to share my screen with you to illustrate the point I would like to discuss. In your browser can you go to Join.me/rmarkgibson and I will start a session". I click on the Join.me logo in my toolbar and a session starts and as soon as the client arrives at my Join.me address they "knock" to request entry and I begin to share my screen.
If your client is on a tablet or smart phone, they will need to download a viewer, and this applies to all of the conferencing services.
Join.me is free for up to 10 users. I elected to use Join.me Pro and am paying less than $12 per month for a vanity URL (join.me/rmarkgibson) and it allows me to share my screen with up to 250 others. Audio is via VOIP or a non-toll free number.
Join.me does not have recording capabilities, but if I want to record my Webinars I use Screen-Flow to create them as my experience with the quality of recorded Webinars using high-end tools has been mixed.
Here are several reviews of Web conferencing tools that may be of interest.
http://lifehacker.com/5878067/five-best-online-meeting-services
http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2012/102212-desktop-videoconferencing-test-263197.html
http://web-conferencing.findthebest.com/compare/42-66/WebEx-Meeting-Center-vs-join-me
http://web-conferencing.findthebest.com/compare/1-66/GoToMeeting-vs-join-me
