Salespeople cannot be effective in today's competitive environment if they lack up-to-date information on their customers, accounts, and pending deals. New functions and features from sales-force automation heavyweights ACT! 6.0, Salesforce, Salesnet, and UpShot enhance that effectiveness with better off-line and wireless capabilities, tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook and back-office applications, and improved security for users on the road.

Since mobile sales teams tend to spend more time off-line than in the office or connected to the Internet, we looked at each product with special attention to its off-line behavior. Web-based customer-relationship management (CRM) packages—Salesforce, Salesnet, and UpShot—have off-line versions to ensure that sales teams can still access their data after they disconnect. ACT!, a traditional Windows application designed to manage sales accounts off-line, has improved Web-based access and now allows data to be shared across a network.