Sales Tech Tips: Using Google Alerts

Staying informed on your industry, competition and customers

Let’s face it, in today’s fast moving sales environment, information is King (and Queen). If you don’t have your finger on the pulse of your market, you are behind the curve, and at a disadvantage. But how do you stay informed without being inundated with info, and filter out the noise? One of my favorite social sales tools is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is a great way to leverage the power of the Google search engine to notify you when new info on a topic is found in the digital world. You can receive daily or weekly digests of the info on specific topics you identify. The best part is it’s absolutely free. Here is a simple guide to using the service.

Google Alerts Setup Guide for Sales

Decide what you want to track. My suggestion is to create alerts for specific categories: competition, industry, product, customers and prospects. And just about any other topics you would like to get updates about. Make a list, and revise as necessary.

Start the Setup. You can get started by going to https://www.google.com/alerts . It’s fairly simple to get started. Essentially you can start out really simply, and just enter a search query for your first alert. So, let’s go a little geeky, and talk about the Boolean search options (Don’t be scared, it’s easy and powerful). These tricks below will let you refine your search so you get exactly what you want.

Boolean operators are words or symbols used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search. Using these operators, you are able to focus your search on the results that will be most helpful. Google also has a few additional operators that work to refine results.

Below are the most common boolean operators that work when searching within Google, as well as an example of each.

Boolean Operators	Example
AND Limit results	AWS AND Results (Search for content that contains only both terms.)
OR One term OR another	AI OR Artificial Intelligence (Search for content that contains either term.)
– Exclude a term from the search	Microsoft -careers (Limits results to only those with Microsoft and not the term careers.)
-site: Exclude a website from the search	Workflow -site:wikipedia.org (Limits results to results other than Wikipedia.)
~ Synonyms of term	~selling (Search for the term selling and its synonyms.)
“ “ Exact phrase	“Meta Earnings Report” (Search for the exact phrase.)
AROUND (#)Search for specific words in a specific number of words in your phrase.	Kofax AROUND (5) earnings(search for the word earnings within five words of the word Kofax)
intitle:Search for a specific word or phrase in the title.	intitle:Sales(Search for sales in the title)
intext:Search for a specific word or phrase in the text.	intext:Nvidia(Search for Nvidia in the text)
source:Search for a specific word or phrase in the source. This is an excellent way to search for a specific publication	source:Nvidia(Search for term in the source)

So how do you use them?? An example for searching competition in the cloud provider space:

AWS OR “Google Cloud” OR Azure

Use these to build and make them manageable.

Use Options. – If you click the “Show Options” drop down, you can see a variety of options to help further narrow down the number of results you see and how often to run the alert search and look for news and new content.

Another tech tips for social selling.