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Life at NIFT is definitely as fancy as many would claim but it is also equally challenging and hectic that many don’t know. Many pave their way into NIFT to pursue their passion but most are here to attain that prestigious tag of “NIFTian”.NIFT Chennai, being amidst a harmless Conservative locality, constitutes a diverse student population from across India. NIFT Chennai is also one among the top 5 fashion institutes of the country, contributing some of the finest, talented individuals to the fashion and apparel industry.All the UG programmes at NIFT are entitled for a span of 4 years. The first year is deemed as the Foundation Programme where every student is exposed to various facets of fashion and apparel field. Most of the first year runs out in figuring where are we, what are we doing and what we would probably be doing at the end of these 4 years. It’s fine to be paranoid but slowly you will be too much occupied with assignments, submissions, projects, presentations and documentations and what not, so meeting the deadlines will be your only priority after that. One of the best thing about studying at NIFT is, the importance given for practical learning is immense.A typical weekday at NIFT will commence at 9.am. (Which is like moving earth and heaven for most to make it to the campus ) and classes goes until 5.30.pm. Another great thing is that, you don’t have to be carrying heavy textbooks and notebooks as most of the lectures are given as presentations ( made by the faculties after referring to numerous books and online articles). But design students have to certainly carry numerous other heavy articles which is until 1st year and after that we get lockers. Apart from classroom learning, there will be frequent industrial and field visits for better understanding of concepts. The students are also encouraged to undertake numerous internships and part time jobs in this course of 4 years, which tremendously help in building confident, versatile individuals. To not make it monotonous, the college also arranges numerous workshops, some alumni interactions and lots of guest lectures from industrial experts and faculties from other colleges. After the first year, we get the passes to enter into the core of each of their courses. Thus, during 2nd year and 3rd year at NIFT, you get the broader opportunity to express yourself and at the same time identify and establish your goals for the next few years. It is during this time that many budding entrepreneurs start surfacing and soar to great heights. One such instance is my classmate who started off slow and steady by designing and sewing garments for our department’s fashion show for the college cultural and then established herself into a brand and she’s making some good money. You can find her as Divya Samal Clothing on Instagram and also FB.Some of the frequent terms or slangs that you would encounter in any NIFT are Attendance( I will come back on this later), CMS( online college portal)( our results are safe here), submission sheet( one of the million dollar feeling for every NIFTian is signing this sheet), learning diary( the holy book of every student), Jury( the only time we realize our true friends), Log book( resurfaces only during Jury and diminishes forever), GC(Garment Construction )Lab( great place only during non-submission days), pen-drive hain kya?( the answer is NO but still everybody asks everybody which means Get your own pen-drive), body-forms( has seen the worst with us and also been in the worst with us), RC( Resource centre( apparently that’s how we address our library)) and many such things. Attendance at NIFT is like the Oxygen cylinder of every student, you gotta keep it sufficient to make your way into another semester and also another year.Now and then, there is massive celebration of some Indian Festivals where DJ night is mandatory to de-stress ourselves and to keep us going until the next big celebration. The mega cultural fest of NIFT Chennai is the Spectrum, for which the entire college awaits eagerly and also everyone work hard to make it spectacular each year.“The world is your ramp. Own it”, “Dress up like there’s no tomorrow”, and “People will stare. Make it worth their while”, all these phrases Comes into life at NIFT. Growing up teaches us some serious lessons on presenting ourselves and dressing up. But at NIFT, you master them.For anyone, hostel life is the happiest of times to cherish and to always speak about. Hostel life is the best at NIFT. There are no inhumane rules and practices as it happens with most of the engineering colleges in India. Definitely No ragging of any kind, just a friendly interaction. As most of your friends will be around all the time, it will only be difficult to focus on your work. But everybody gets engrossed with their stuff as the deadlines approach nearer. Also too much misbehaviours can lead to denial of hostel facility to you for the rest of the years. The food is good and healthy enough to keep you energised all through the day. In addition to this, a snack bar is also set up to keep all those hard working owls brisk through the night, coping with the assignments and project work.Inspite of being in a glorious fashion institute in India, you are always going to be criticised and cornered for not being an engineer or a medico or whatsoever, but they also forget to acknowledge that the basic human need has always been Food, Clothing and Shelter. Be proud to be part of an industry which is going to evolve but never diminish.

It takes a lot to succeed in sales. You need empathy, grit, and drive. You need to know your customers intimately. You need to bounce back from rejection resiliently. You need to know when to talk and when to shut up. And then, there are sales tools…The human element of sales will never go away – that’s a fact. But here’s another point. Sales are HARD! Don’t make it more difficult than it already is.There’s no need to be doing manual tasks anymore like following up on cold emails one by one. So if technology improves your process, or helps you close more deals, add it to your arsenal of sales tools and get cracking!There’s Plenty Of Fish (I Mean Sales Tools) In The SeaThere’s a vast ocean of sales tools in the market. The potential benefit these tools can bring to your business can be very exciting, but the sheer number of choices is straight up intimidating.This list of sales tools is listed in no particular order, other than alphabetical. Its hierarchy does not reflect importance or value in any way, shape, or form.Account-based Sales and marketing analyticsCommunication/ConferencingContent Sharing and ManagementContract Lifecycle ManagementCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) SystemsEmail ManagementLead Generation, Productivity, ProspectingPerformance ManagementSales and Market IntelligenceAccount-based Sales & MarketingCircleBackYou can’t be a great salesperson without having great contacts. CircleBack helps you organize all the contact information from your phone, email, social media accounts and even your wallet into a single automated address book that empowers you to build meaningful and profitable connections. CircleBack automatically discovers new contacts, updates data, removes duplicates and saves information from scanned business cards. Integrate CircleBack into your CRM to keep your lead pipeline flowing.DatanyzeAmong other things, Datanyze generates technographics that help assess a prospect’s likelihood of buying your product at a specific time window based on its prior purchasing/subscription behavior. You can have it crawl a prospect’s website to detect the technologies, software, and platforms the prospect uses; and whether it uses your competitor’s services and for how long.EngagioB2B sales professionals need a thorough understanding of each organization they engage, especially when it comes to the hierarchy of decision makers who approve purchases. Engagio focuses on this niche, providing a suite of account-based sales solutions that 1) pull CRM data, 2) correlates leads to accounts, 3) activate marketing automations, 4) measure engagement impact, and 5) provide insight on how best to execute subsequent moves.LinkedIn Sales NavigatorNearly everybody worth your time is on LinkedIn. The platform’s Sales Navigator helps you pump your pipeline with new leads and build relationships with prospects. It can help you find the right referrals so you can approach a new contact with confidence. Through LinkedIn’s native messaging, Sales Navigator also serves as an alternative way (to email and) of reaching out to executives.OutreachGet your email campaigns in order. Outreach helps you track, pace, analyze and automate your email and voice messages to your customers. By integrating Outreach into your CRM, you’ll never have to manually log your messaging activities and outcomes, freeing more time for you to book more meetings, close deals and make better-informed decisions.PersistIQGone are the days of missed followups with prospects or losing hours each day logging information to your CRM. PersistIQ is an easy to use sales orchestration system that salespeople use to proactively generate new opportunities. With PersistIQ, salespeople quickly create multi-touch and multi-channel communication campaigns that include email, voice, and manual tasks, all synced to your CRM. These campaigns drive high-quality and personalized touch points with prospects, increase sales activity numbers, and keep salespeople organized everyday.PFLAccelerate your sales cycle by making stronger connections and automating your outreach efforts. PFL provides a suite of sales and marketing solutions that help you close more deals, revitalize stalled engagements, hyper-personalize email campaigns, and deliver stunning content designed to drive conversion and loyalty.RevegyAccount planning is an important aspect of the sales process but many businesses fail to actualize its revenue-boosting potential by adopting sloppy account management strategies. Revegy helps streamline, automate, scale and monitor account management processes to provide teams with valuable insight for harnessing the full value of customer relationships across all stages of the sales process. Use Revegy to determine customer pain points, identify high value leads and maximize business with key accounts.SalesLoftSalesLoft provides sales organizations the ability to build, share, and execute on their pattern of sales steps across email, phone, and social. They help sellers make more connections and close more business. Real-time email tracking helps teams respond to buying signals, and the integrated dialer allows users to dial, log, and record calls from anywhere. SalesLoft integrates with over 35 other sales technology vendors.Smart Rooms (Journey Sales)Drive engagement and achieve higher sales performance by growth-hacking the experiences you create for your customers. Running as a native feature on Salesforce, Smart Rooms empowers your team to build hyper-personalized and guided experiences that positively impact customers’ buying behavior. Use Smart Rooms to deepen existing relationships with key accounts and organically ramp up your upselling and cross-selling campaigns.TerminusTerminus is an account based marketing software that enables marketing and sales teams to run account-based marketing at scale. Some of their most useful features are campaigns for demand generation and sales acceleration. Campaigns can target different personas, buying stages, individual accounts, and other segments of your audience using various ABM tactics. This allows marketers to easily coordinate complex marketing efforts, track results, and optimize their campaigns on the fly.VanillaSoftVanillaSoft blends telemarketing and customer relationship management to improve outbound call volumes and conversions. Using a queue-based framework and priority routing, VanillaSoft helps reduce lead response time while increasing close efficiency. This cloud-based tool also has call recording, automated emailing, appointment setting and lead tracking features.Analytics6senseAccelerate your account management process with market-leading analytics. 6sense adds a data-driven layer to your sales cycle, unlocking and prioritizing new prospects across your pipeline. Use 6sense’ predictive intelligence to accurately forecast your customers’ purchasing behavior in a specific context.AlineanNothing beats a message that demonstrates a product’s ROI to your prospect. Strong ROI and clear benefits will tilt the conversation in your favor, making it easier to close deals. Alinean specializes in value messaging, metrics verification, and value selling to help sales professionals justify the economic costs of purchasing their products. Use Alinean to enhance your team’s ability to pitch, articulate and quantify your product’s value. Integrate Alinean with Salesforce to make value selling integral to your sales process.AvisoMake decisions, execute strategies, and drive performance based on data-driven intelligence. Aviso empowers reps, account executives and managers to add a robust layer of visibility and predictability in all aspects of their sales activities — from pipeline health to lead prioritization. By combining cloud technology, machine learning and data science, Aviso takes human insight into the next actionable level.BomboraKnow what your prospects are thinking. Bombora collects and analyzes volumes of data from various sources to identify which of your prospect organizations are actively searching for your branded solutions. Discover critical information about your priority leads from business size, industry, location, and key decision makers.ClariUsing AI and data science, Clari provides insights on prospects’ readiness to buy, giving your team a smart window and an ample legroom to make precise assessments and take decisive action in the opportunity-to-close stage in your sales cycle. Use Clari to formulate accurate forecasts and identify specific areas your sellers should focus on to improve skills, perfect pitches, and win deals.DatahugSometimes, the very process of using the tools that help you sell takes away valuable time you can otherwise spend for customer engagement, training or deal closures. Ironic but it’s a common phenomenon in digital selling. Datahug eliminates this problem by automating many of the manual processes you commonly need to run sales tools like CRMs. By automatically detecting and analyzing your sales activities as gleaned from emails, calendars, CRMs, and other sources, Datahug ramps up your sales velocity and team productivity, propelling win rates by more than 20% on the average.DomoNeed an analytics and performance platform for the entire business? Domo crunches data across all your teams and departments to provide statistical analyses and actionable insights capable of moving the needle on every metric that matters. Customize Domo to deliver easy-to-understand data visualizations, enhance collaboration across the entire organization, discover new opportunities, or provide data-driven intelligence for making faster and smarter decisions.GeckoboardOut-of-focus teams will be compelled to stay on track using Geckoboard’s live TV dashboard that displays the mantra and metrics that matter. Use Geckoboard’s crisp and catchy visuals to keep everyone aware of their respective roles in meeting daily targets and long-term goals. Monitor key performance indicators and make critical adjustments in real time. Prevent distractions and keep team members focused on achieving high performance.InsightSquaredAs its name suggests, InsightSquared processes business intelligence into actionable insight to help move the needle on sales team performance. InsightSquared takes in data from your CRM and generates reports and visualizations that help you make smart decisions — from sales process improvements to training realignment for your sales team. Use InsightSquared to quicken the pace at which actionable intelligence — such as historical trends and predictive outcomes — can be gleaned from your CRM.Lionboard AnalyticsLionboard makes it easy to analyze the impact of your sales enablement efforts on the bottom line. Use Lionboard’s powerful data analytics and simple data visualizations to demonstrate the rationale of your sales strategy as well as the benefits of your programs on seller readiness and performance.People.aiDrive Revenue Intelligence | People.ai is on a mission to be the AI Platform for all business activity, building the sales automation tools the modern organization needs to be more productive. They are starting by solving the age old problem of sales and marketing alignment, but in a completely new way.They believe that by using their sales automation tools to automate manual tasks (like logging activities into your CRM), you’ll have more time in your day to focus on what’s most important to your business, and sales and marketing teams get the data they need to align and thrive.RingLeadA data-fragmented sales operations can sap significant energy and revenue from your business. Effort duplication alone can waste resources that could have been used for more deal-closing engagements. RingLead eliminates duplicates in your sales team’s pipeline by automatically checking data quality upon manual entry, web form submission or data imports. Moreover, RingLead reduces sales cycles using an account-based lead routing system.SisenseWith massive heaps of information available to enterprises, having a team of data scientists and a powerful crunching tool on your side becomes imperative. But with Sisense, you already have a full-stack business intelligence platform that can gather and process all your data scattered across multiple sources and quickly build decision-quality reports. Easy to use and deploy, Sisense reduces your need to badger IT specialists for critical analyses and visualizations of complex data. Use it to keep your people up-to-date on crucial data that can help them close bigger deals faster.SpringMLBring the power of data science and machine learning into your workflow. SpringML enables your team to improve forecasting capabilities, optimize performance, and increase revenue. Execute your strategy with confidence, backed by SpringML’s predictive analytics.TableauAs a desktop-based data analytics tool, Tableau is easy to deploy, customize, learn and use. Many users depend on its lightning-fast turn-around time for reports generation and data visualizations. Tableau outputs are presented in a way that taps people’s natural abilities to discern patterns or trends. Use Tableau to pull and merge data from various sources in creating complex but insightful statistical analyses.TopOPPSRamp up your team’s sales performance by adding a robust layer of predictive analytics and full pipeline visibility in your workflow. TopOpps helps you identify and standardize winning behavior, while increasing the accuracy of your sales forecasts.TrustSphereTrustSphere helps organizations leverage their most valuable asset—their collective relationship network. They enable organizations to unlock the inherent value of their own networks, using a proprietary Relationship Analytics platform. This rich set of analytics surface insights which help you improve key business challenges including workforce engagement, sales force effectiveness and enterprise-wide collaboration.Communication/ConferencingChorusGive your reps all the intel they need to engage prospects better and close more deals. Chorus automatically records and transcribes sales conversations to generate analyses and insights that help sales teams calibrate their conversations with customers. Use Chorus to attain quotas consistently and achieve higher win rates. You can also use the platform to onboard new hires, keep your team’s engagement skills sharp, and fine-tune your communication strategies.ConnectAndSellRamp up your win rates by increasing the number of your daily conversations. ConnectAndSell accelerates your customer outreach process and overcomes the limitations of conventional dialers, substantially reducing the time it takes for your team to respond to inbound leads. Using patented sales enablement technologies, ConnectAndSell promises to infuse a new name on your lead list every few minutes.ExecVisionUnlock valuable insights from your sales conversations. ExecVision enables your team to revisit their sales calls and identify factors that dampen their pitch and elements that boost their win rates. You can use ExecVision for call analysis, coaching, A/B Testing, and growth hacking.FrontSpinThe tools you use in communicating your message matter. FrontSpin simplifies your sales cycle, enabling you to 1) connect with 3x more leads via Power Dialer; 2) hike engagement via personalized Sales Email; and 3) quicken lead generation via account-based Playbooks. FrontSpin centralizes call lists, voicemails, email templates and notifications, social media messaging and other channels you use in nurturing leads and closing deals. More customer engagement in less time translates to better win rates.GongFind out the good and the bad in your sales conversations. Using AI technology, Gong automatically records and transcribes sales calls, then generates actionable analyses and insight on how your team can improve their pitches.GoToMeetingOn the GoToMeeting website, customers claim that deals get closed 20% faster when they use the video conferencing service. Whether the claim is accurate or not, millions of business people around the world use GoToMeeting to facilitate real-time online meetings and share information/experiences/presentations via their desktops (i.e., screen sharing). For frontline sales professionals, engaging prospects within a stable and supportive channel is a crucial requirement for successful outcomes. Use GoToMeeting to invite prospects, domain experts, and referrals from any location and get all of them focused on your message.JiminnyJiminny makes coaching happen for sales and customer success. Capture every customer conversation and simplify how teams work by integrating coaching, web conferencing and a dialer in one place. Jiminny allows every one of your team to be a coach. Automation with Salesforce & Slack improves team communication and productivity.NewVoiceMediaWhy build your contact center piecemeal from multiple providers when you can have a complete cloud-based solution that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce? NewVoiceMedia’s Cloud Contact Center enables your team to instantly connect with prospects through call, email, or social media.NextivaConnect seamlessly with leads, customers, and colleagues from anywhere with Nextiva’s business phone service. The product allows business professionals to make and receive business phone calls from any device, enable one-on-one HD video calls, instant message, and track all communications through the Nextiva App. Nextiva’s business phone service has omni-channel support across email, voice and chat, allowing you to reach customers anytime and from anywhere.RefractAdopting Refract is a single move that impacts multiple aspects of your sales call infrastructure and overall performance: It helps upgrade sales coaching, keep reps’ engagement skills sharp, prevent call errors that erode win rates, and provides strategic insight that helps you formulate results-driven customer conversations.SkypeSkype has been around since 2003 and remains a dependable and easy-to-use service for reaching and communicating with your prospects. Operating under a freemium model, Skype offers instant messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, and voice call services over the Internet. Users have the ability to exchange digital documents such as contracts, brochures, images and videos.Content Sharing and ManagementAllboundWhile marketed as a partner sales acceleration platform, Allbound offers a lot more in many areas. You can use it to organize and manage all your sales and marketing content — from campaigns to training modules — in just one lively place. Your reseller reps can use it to create hyper-personalized landing pages for each prospect, hiking the quality and outcome of each engagement. You can also manage team progress using Allbound’s simple UI that enables reps to register all their deals and organize leads.BigtincanPowered by AI and machine learning, Bigtincan automatically delivers recommended content to each specific prospect on any device and at every stage of the sales cycle. Bigtincan integrates with your CRM, providing real-time intelligence to help you customize collaterals, presentations and dynamic sales playbooks any time and on the go. Real-time usage alerts helps you understand how prospects engage content. Automated CRM updates and predictive modeling drive productivity.BrainSharkKeep your sales team sharp with top-notch training and coaching resources to hike productivity and outsell competition. Use BrainShark to create on-demand training tracks that quicken their learning journey every step of the way — from onboarding to leadership. Validate your team’s sales readiness and equip them with relevant content they can access any time.ClearSlideClearSlide is a full-stack sales engagement service covering content management, analytics and smart messaging. Use ClearSlide to ramp up the quality and impact of your emails, conferences, presentations and other engagements. Persuade your customers and prospects with the most compelling content. Motivate and train your team with the most effective and inspirational learning modules.CongaConga streamlines your contract management process, freeing up more valuable time for direct customer engagement. Re-imagine the way your team handles reports, contracts, and other documents. Eliminate bottlenecks, enforce compliance standards with ease, and run Conga’s native analytics engine to give you an accurate picture of how specific customers engage your content.DemoChimp (Consensus)The way you communicate your brand and articulate the benefits of your product matter. But so does the behavioral state of your target audience at the moment of engagement. DemoChimp provides insight on how your prospect perceives or responds to your messaging so you can align the conversation appropriately even before you engage a lead. More than this, DemoChimp lets you deliver personalized videos and documents that are highly relevant to your audience.DocSendEquip your sales team with a centralized content management, tracking and presentation solution designed specifically for sales professionals. Providing an on demand and always up-to-date content library, DocSend enables your team to engage clients more effectively. By initiating the right conversation at the right time with the right prospects, DocSend helps your team to close more deals faster.DocuratedContent is king — in sales as much as in marketing. The right stories can move your prospects to take your desired action. The right visuals can trigger a positive buying decision. Top-of-the-line learning modules can turn newly-hired reps into unstoppable selling machines. Docurated uses analytics, advanced search algorithms, tagging, machine learning, custom content development, and automations to make it easier for all stakeholders in your sales process to experience the perfect content for every type of situation or engagement.FollozeDeliver the impact of account-based content marketing to your sales operations. Folloze allows your sales team to create compelling experiences that positively influence your audience’s purchasing behavior. Enable your sales team to deploy account-specific content and execute campaigns designed for maximum conversion rate for the targeted account. Leverage native analytics and behavioral triggers to nurture leads across the buyer journey. Integrate with Salesforce, Microsoft Office, MailChimp and other tools.GuruKnowledge is power, but only if you have the right one at the right time. Guru makes everyone on the team smarter by equipping them with relevant knowledge and resources they need at any point of the sales process. Providing situational information and access to marketing content on demand, the platform also enables everyone to personalize their organization’s knowledge base to fit their role and optimize their performance.HighspotHighspot uses AI and machine learning to manage and deliver content for each unique engagement scenario. Use Highspot to keep sales reps sharp with the right training modules. Implement well-designed playbooks and delight customers with compelling content via email, landing pages or online presentations. Enable sales managers, teams and customers to discover and act on relevant information or insight. Integrate Highspot into Salesforce and gain real-time data on how prospects and leads respond to your messaging.Knowledge TreeElite sales professionals go the extra mile honing their product knowledge and truly understanding their customer’s pain points. But even the best of them can’t have every information or content they need all the time to best articulate their message to every variant of their customer personas. Omniscience is a myth unless you’re using Knowledge Tree. Knowledge Tree is a content-focused sales enablement tool your team can use to train people, persuade prospects, and close deals better and faster. Knowledge Tree integrates with email, CRMs and other tools so you can access the most relevant content for every scenario all the time.PandaDocTraditional document management practices take an awful lot of time, sapping your team’s productivity. Instead of engaging prospects and closing deals, they spend a big chunk of the day doing paperwork and administrative tasks. PandaDoc streamlines your content and documentation workflows using automation, analytics and collaboration. Build, present, edit, track and manage all your documents (including contracts and marketing content) in one lively place.PreziPrezi is a formidable alternative to presentation titans PowerPoint and Keynote. Its enterprise variant, Prezi Business uses HTML5 technology and robust collaboration features to compel your audience with adept visual storytelling across multiple devices. It also comes with live leaderboard analytics, commenting support, and powerful design customization features.RO InnovationThe best pitch you have is the long list of satisfied customers in your corner. It’s no accident testimonials and success stories find their way into brands’ home pages. RO Innovation helps your team tap the power of customer feedback and other sales enablement assets to propel win rates and hike revenue. Integrate RO Innovation with your CRM and other sales tools to give prospects quick access to relevant customer reference and success stories of existing clients.SAVOThe ability to communicate the right message at the right time spells the difference between sales success and failure. SAVO automatically recommends the perfect resources for every situation, enabling your sales team to consistently share the right content with customers, learn from the right training modules, and execute the right process in each selling context. Use SAVO to help reps and account executives prepare for every conversation and become more effective at articulating your brand.ShowpadGet the most from your content by making it more accessible, measurable, relevant,and powerful. Showpad enables your team and your customers to find, share, or present the perfect content for every situation. Ramp up sales performance by engaging and inspiring customers with better, action-inducing conversations.VideoliciousWhen words and static images prove inadequate, use videos to get prospects focused on your message. Purpose-built for selling, Videolicious enables marketers and sales professionals to quickly and easily create, edit and share compelling videos with customers at any point in the pipeline. Unlock new opportunities by igniting interest among existing accounts. contract lRevitalize stalled leads and attract new prospects.VidyardImages can sometimes drive the message home a lot better than words. No wonder videos are the fastest growing content format on the web, and why conversions improve by more than 80% when there’s a video on a landing page. Use Vidyard to strategically deploy videos in your sales process. When you get to inform, educate and delight leads better, you also get a better shot at closing deals and increasing revenue.WhutThe quality of your content and the way it is delivered significantly impact the buying behavior of your prospects. Whut automatically sifts through the mountain of content you maintain, selects the most effective content for each user, and gets it delivered to establish the most meaningful and positive experiences. Whut helps you organize your digital content, generates data-driven insights about them, and improves the way you share it with your customers.Contract Lifecycle ManagementAdobe SignFew things can beat the sense of accomplishment at getting a big and challenging prospect to buy your product. In most cases though, verbal confirmation hardly counts until the new client actually signs a contract. Good thing contract management services like Adobe Sign are there to facilitate the binding agreement between your business and a new customer. Formerly called EchoSign and eSign, this tool forms part of the Adobe Document Cloud service which also includes the venerable PDF pioneer Acrobat. Use Adobe Sign to create, transmit, sign, and manage forms, agreements and contracts anytime, anywhere and on any device.ApptusAppttus offers a suite of QTC (Quote-to-Cash) solutions that empower sales teams to accelerate, enhance and optimize the negotiation process. From proposal creation to contract approval, Apptus speeds up the deal cycle while maximizing deal values through upselling and cross-selling recommendations. Use Apptus to configure different transactional components of your sale operations including contracts, e-commerce, customer incentives/loyalty programs, billing, and order management.ConcordA free and easy to use cloud-based contract management service, Concord helps individuals and companies create, negotiate, sign and manage contracts. Concord offers unlimited online contract storage and has decent collaboration and document tracking features.DocuSignContracts evolve over time. Signatories from different parties typically would want to mutually modify the terms of agreement amid changes in their relationships or in conditions relevant to the contract. DocuSign makes this back and forth collaboration easier and faster to conduct and complete. The service also integrates well with most CRMs and other business solutions. Predating even Adobe’s offering and holding a dominant market share, DocuSign arguably represents the best in class solution in the contract management niche.HelloSignHelloSign is a highly-rated e-signature service that helps you bypass printers, scanners and pens, speeding the contract negotiation and signing process by as much as 90%. The service is free for individuals and comes at comparatively affordable prices for small to enterprise-scale businesses. HelloSign takes all your paperwork into the cloud via a simple, clean and intuitive UI. You can get it customized based on your workflow and integrated with your CRM, email platform and other business software.GetAcceptGetAccept automates your deal signing process by combining document tracking, e-signing, and automated email follow-ups into a single platform. Similar to marketing automation tools, the service comes with a clean dashboard that lets you see how deals are progressing across your business and which actions you need to take to accelerate the process.OctivImprove sales productivity by taking your team’s document and contract management tasks to the next level. With Octiv, you can quickly create, share, and sign documents from anywhere at any time. Octiv’s cloud-based document management technology significantly streamlines paper-based workflows, improves collaboration, and allows full integration with other content-related services.QvidianRamp up your team’s win rate by accelerating your documentation workflow. Qvidian is a proposal automation solution that significantly cuts the time it takes for customers to create an RFP, for your team to submit a winning proposal, and for everyone to sign an agreement. Organize all your content in a single accessible library.SpringCMSpringCM automates your document cycle, establishing a high degree of control, visibility, and security for your contracts, presentations, and other content. Simplify your documentation process (creation, review, tracking, sign-off, storage, compliance, etc.) and increase the level of collaboration among creators, sellers, vendors and customers who engage the same content.Customer Relationship Management (CRM) SystemsAgile CRMAgile CRM is a powerful tool for any small business struggling to manage the time and resources necessary to build effective sales and marketing processes. Featuring easy integration with the most popular email platforms, support and customer service software, phone and conference bridges, billing plugins, social media networks, and more Agile leverages the tools you need on one easy-to-use platform. Built specifically for small businesses, Agile offers effective solutions for sales, marketing, and process automation, as well as customer support, contact management, and even project management.ApptivoApptivo is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning solution that has earned accolades and won awards for its comparative flexibility and affordability. In addition to its CRM feature, Apptivo also provides invoicing, sales reporting and project management services. It runs on a freemium model.Base CRMManage all your sales activities from one powerful, data-driven platform. Base enables your team to approach selling as a science, using metrics to establish a predictable, achievable and scalable path to success. Use Base to collect quantified intelligence you can leverage to close more deals faster.Close.ioInside sales teams can increase productivity by uniting all their sales communications in one place. This CRM comes with built-in calling, emailing, and SMS, plus powerful search and filter functions that make it easy for your reps to follow up with the right leads at the right time. The reporting features give you a glance of both the activity and performance of individual reps and your overall sales team, while enabling you to dig deep into the data to find insights that matter. A powerful API enables you to automate and connect Close CRM | Inside Sales Software CRM with Calling & Emailing with other apps in your toolset.ContactuallyContactually is an affordable alternative to enterprise-scale CRMs such as Salesforce. Well-suited to small-business operations, Contactually helps teams find leads, generate referrals, and nurture repeat customers. Link your customer data with your email platform to quicken and enhance interactions. Organize your contacts to establish lead priorities and maintain long-lasting relationships with clients. Collaborate with the entire team to achieve common goals faster, more efficiently and with greater impact.MembrainUnlike traditional CRM, perceived as mindless data-entry by your sales team, Membrain converts your sales strategy into visual workflows that are easy to understand. Membrain helps salespeople to focus on the right prospects and opportunities and sell more confidently, from the first contact to close. If your organization operates in a complex B2B selling environment, with longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders, Membrain is the CRM for you.FreshsalesStreamline your operations with a CRM purpose-built to ramp up performance and accelerate the sales process. Freshsales uses AI, automation, and other features to make it easier for your team to refresh pipelines, communicate with prospects, prioritize leads, make meaningful conversations, analyze customer behavior, and close maximum-value deals. Use Freshsales to upgrade your contact management, lead scoring, email tracking, and territory management process.InfusionsoftInfusionsoft is the flexible but powerful CRM for small businesses. This sales and marketing platform enables teams to grow pipelines, qualify leads, deploy email marketing campaigns, automate tedious tasks such as follow ups and invoicing, manage selling activities and centralize customer interactions. Use Infusionsoft to get everyone on the same page, achieve higher performance, and improve win rates.InsightlyAvailable via a freemium model, Insightly is an affordable CRM option for solopreneurs and very small teams. For its pricing, ease of use, decent feature set and platform integrations, Insightly earned awards from channels such as Business News Daily. In addition to core CRM functions, Insightly has a native project management support as well as a mobile and social media component.Microsoft Dynamics CRMThis enterprise-scale application is available on the cloud, on-premises, or a combination of both. Given its pedigree, it integrates well with other Microsoft services such as SharePoint, Outlook, Office 365, and OneDrive.NetSuiteIf you want everything managed using just one platform, then NetSuite is the solution you’re looking for. Combining enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting and CRM functionalities, NetSuite enables managers to extract data-driven insights for strategy formulation while equipping sales teams with tools that improve productivity. You can use NetSuite to make forecasts, upsell and manage compensation and incentives systems.PipedriveSmall teams with big ambitions prefer to use Pipedrive’s clean UI and activity-based selling methodology. As its name suggests, this CRM solution visualizes your pipeline and shows you which activities you need to perform to move leads forward and get more deals closed. Pipedrive is highly customizable and can be integrated with many other tools in your sales stack.PipelinerPipeliner is a visually intuitive CRM solution that provides instant visibility and intelligence on key metrics and data. Designed with a drag-and-drop pipeline UI, this graphical CRM can generate one-click reports, comprehensive charts, and a quick view of your sales performance featuring metrics such as deals created, deals lost, deals converted, and the respective values of lost and won deals.ProsperWorksProsperWorks seamlessly integrates with G Suite, which means you have the power of a full-featured CRM right in the familiar environment of Gmail. Unlike complex CRMs, ProsperWorks can easily be learned and optimized by anyone who uses email. The platform’s features set and ease-of-use earned it Google’s strong endorsement. But don’t let its simplicity fool you. ProsperWorks has the automation, analytics, and machine learning capabilities of other CRMs in the market.RollioSalesforce is great but it takes a while to keep it always up-to-date. Good thing Rollio’s there to help. Just tell Rollio what to do via voice or text message and he’ll automatically make CRM updates for you, within seconds. With an AI-driven assistant who understands what you say, you won’t need to make manual updates on your CRM ever! Saves a ton of time, propels team productivity, and helps you focus on closing more deals.SalesforceThe dominant player in the space, Salesforce basically sets the standard for all things CRM. Salesforce has a robust range of functionalities, allows a high degree of customization, and supports collaboration. It integrates well with other apps and services and inspires a thriving third party ecosystem. The Salesforce dashboard is among the most useful tools among sales and marketing professionals. The only drawback is its relatively steep pricing.SellsySellsy is a full-featured CRM that eliminates the need for multiple software to cover different aspects of your sales operations. From prospecting to invoicing, Sellsy helps you manage every element in your workflow, including email campaigns, e-commerce, and project management. The platform also provides sales and marketing intelligence to help you make smarter business decisions and achieve higher conversion rates.ZohoZoho offers a ton of features at a very affordable price. It has goodies for email marketing, customer service, lead generation, and reporting. Zoho has a simple and intuitive UI and integrates well with widely used apps such as Evernote, MailChimp, Google Apps, Microsoft Office and Quickbooks.Email ManagementCirrus InsightGoing back and forth between your email and Salesforce can be tedious and surely takes a ridiculous amount of time. Cirrus Insight allows you to work within your email while having Salesforce around to seamlessly guide your correspondence with smart, deal-closing insight. With Cirrus Insight, all your email data, schedules and followups get sync automatically with Salesforce, eliminating the need for data entry, manual updates and other tedious tasks. You save time, increase productivity, and exude unmatched domain mastery in your email correspondence.FullContactFullContact is a powerhouse contact platform for professionals, teams, and businesses. Their Chrome extension puts your Gmail on steroids – giving you robust data on your prospects so you can sell better and win more deals.GetResponseGreat marketing leads to great sales. With email among the best tools to bring your products closer to customers, having the best email automation and analytics on your side can really beef up your bottom line. GetResponse provides a simple tracking tool and integrates well with third-party apps.RapportiveWith just one action (i.e., installation), you bring the business intelligence and social networking benefits LinkedIn provides directly into your email workflow. More importantly, you get to replace in-service ads with contact, professional and other information from LinkedIn that can enhance prospect engagements and grow relationships faster. As its name suggests, Rapportive makes establishing trust (i.e., rapport) easier… and for free.ReplyReply automates your email campaigns while maintaining personalized conversations with each of your prospects and tracking their behavior over time. Use Reply to scale your outbound communications and drive closing. Use it to boost inbound sales and nurture relationships with existing accounts. Integrate Reply with your CRM to find new leads, initiate call sessions more efficiently, and tap the benefits of data-driven analytics to make smarter selling decisions.SenderGenUse analytics and cloud technology to fine-tune your email campaigns. SenderGen standardizes the look and feel of your email signature branding and allows sales teams to insert real-time hyper-personalized banners and messages into the signature.SigstrOptimize your email campaigns by fine-tuning the email signature for your brand. Sigstr is a simple but powerful tool you can deploy without IT help. Sigstr comes with analytics, real time updates and tracking features.YeswareUse email to simplify sales prospecting and propel your closing rate. Yesware is an easy-to-use service that runs in the background of your email client, syncs with CRM, and provides prescriptive analytics on how to best engage prospects at each stage of the selling cycle. Yesware tracks and analyzes email, call and presentation data as gleaned from your inbox then automatically syncs with Salesforce, lending more transparency while eliminating the need for manual data entry.ZynBitGet all the content, data, and insight from your CRM right inside the convenience and familiarity of your inbox. ZynBit is a powerful add-on for Gmail and Outlook that channels critical information from Salesforce. That means you can organize and plan all your customer engagement in the comfort of your email, simplifying your workflow and raising your productivity.Performance ManagementAlwaysHiredTech businesses who partner with AlwaysHired can expect to have a high quality talent pool from which they can onboard tech savvy sales professionals. An immersive bootcamp for salespeople wishing to upgrade their skills, AlwaysHired also trains candidates to become well-versed in the trends and language of technology. Any organization who plans to sell tech products stands to benefit from this rare subset of salespeople.AltifyKeep your team sharp with the right performance management tool. Altify helps determine the factors that deliver the biggest impact on your sales velocity, win rates and other metrics. Whether you need to tweak a specific sales activity or build new business development skills, Altify will show you how best to move the needle.AmbitionYou can brag about the latest tech enabler on your premises but selling still depends on how motivated your people are. Software can help improve metrics but it’s the people behind a brand who ultimately reel the profits in. To keep sales professionals focused and motivated, Ambition identifies which metrics have the greatest impact on your business then incentivizes sales reps who perform excellently on those metrics. Ambition provides motivational leaderboards to establish transparency and accountability, real-time scorecards to instill focus, and data analytics to ramp up individual and team performance.Betts RecruitingFinding competent sales professionals can be difficult, especially when you’re doing business at competitive cities like New York, San Francisco and London. Fortunately, Betts Recruiting is doing the groundwork for ambitious, fast-paced companies who need top-performing personnel manning their sales floor. Check out Betts Recruiting if you need pre-screened and optimally primed selling machines on your side.CallidusCloud CommissionsCallidusCloud is an award-winning sales software provider whose suite of solutions cover marketing, sales performance, learning and customer experience. Commissions, the suite’s sales compensation service automates the compensation process while making any organization’s rewards program fast and accurate. Use Commissions to create and manage sophisticated incentives programs that reduce disputes and overpayments while motivating direct and indirect sales teams to attain higher levels of performance.Factor 8If you need training for people in your inside sales operations, Factor 8 is the team to get your reps in top shape. Factor 8 focuses on B2B selling for small and medium businesses but they work and partner with big name brands such as IBM, HP, Google, and SAP. Unlike nearly every item on this list, Factor 8 is not a technically a software that you deploy across the organization but a bankable source of skill sets from where your team can learn everything they need to consistently deliver high performance.HireVueGive your recruitment and training programs an upgrade. HireVue is a video-based platform that helps organizations discover, assess and train top talent. Use HireVue’s analytics capabilities to identify candidates who’ll fit your ideal profile for each sales role in your team. Use the platform for pinpoint-precise coaching, and use it to maintain peak sales readiness.HooplaHoopla is a full-stack performance management platform that aims to build a culture of excellence and collaboration. Using data analytics, gamification and other features, Hoopla takes everyone on the same page and keeps sales teams focused on achieving their goals. Dynamic leaderboards and visualized metrics drive staff engagement and motivate everyone to give their best. Hoopla can be integrated with CRM, productivity apps and other software.LearnCoreLearnCore is a sales training and video coaching solution that addresses common enablement challenges for large and growing sales organizations. Leading companies use LearnCore to onboard sales reps, identify top performers, share best practices, and ensure consistent communication across geographically dispersed teams. Through learning automation, sales reps can easily consume content (Learn), assess their knowledge (Test), and apply what they learn with video practice and coaching (Pitch IQ). Reps and managers can access the LearnCore platform through native iOS and Android apps, web browsers and Salesforce integration.LevelElevenThings pan out well when data is on your side. LevelEleven is a sales activity management system that relies on engagement, behavioral, and performance data to tweak your sales team into top shape. The platform determines the key factors that tip the scales in favor of your business, then guides your salespeople on how best to transform that intelligence into closed deals. Use LevelEleven to build a culture of high performance and revenue growth.MindTickleIn sales, your numbers are only as good as your members. Because your team’s knowledge and skills are critical, sales readiness is a strategic component you can’t afford to ignore. MindTickle is an end-to-end sales enablement platform that guides reps and managers across the selling cycle using structured learning paths, role-play and analytics. From onboarding to ongoing readiness, equip your sales team with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.PointForwardPointForward is an end-to-end performance management solution that helps you train sales reps quickly and cost-efficiently. Use PointForward to facilitate the onboarding of new sales hires, reinforce deal-winning skills, and establish best practices that consistently deliver positive results in every scenario.QstreamA team’s performance depends very much on the leadership behind it. Qstream equips sales coaches and managers with qualitative and quantitative insights that demonstrably move the needle on metrics that matter. This solution combines KPI information from your CRM, competency ratings, skills training, knowledge base, gamification and video-formatted observations to equip sales professionals with the right selling approaches, behavior, and messages as they engage customers in real time.ThinkSmartOneSuccess in sales depends heavily on behavior, attitude and habits. ThinkSmartOne is an incentive and rewards platform that helps reinforce and standardize winning behavior among sales professionals. Using gamification, automation, reporting, and real-time communication, ThinkSmartOne drives high performance and top-line growth.VeeloVeelo provides a comprehensive sales performance management solution by centralizing enablement, optimization, onboarding and training in a single platform. Using AI, machine learning and behavioral science, Veelo recommends the perfect conversation agenda or the most crucial learning tract at the right moment to drive productivity and hike success rates. Use Veelo to onboard new salespeople faster and get them to reach peak performance quicker.XactlyYou can (and should) align your compensation strategy with your growth targets. Xactly can help you do so easier, faster, and with surprising levels of success. Xactly is a cloud-based incentive, compensation and performance management platform purpose-built for enterprise-class sales organizations. Develop incentive plans that ensure optimal sales performance. Let Xactly automatically manage complex calculations and focus on getting your team improve their win rates. Use analytics to glean actionable insight on performance-compensation dynamics. Leverage industry data to see how the competition compensates their talent pool.Lead Generation, Productivity, ProspectingAccent AccelerateHaving a full view of every sales situation enables your team to make the right moves that directly impact your bottom line. With Accent Accelerate, you gain complete visibility into opportunities, selling activities, and customer behavior — crucial information that propels your team to achieve higher win rates. Using Accent’s data analytics, real-time tracking and visualization tools, you can navigate complex sales situations, prioritize the most valuable opportunities and determine the best step forward.CognismYour sales performance depends heavily on how your lead pipeline grows and flows. Increase revenue by accelerating your prospecting activities. Adopt smart practices that go beyond contact information and into deep analytics to sift through oceans of data and identify buyer personas most likely to engage your brand. Cognism uses automation and machine learning to get you to the right customers faster.ConversicaHarness the link between conversation and conversion rates. Conversica is an AI-driven sales tool that automates, streamlines and upscales your lead contact and qualification process. Deploying Conversica is like hiring a group of sales reps — at a fraction of the cost — who will tirelessly chase and nurture leads 24-7. The Conversica sales assistant will relentlessly but smartly continue to engage customers using natural language until they are ready for human sales professionals to come in and close the deal.DataFoxNot all companies in the market fits your ideal customer profile. Let DataFox find them for you. Using machine learning to sift through thousands of data sources, DataFox identifies new prospects who are likely to respond positively to your message. Enable your reps to accelerate their pipelines, initiate meaningful conversations, and unlock new opportunities.DealSheetDrive revenue growth by managing your opportunities better. DealSheet extends the capabilities of your CRM, helping your team qualify, manage and close leads better. DealSheet also tracks the metrics sales leaders need to train and coach their team more effectively.DealSignalProspecting can be a tedious process. Worse, doing it manually can take up an entire day and still leave you with a trickle of low-quality leads whose likelihood of opting in is not very bright. Fortunately, DealSignal automatically generates a list of prospects, leads and relevant intel on demand so you can focus on scheduling meet ups, polishing your pitch and closing deals.DoolyDooly brings your most important sales and marketing content to your reps when they need it most—during their sales meetings. By analyzing your team’s calls and notes in real-time, Dooly feeds your team the stories and competitor intel they need to wow prospective customers and weave through objections with ease. Stop searching the abyss of your Google Drive for deal collateral or saying “I’ll get back to you on that,” and let Dooly help you close more deals—all while knowing your CRM and your team are kept up-to-date on the fly.FileboardFileboard enables sales teams to improve performance by tracking engagement activities such as presentations, email campaigns and live meetings. Use Fileboard to accelerate your workflow, ramp up the pipeline with new qualified leads, and drive sales activities with more customer meetings.Google TrendsGoogle Trends makes it possible to map the stuff that excites your audience at any given moment and locale. This allows you to create precise messages, content and call-to-actions that resonate with what your prospects are currently preoccupied with.GrowbotsGrowbots automates the entire outbound sales process to help you generate and tap new sales opportunities from a database of more than 200 million decision makers. Use Growbots to create an ideal customer profile and automatically get a list of screened prospects that fit your criteria. You can then automate and execute an email campaign for warm leads and get closer to your sales goals. Growbot is intuitive and customizable.GrowlabsGrowlabs combines B2B lead generation with outbound sales communication to identify, engage and convert leads, at scale. Create your ideal customer profile(s) and automatically find leads from a proprietary database of 400 millions verified prospects. Growlabs machine learning algorithms determine when to send emails / follow-ups and pass new qualified leads directly to sales reps.HubspotHubspot offers an array of services ranging from free online analytics tools to a full-featured CRM. However, the company is best known for its set of inbound marketing tools that help brands hike customer reach and engagement. Use Hubspot to glean data-driven insight on how to build and optimize your lead generation campaigns.HullHaving a powerful tool stack for your sales team is a valuable strategic advantage. But things can become complicated when your different tools become so siloed and detached from each other that you need to 1) exit one tool just to use another; 2) manually sync data across the stack; or 3) follow separate usage protocols to get things done. Fortunately, Hull keeps all your tools in one place and automatically syncs customer data and other information across your stack. Use Hull as your command center to access and use your CRM, email, databases, pipeline manager, performance platforms and other sales enablement software.Infor Sales PortalOptimize and streamline your sales process by centralizing your customer content, quoting and ordering system across all your channels. Infor Sales Portal benefits makers and sellers of complex products which often experience discrepancies arising from the parallel use of disparate tools, apps and other software. Infor Sales Portal systematizes all your selling collaterals in one place to ensure that everyone gets timely information about your product.Insidesales.comNothing accelerates your sales performance better than plain, simple science. Inside Sales is a full-featured selling platform that uses AI, machine learning, data science, and predictive analytics to drive productivity and revenue growth. Powerful native features for sales calling, opportunity scoring, lead qualification, and forecasting to take your business to the next level.KickFireKickFire enriches your pipeline by unlocking new leads and opportunities, identifying which of your products and services resonate most with your key audience, and scoring prospects to help you prioritize your moves. KickFire uses web tracking, real-time notifications, and powerful analytics to give you full sales process visibility and keep you ahead of the competition.Lead411Lead411 is a Sales Intelligence platform that discovers actionable insights for sales/marketing teams to help them target companies/contacts that are much more likely to be buying specific products and services. Using technology and their team, they expose high quality leads for your solutions coupled with highly accurate contact information. Lead411 helps their clients crush their competition.LeadfeederLeadfeeder keeps your pipeline flowing by identifying companies who favorably engage your content. In analyzing website traffic, Leadfeeder traces organizations who show interest in your brand and which specific products appear to offer solutions to their problems. With this insight, sales teams can then approach prospects from the right angle and with the right pitch, substantially increasing their win rates.LeadFuzeLeadFuze automates your prospecting process, giving you more time to improve your skills, perfect your pitch, and close deals. Based on how you configure your ideal customer profile (industry, title, location, company size, etc), this lead generation software automatically gathers the contact information of matching decision makers and promptly sends personal emails and follow ups. LeadFuze has more than 50 million records in its growing lead database.LeadGeniusElevate your lead generation and management process using the powerful combination of machine learning and expert human intelligence. LeadGenius enables your team to build lasting and meaningful relationships with every decision maker who matters. Grow your market by identifying new prospects, validating consumer segments and buyer personas, optimizing your existing lead database, and enhancing your email outreach.LeadIQLeadIQ makes prospecting super easy, especially on LinkedIn. It is one of the fastest and easiest ways for sales teams and recruiters to build lists of verified contact data from the web and sync it into Salesforce, and many other CRMs.LeanDataThere are a lot of things you need to match well besides clothes, job skills and romantic partners. In sales, there’s such a thing as a lead-rep fit. A promising lead getting to the wrong rep easily becomes lost opportunity. LeanData enhances your sales process by enabling precise customizations of your lead routing strategy. Use LeanData’s visually intuitive and insight-driven lead management features to optimize your topline potential by consistently assigning the right leads to the right reps.Live HiveAll the elements you need to optimize your sales process and increase win rates are in Live Hive. From prospecting, email tracking and call management to pipeline acceleration, analytics and coaching — small to medium enterprises rely on Live Hive to fine-tune their sales workflows and ramp up the volume of closed deals. Gather insights to identify and build a winning game plan, automate the strategy, and hyper-personalize a playbook that consistently deliver wins for your all your reps.MapAnythingKnowing the exact sweet spot is a competitive advantage you can’t do without. MapAnything provides full visibility on location-sensitive factors that affect your business. Integrate MapAnything’s geo-analytics, mapping and geo-productivity features into your Salesforce or ServiceNow infrastructure and expect to address customers’ problems exactly where it hurts, and improve metrics precisely where it matters.MintigoGain real time, data-driven insights to propel your lead management process. Mintigo collects and analyzes thousands of corporate data points including financials, tech subscriptions, staff complement, and purchasing behavior. Running these data points with corresponding models and data in your CRM, Mintigo then prioritizes leads based on the value they can generate for your company.Nudge.aiLet AI-derived insights enhance your customer engagement efforts. Nudge analyzes your prospect’s behavioral patterns and gives you real-time recommendations on how best to connect with your customers at every moment of the engagement cycle. Integrate Nudge with Chrome, Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Office, Slack, Salesforce and other software in your toolbox to get actionable intel (social media mentions, company news, etc) about the customer while you write emails or browse the Web.PatternTaking notes during a meeting is important. But it can also take up valuable time. Pattern helps you save on note-taking time by automatically syncing all your notes to Salesforce. Pattern also enables teams to adopt a unified winning template to get everyone on the same page, standardizing the way everyone optimizes opportunities and closes deals. Pattern integrates with your favorite sales tools.ReachableIn business, strong relationships often translate to strong revenue. Reachable helps your team harness the power of personal and corporate relationships to generate value, increase productivity, and drive self-motivation. Use Reachable to enhance team collaboration, accelerate sales, and identify the best point persons to engage or request referrals from when reaching out to prospects.SalesExecAs its name implies, SalesExec is a lead management software purpose-built for sales managers. Use SalesExec to find and route leads, quicken closing times and generate sales activity reports. Match your best salespeople with the most challenging and valuable leads.SalesvueSalesvue was purpose-built as a native Salesforce function to help sales professionals automate their entire workflow: from prospecting to lead nurturing. Use Salesvue to grow your pipeline, increase appointment rates and convert more leads — without the glitches, delay, and usability issues commonly experienced in other third-party, non-native solutions that run in the Salesforce environment.SalesWingsYou need real-time intelligence on how your prospects perceive your brand in order to create and execute a timely engagement plan. SalesWings is a handy tool for monitoring and gauging how your leads respond to your current messaging. This suite of plugins, APIs, add-ons and apps has the ability to detect specific behavior (such as newsletter engagement, visits to your website, and the particular sections or topics they are interested in). When trigger conditions are met, SalesWings sends real-time notifications so you can instantly react to positive signals.SudoSelling is a tough job. Get 24/7 help from an AI-powered sales assistant. Sudo connects to your organization’s software stack and will help you manage your Salesforce data, calendar, phone calls, email, online conferences, and other activities — all the while taking notes, keeping all your records up-to-date, and freeing you from manual data entry once and for all. Sudo will also alert you of important signals and triggers so valuable opportunities won’t ever get lost in the bustle.TroopsThe new generation of sales professionals demand tool sets that align with their habits and preferences, seamlessly melding work and lifestyle to keep them motivated and primed for high performance. Troops uses conversational AI to help teams get what they need (from cumbersome CRMs) fast, easy and on-the-go via a bot on Slack. No more need to wade in the murky swampland of conventional CRMs. All you need is to chat with a smart bot like you do with your friends.Velocify PulseAs its name suggests, Velocify Pulse accelerates the sales process while improving the precision with which teams prospect for and engage leads. Use the platform with Salesforce to hike the productivity of everyone on the team — from prospectors and SDRs to closers and managers. Automate the way leads are distributed and systematize how your team approaches different engagement scenarios to improve conversion rates.ZenProspectTurbo-charge your lead management process. ZenProspect enables your team to scientifically determine your ideal customer persona and find real-world decision makers who fit the profile. Once the platform infuses your pipeline with new qualified leads, ZenProspect immediately toggles your team to full engagement mode, accelerating your topline performance.Sales and Market IntelligenceArtesianHaving the right information at the right time enables you to make decisions or take actions that get you closer to your goals. Artesian provides real-time and relevant insights about your customers, their world, and what matters to them most. Use Artesian to understand your market better, qualify prospects more intelligently, and maintain customer engagements that yield meaningful and productive results.D&B Hoover’sKnowing your audience and having fresh, accurate information about prospects help set the right tone for customer engagement. Hoover’s has been providing customers with market intelligence since the 1990s and runs a database of more than 85 million businesses and 100 million professionals across nearly a thousand industry segments. If you want a quick way to gather insider info on a new prospect, Hoovers is a decent tool to use. A well-known secret: this tool can help you find prospects with immediate needs.DiscoverOrgCombine accurate sales and marketing intelligence with your pipeline management tools and you get an effective tool for homing in on the right leads every time. Use DiscoverOrg to funnel marketing-qualified leads into the pipeline of your sales development team. Configure behavioral triggers to give you real-time information on whether targeted prospects are ready to buy. Use detailed and regularly updated org charts of your prospective client companies to identify the right point person for each engagement.EmmisaryDeepen your knowledge of high value prospects. As a platform enabling sales professionals to connect with former executives of target companies, Emissary helps you gain a clearer understanding of the ecosystem, motivations and pain points of your key customers. Use Emissary to formulate a winning engagement strategy.EverStringArm your sales and marketing teams with an AI-powered intelligence platform and accelerate your sales velocity. EverString’s intuitive user interface means every team levels up their game with net-new, high-potential prospects, a prioritized inbound lead flow and relevant insights about every account and contact. With EverString in your stack, your team can finally focus on what they do best: Selling.FirstRainThe right intel will help you establish positive connections with prospects. The right insight gained at the right time will help you build relationships and convert prospects into paying customers. FirstRain focuses on acquiring pertinent information, and on formulating timely insights to drive growth strategies and strengthen sales. FirstRain tracks the business, social media, and financial activities of your key customers and empowers your team through in-depth field knowledge and analytics.MattermarkAcquire the corporate intel and insight you need to attract, qualify and convert customers. Mattermark enriches your customer database with dynamic, up-to-date information about your target companies, including location, number of employees, funding rounds, and scores of other data. Use Mattermark to deepen your understanding of key prospects and initiate more meaningful conversations that lead to sales.ZoomInfoIf your prospect’s company size, revenue history and contact information are missing on LinkedIn, you might be able to get it on ZoomInfo. The service is by no means perfect but the company has been in business since 2000 and has had ample time to mature and cover a good fraction of businesses operating in the U.S. and elsewhere. Use it to support lead research.

Is much of the Quran copied from the Bible? If so, where is the proof?There are eleven verses in the Quran were Muhammad is accused of writing down “Tales of Old” or “Legends of former people”. This is 67% more times than Muhammad’s names is used in the Quran. By implication, this directly affects the divine revelation from Allah, as it indicates the concern of Muhammad’s contemporises in and around the Kaaba at the time of Muhammad, therefore demands a deeper investigation as a test for the reliability of the Islamic faith.Muhammad writes Legends and Fables - Surah 25:5And they say, "Legends of the former peoples which he has written down, and they are dictated to him morning and afternoon."(83:13, 68:15, 23:83, 25:5, 27:68, 16:24, 8:31, 23:67, 6:25, 46:17, 34:19)It is no secret Muhammad had interaction with Christians, Jews and other religious groups on his travels as a caravan trader. It is well known among Muslims that Muhammad was given a Christian slave girl as a present, this was Mary, the Egyptian Copt after she gave birth to a male child, and he married her. It would be prudent to think Muhammad under these circumstances had no knowledge of the Christian and or Jewish faith. However, in many places, the Biblical narrative found in the Quran is clouded with inaccuracies. These Quranic stories are typical of that one would expect to find in the record of a man relying exclusively on hearsay and secondary sources. This makes perfect sense considering Muhammad was illiterate and could not read the books which the Christians and Jews used.Muhammad had many opportunities of learning Christianity, both during his journeys into Syria and also in Arabia itself. It would then be easy for Muhammad to take these stories and give them out in his own eloquent Arabic as though revealed from Heaven. Muhammad's contemporaries had no doubt that he did so and frequently charge him with obtaining the help of certain well-known persons. Muhammad countered these claims in the Quran but does not specifically deny the accusation. All Muhammad can reply is that the person or persons making such accusation against him are foreigners, supposedly using the typical Islamic argument that one can only fully understand the revelation in pure Arabic which a foreigner could not.Humans Teach Muhammad - Surah 16:103And We certainly know that they say, "It is only a human being who teaches the Prophet." The tongue of the one they refer to is foreign, and this Quran is [in] a clear Arabic language.Hadith Muhammad’s Christian ScribeSahih Bukhari: Book 61, Hadith 124Narrated Anas:There was a Christian who embraced Islam and read Surat-al-Baqara and Al-`Imran, and he used to write (the revelations) for the Prophet. Later on he returned to Christianity again and he used to say: "Muhammad knows nothing but what I have written for him." Then Allah caused him to die, and the people buried him …….What we need to understand here is, the nature and the influence which Christianity exercised upon Muhammad. Arabia has been called "The Mother of Heresies." History shows, that from the earliest times, that Arabia offered a refuge for the many heretical sects of Christians who had been expelled from the Roman Empire on account of their dangerous heresies. The Christianity of Arabia in the time of Muhammad was buried under a senseless mass of superstition and degradation. It was Muhammad's misfortune that he identified this mass of superstition with true Christianity, and thus became the founder of a faith which led back to the legal bondage of Judaism and not the freedom and security found in the love of Jesus Christs’ sacrifice.Any comparison of the Apocryphal stories which were current amongst those wanderers from the pure teaching of the Bible with the stories of the Quran will, at the same time, make it evident that Muhammad accepted many of their fables as a portion of the Gospel record, and thus, believing them to be true, incorporated them into the Quran.The Muslim historian, Tabari further tells us Khadija (the first wife of the Muhammad) read the former scriptures and knew the stories of the prophets. Muhammad lived with Khadija for some fifteen years before he began to announce his mission, and when it is remembered that during that period he must also have had close and frequent interaction with Waraqa, the cousin of his wife, who was, in turn, both Hanif (believer in One God) and Christian, and was the translator of the Christian scriptures into Arabic. Making it clear as to where Muhammad obtained his knowledge of the Jewish Rabbinical fables.The Jews, especially in the neighbourhood of Medina, were both powerful and numerous; but the study of the Old Testament scriptures had largely given place to that of the Talmud. To understand the difference between the Torah and the Talmud in simplicity, the Torah is the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), some people think the Torah refers to only the "Five Books of Moses" which is commonly known as the Pentateuch. Torah or Taurat refers to all of the Book in Hebrew Bible, including such books as Joshua, Psalms, Book of Ruth, excreta. The Talmud is the compilation of the historic Rabbis "discussing" or "debating" what the Torah means. The Talmud is a chaotic arrangement of rabbinical speculations, comments, and traditions connected with the Hebrew Bible. This encyclopaedia of laws and traditions records the thoughts of a thousand years of the national life of the Jewish people, and in it, the oral traditions of the Jews which have been carefully preserved. It is often grossly imaginative and abounding in foolish fancies and absurd stories. The stories of the Talmud delighted the ears of Jewish audiences and furnished the basis of instruction in Jewish schools and it was these stories of the Talmud, rather than of the Bible, which Muhammad would learn with his interaction with the Jews.This section looks at the Christian and Jewish literature and heathen worship in Arabia around the 7th century. The bulk of this information comes from “The Origins of the Quran” - An Enquiry into the Sources of Islam by W. Goldsack from answering http://Islam.org, Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry and other scholars referenced in the footnotes. Acknowledgement is given to the respective authors and scholar for allowing me to stand on their shoulder in presenting their research into Islam.Solomon & Queen ShebaThere is a story in the Quran about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba recorded in Surah 27:15-44. It explains that Solomon was taught by God, the language of the birds. Solomon calls together an army of birds, men, and jinn’s (demons or spirits). Solomon is angered to find that the Hoopoe bird has not come to the assembly, and threatens to have the bird killed if it does not come with a good reason for his absence. The bird soon arrives and explains that he was surveying the territory that Solomon did not possess and found a woman ruling over Saba (or Sheba) on a magnificent throne. Her people worship the sun instead of God. Solomon sends the message through the Hoopoe bird to the Queen calling her not to be arrogant but to come to him in submission. Her advisors are against Solomon, but she rejects their advice and goes to Solomon in righteous submission. Solomon has a jinn transport her throne to his kingdom as a sign. When she reaches Solomon's palace, there is a floor made of glass which she mistakes for water and lifts her dress to wade through it, for which she must be corrected.This fascinating story is obviously not found anywhere in the Bible. A remarkably similar story, however, is found in a Jewish document known as "Targum Sheni." Targum Sheni was an Aramaic paraphrase of the book of Esther that also included a lot of additional legendary material.Walking on Glass - Surah 27:44She was told, "Enter the palace." But when she saw it, she thought it was a body of water and uncovered her shins [to wade through]. He said, "Indeed, it is a palace [whose floor is] made smooth with glass." She said, "My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I submit with Solomon to Allah, Lord of the worlds."If Muhammad had read the Bible, one will see this has no place in the Biblical narrative, and therefore the question naturally arises as to the source of the story. In the Targum of the Book of Esther , a Rabbinical work full of fables and mythical stories may be found, often in the very same words, practically the whole story as told by Muhammad. In this Targum, we read,"Solomon, know that she (the Queen) was come, arose and sat down in the palace of glass. When the Queen of Sheba saw it, she thought that the glass floor was water, and so, in crossing over lifted up her garments."This episode in Targum Sheni is part of the larger narrative. It fits into and completes the general lore of the story. If you were to remove it, the passage wouldn't make sense. The story was not merely cut and pasted in from another source, but rather flows out from and climaxes with the mythology being presented. In the Quranic passage, however, the story is sandwiched between an essentially unrelated story about Moses and the burning bush and a story about a later civilization called Thamud. While it would be an exaggeration to say that there is no point to the story being there at all, it is an isolated episode among a variety of unrelated episodes. The Quranic passage would make sense without the story. The Quran draws on the story as an illustration of the fables and tales on men inserted into the Quran. It makes much more sense to see the Quran repeating this story from the Targum tradition by way of example (or a modified oral version of it) just as the Quran is drawing on the well-known story of Moses from the book of Exodus.Cain, Abel and the RavenEver wondered why people are buried in the ground, the Quran recounts a fascinating story of Cain and Abel that may offer an explanation but ends with a detail not found in the Bible. This is what the Quran says:A Raven Teaches Cain - Surah 5:31Then Allah sent a crow searching in the ground to show him how to hide the disgrace of his brother. He said, "O woe to me! Have I failed to be like this crow and hide the body of my brother?" And he became of the regretful. (Full Story Surah 5:27-32)Where did this story come from? It is an old Jewish legend, an oral story, which was written down in a variety of forms in different Jewish sources. Midrash Tanhuma records:"After Cain slew Abel, the body laid outstretched upon the earth, since Cain did not know how to dispose of it. Thereupon the Holy One, blessed be he, selected two clean birds and caused one of them to kill the other. The surviving bird dug the earth with its talons and buried its victim. Cain learned from this what to do. He dug a grave and buried Abel. It is because of this that birds are privileged to cover their blood."And in Pirḳe de-R. Eliezer, Chapter 21, we find:"The dog which was guarding Abel's flock also guarded his corpse from all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the heavens. Adam and his helpmate were sitting and weeping and mourning for him, and they did not know what to do (with Abel), for they were unaccustomed to burial. A raven (came), one of its fellow birds was dead (at its side). (The Raven) said, 'I will teach this man what to do.' It took its fellow and dug in the earth, hid it and buried it before them. Adam said 'Like this raven will I act.' He took the corpse of Abel and dug in the earth and buried it."Illustrative stories that expand on biblical narratives are common throughout the Jewish Midrash literature. Such stories are legends that developed over time, particularly in the early centuries after Christ. They are exactly the kind of stories we would expect a man of Muhammad's day to hear among the Jews of his time. This legend about the raven and the body of Abel is a perfect example, and it is interesting that we find this Midrash fable in the Quran. Confusion of mythical material with history makes sense if a mere man wrote the Quran, but obviously, an all-knowing God would know the difference between biblical history and legendary Jewish fables.The Quran goes on, in the very next verse, to draw a specific application from the Cain and Abel narrative. It says:Save a Life Save the World – Surah 5:32Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors.This story is found in several places in the highly legendary and imaginative Jewish Midrash literature, like Midrash Tanhuma and Pirḳe de-R. Eliezer.The Mishnah, a code of Jewish law and interpretation that was written down by the early 3rd century AD (hundreds of years before Muhammad was born) records its own application of the Cain and Abel story:"For so we have found it with Cain that slew his brother, for it is written, the bloods of thy brother cry. It says not 'the blood of thy brother,' but the bloods of thy brother. - His blood and the blood of his posterity. (Another saying is: Bloods of thy brother - because his blood was cast over the trees and stones.) Therefore, but a single man was created in the world, to teach that if any man has caused a single soul to perish from Israel scripture imputes to him as if he had caused a whole world to perish; and if any man saves alive a single soul from Israel scripture imputes it to him as if he had saved alive a whole world," (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5b).The Mishnah is clear. This application was not a prophetic revelation given down by God. It is an interpretation reasoned out from the fact that the Hebrew word for "blood" used in the Genesis account of Cain and Abel is in the plural. This tradition in Jewish law was well established by Muhammad's time, and the Quran quotes this tradition with its own conclusion to the story. Again, this is what we expect from a man repeating or having stories written down he commonly heard from the Jews of his day and that he assumed to be Biblical, but these stories and applications are not divine revelations, but mere human traditions. The all-knowing God would obviously know the difference, while the author of the Quran did not. Therefore can Muslims claim the Quran to be the word of the True God of Creation?Burning AbrahamWhen someone copies a document and claims it is from a divine origin, it is important not to copy the errors within that document to save embracement of your alleged divine claim. Caught with a hand in the cookie Jar - as we find with Muhammad and the account of Abraham been saved from the fiery furnace.In several places of the Quran, the story is told of Abraham being cast into a fiery furnace by order of a king whom the Islamic commentators name Nimrod, because of Abraham’s refusal to worship idols.Burning of Abraham - Surah 21:68-70They said, "Burn him and support your gods - if you are to act." Allah said, "O fire, be coolness and safety upon Abraham." And they intended for him harm, but We made them the greatest losers. (Full Story Surah 21:51-71 also 29:23-25, 37:94-99)The problem with this claim is there no basis in actual history but was well known in Jewish and heretical "Christian" literature at the time the Quran was composed. The author of the Quran mistook this material for legitimate history the way one would expect an Arab merchant of Muhammad's day to do upon hearing such stories from others. This makes sense if a man like Muhammad composed the Quran, but it doesn't make much sense if the Quran is the eternal, unchanged word of the all-knowing God who has a personal copy word for word in Heaven before the world began.In the Biblical narrative, we read that Yahweh called Abraham out of "Ur of the Chaldeans". In the Babylonian language, "Ur", just means city.Genesis 15:7 & 11:31Then He said to him, “I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it.”And Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot, the son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out with them from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan; and they came to Haran and dwelt there.But in the first century, Jewish Rabbi named Jonathan Ben Uziel was translating Genesis 15 into Aramaic. He came across the word "Ur", now Jonathan did not know Babylonian so he confused the Babylonian word "Ur", which means "city" with the Hebrew word "Ur", which means "fire". This caused him to mistranslate the passage. Instead of saying that God delivered Abraham out of "Ur, the city of the Chaldeans", Jonathan's mistranslation said that God delivered Abraham out of "the fire of the Chaldeans". Now, why is this important? Well, Jewish writers ran with this idea of Abraham escaping from the fire and soon the Talmud contained all kinds of stories of Abraham being thrown into the fire by the Chaldeans and being miraculously rescued by God and these stories were quite popular in Arabia during the time of Muhammad among the Jews living there. And this is crucial because in Surah 21 we read about Abraham being delivered from the fire. Now Muhammad claimed that he was getting this story from God, but we know from history that this entire idea of Abraham being delivered from a fire was based on a mistranslation. So what makes more sense here? That God also mistranslated the word "Ur"? Or that Muhammad was getting his information from the people around him?So certain of the truth of the narrative which Muhammad heard, Muhammad persuades Allah to include the error made by the Jewish Rabbis to be revealed in the divine text of the Holy Quran. There is no support for this fable in the Jewish or Christian scriptures. But is found in its entirety in a Jewish book called the Midrash Rabbah.The whole story is given at length in the Midrash Rabba referred to above and was well known to the Arabian Jews of Muhammad's time. Thus not a divine revelation from the True God of Creation.We Killed Him Not!One of the central themes of Muslim Polemist is the denial of Jesus Christ Death and Resurrection. Despite the wealth of evidence for this event, it is understandable that one will battle to comprehend the Muslims view, instead of defaulting to a simple understanding of the true spiritual battle lines between Good and Evil. Yet what we find is the illiterate Muhammad borrowing tales and legends from an existing gnostic source in circulation in the 7th century Arabia. The Quran states:-Jesus was nor Crucified – Surah 4:157-158And [for] their saying, "Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah." And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain. Rather, Allah raised him to Himself. And ever is Allah Exalted in Might and Wise. (Full Quran Story 4:150-160)The Quran is unclear as to who died on the cross, with conviction, Muslims are clear that Jesus was not crucified but raised up to Heaven. Who was crucified is inadequately answered by Islam, but where does this idea originate from? It originates from earlier sources, in this case, Gnostic myths. During the late 2nd-century Christian writer Irenaeus wrote about the teachings of a Gnostic leader of his time named Basilides, who claimed:"He did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all," (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book I, Chapter 24, Section 40).The similarities are striking, and this is not the only example. The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of Gnostic documents that were preserved in a jar in Egypt from the 4th century AD. These documents contain a variety of references to this teaching. One, for example, has Jesus saying:"I was not afflicted at all, yet I did not die in solid reality but in what appears, in order that I not be put to shame by them,""Another, their father, was the one who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. Another was the one who lifted up the cross on his shoulder, who was Simon. Another was the one on whom they put the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height over all the riches of the archons and the offspring of their error and their conceit, and I was laughing at their ignorance," (The Second Treatise of Great Seth).Another document from Nag Hammadi recounts:"I saw him (Jesus) seemingly being seized by them. And I said 'What do I see, O Lord? That it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking?' The Saviour said to me, 'He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me.' But I, when I had looked, said 'Lord, no one is looking at you. Let us flee this place.' But he said to me, 'I have told you, 'Leave the blind alone!'. And you, see how they do not know what they are saying. For the son of their glory instead of my servant, they have put to shame.' And I saw someone about to approach us resembling him, even him who was laughing on the tree. And he was with a Holy Spirit, and he is the Saviour. And there was a great, ineffable light around them, and the multitude of ineffable and invisible Angels blessing them. And when I looked at him, the one who gives praise was revealed," (The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter)In this last version, the "substitute" seems perhaps to be Jesus' own physical body which was left behind before they crucified Jesus. While His true, spiritual self-laughed, looking down on a mere body on the cross. This gets us to the crux of the matter.Obviously, Muslims are tempted to say that these documents are the ones that preserve the real history of Jesus would not be doing themselves any favours. As can be seen, even in a careful reading of the quotes above, these documents are arguing that Jesus was not crucified because he was not actually a physical being at all. He only appeared to be human and so he only appeared to be crucified. They believe He was a purely spiritual, supernatural being that could not suffer as a mere man of flesh does. Basilides, for example, explains elsewhere in the same passage quoted from above:"But the father without birth and without name, perceiving that they would be destroyed, sent his own first-begotten Nous (he it is who is called Christ) to bestow deliverance on them that believe in him, from the power of those who made the world. He appeared, then, on earth as a man, to the nations of these powers, and wrought miracles. Wherefore he did not himself suffer death," (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book I, Chapter 24, Section 40).One of the Nag Hammadi documents likewise begins with Jesus professing:"I visited a bodily dwelling. I cast out the one who was in it previously, and I went in. And the whole multitude of the archons was disturbed. And all the physical matter of the archons along with the powers born of the earth began to tremble when it saw the likeness of the image, since it was mixed. and I was the one who was in it, not resembling the one who was in it previously. For he was a worldly man, but I, I am from above the heavens. I did not refuse them, on the one hand, and I became the Christ," (The Second Treatise of Great Seth).One gnostic document, for example, called the "Acts of John," was clearly still in circulation during and after the time of Muhammad as it was condemned by a church council in 787 AD. In fact, we have a manuscript of it, from the Middle Ages. In this document, John is reported to have said in describing the crucifixion. Jesus goes on to use the symbol of a cross of light to teach John a variety of spiritual lessons. He then goes on to say:"This, then, is the cross that has united all things by the Word, and marked off the transient and inferior, and then compacted all into one. But this is not the cross of wood which you will see when you go down here, neither am I he who is upon the cross," (Acts of John, Chapter 99)Plainly, there was a widespread, mythical notion that Jesus had not been crucified but was instead somehow made to appear so. In most versions, this was due to someone else being substituted in Jesus' place, either way, he was preserved in heavenly glory.This story is rooted deeply in gnostic teachings that Jesus is a purely spiritual being that did not ever actually become human but merely inhabited the human realm for a time, and therefore could not actually die a human death. While obviously not embracing anything like the Gnostic theology behind the story, the Quran has included this legend as a fact.Recall the foundation stones of Islamic discussed in an earlier chapter. Two central doctrines of Islam at stake here. One, of course, is the teaching that Jesus was not crucified. This was obviously a story drawn from a non-historical Gnostic myth, and therefore is not true. The second is the eternal divine nature of the Quran. From the above, we see that the probability is that the author of the Quran mistook such a myth for a historical fact, thus the Quran clearly cannot be the word of Yahweh. The True God of Creation would know the origins of His divine revelation to man.Therefore the author of the Quran was not the True God of Creation but a mere man.Moses’s Talk CalfAnother Quranic story which has an undoubted Jewish origin is that with the calf which was worshipped by the Israelites during Moses absence on Mount Sinai. We are there told that the people brought their ornaments of gold and silver and cast them into the fire, after which in like manner Samiri also cast them in and he brought out to them a calf.The Talking Golden Calf - Surah 20:87-88They said, "We did not break our promise to you by our will, but we were made to carry burdens from the ornaments of the people [of Pharaoh], so we threw them [into the fire], and thus did the Samiri throw." And he extracted for them [the statue of] a calf which had a lowing sound, and they said, "This is your god and the god of Moses, but he forgot." (Full Story 20:86-94)It is well known that in the Torah no mention is made that the golden calf of Moses made any type of sound. But rabbinical fables do, and it is this narrative which is reproduced by Muhammad. In the Pirke Rabbi Eleazar, we read,"The calf having cried aloud, came forth, and the children of Israel saw it."Rabbi Yahuda further preserves a fable to the effect that a man named Samael concealed himself inside the image and made a cry like a calf in order to lead the Israelites astray. Such is the story which was current amongst the Jews of Arabia in the time of Muhammad. Compared with the narrative of the Quran and the reader will easily see that Muhammad, thinking the story which he heard upon the lips of his Jewish contemporaries to be a part of the scripture records, adopted and later gave it out to the ignorant Arabs as though revealed from Heaven.Unfortunately, Muhammad failed to rightly understand the illusion to the man Samael, confusing his name with the name of the Samaritans, whom he probably knew to be the enemies of the Jews, makes the Samaritan have a part in the matter. Since, however, the Samaritans did not come into existence as a people until some centuries after the event recorded here, it must require a wide stretch of gullibility indeed to enable one to believe that this Quranic tale also was handed down from heaven by the Angel Gabriel.Ramadan Not from Allah but from Jews and SabiansMany of the Islamic practices followed by Muslims are founded in their pagan ancestors. Both the Jews and Sabina’s observed a month's fast in the year, it is not easy to determine which of these sects furnished Muhammad with the idea to include it in the Quran. There is no doubt that it has a Jewish origin considering the similarity in the fasting times.Ramadan not from Allah - Surah 2:183 & 187O you who have believed, decreed upon you is fasting as it was decreed upon those before you that you may become righteous. And eat and drink until the white thread of dawn becomes distinct to you from the black thread [of night]. Then complete the fast until the sunset.This resourceful method of determining when the night ended and the day began was not original, but was copied by Muhammad from the Jews who, long before, had adopted a similar practice; and in the Mishnah Berakhoth we read that the fast began,"When one can distinguish between a blue thread and a white one."Although the fasting of Ramadan was practised in pre-Islamic times by the pagans of Jahiliyah, it was introduced to Arabia by the Harranians. (Harran was a city on the border between Syria and Iraq, very close to Asia Minor which, today, is Turkey.) Their main deity was the moon, and in the worship of the moon, they conducted a major fast which lasted thirty days. It began on the eighth of March and usually finished on the eighth of April. Arabic historians, such as Ibn Hazm, identify this fast with Ramadan.Casting Lots for Mother MaryAnother story of the Quran which has a distinctly Christian origin is that relating to the childhood of the Virgin Mary. In a community where the pure teachings of the Gospel were hidden under a load of superstitious beliefs, and where idol worship of the mother of Jesus had taken the place of true worship, it is not surprising to find a number of legendary stories in which, with extravagant detail, the events of the Virgin's life are related. These Apocryphal stories were current amongst the Christians of Arabia and were almost certainly well known to Muhammad.Muhammad understood the following two accounts as divine revelation and incorporated them into the Quran, neither are found in the Biblical narrative. Muhammad being illiterate was too ignorant of the contents of the genuine Gospels to detect their falseness, and consequently found no difficulty in introducing them into his revelations as a part of the message sent down to confirm the previous Scriptures.Cast Lots to Care for Mother Mary - Surah 3:44That is from the news of the unseen which We reveal to you, [O Muhammad]. And you were not with them when they cast their pens as to which of them should be responsible for Mary. Nor were you with them when they disputed. (Full Story 3:42-45)Jesus Birth Under the PalmsAnother Quranic story connected with the Virgin Mary which Muhammad borrowed from the Apocryphal Gospels, or rather from the lips of his Christian acquaintances, is that of the palm-tree.Birth of Jesus Under a Palm Tree - Surah 19:22-25So she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a remote place. And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, "Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten." But he called her from below her, "Do not grieve; your Lord has provided beneath you a stream. And shake toward you the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates. (Full Story Surah 19:16-28)This story is found in its entirety in the Apocryphal books of the heretical Christians who lived in Arabia in the time of Muhammad. Hence its source is clearly from the “Infancy Gospel of James”, (Protoevangelium of James) and in the Coptic "History of the Virgin" the incident of casting lots for the guardianship of Mary is fully related. While the birth of Christ under the Palms is found in the Gnostic word called "History of the Nativity of Mary and the Infancy of the Saviour" Look at the similarities in the narrative!Joseph hastened and brought her (Mary) to that palm-tree, and took her down off her beast. When Mary sat down she looked up to the top of the palm-tree, and seeing it full of fruit said to Joseph, 'I desire if it be possible, to take of the fruit of this palm-tree.' ..... Then the child Jesus, who with a joyful countenance lay in his mother, the Virgin Mary's bosom, said to the palm-tree, 'O, tree, lower thy branches and refresh my mother with thy fruit.' Instantly the palm-tree at this word bowed its head to the sole of Mary's feet; and they all plucked the fruit which it bore, and were refreshed and the palm-tree instantly stood erect, and streams of very clear, cool, and very sweet water began to come forth from amid its roots."Surah 19:22-26 tells of Mary, still pregnant with Jesus, travelling and being driven by the pains of childbirth to sit under a tree. She expects to die there, but a voice speaks to her from beneath her (perhaps the preborn Jesus?) and tells her to shake the tree and she will be given both foods and drink by the tree and will live. This odd story is also paralleled by an earlier legend in the mythical "Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew," except that in Pseudo-Matthew, Jesus is a two-year-old boy at the time, and He commands the tree to bend down and feed Mary of its fruit.The Gospels, on the contrary, tell us that Christ was born in the town of Bethlehem, again, the source of the story repeated by Muhammad can be clearly traced. In the Apocryphal work entitled the "History of the Nativity of Mary and the Infancy of the Saviour" the whole story of the palm-tree in its main features may be clearly traced.Jesus Speaking in the CradleThe Quran represents Jesus Christ as an infant talking to his mother.Jesus Speaking from the Cradle - Surah 19:28-34O sister of Aaron, your father was not a man of evil, nor was your mother unchaste." So she pointed to him. They said, "How can we speak to one who is in the cradle a child?" [Jesus] said, "Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet. And He has made me blessed wherever I am and has enjoined upon me prayer and zakah as long as I remain alive. And [made me] dutiful to my mother, and He has not made me a wretched tyrant. And peace is on me the day I was born and the day I will die and the day I am raised alive." That is Jesus, the son of Mary - the word of truth about which they are in dispute.See also Surah 3:42-50 and 5:110Extract from Infancy Gospel of Jesus ChristThis is found in the “Injilu't Tufuliyyah” better known as the Arabic "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas". This is a 2nd-century Arabic apocryphal fable from Egypt. This is what it says:“... Jesus spoke when he was in the cradle and said to his mother: "Mary, I am Jesus the Son of God, the Word, which thou didst bring forth according to the declaration of the Angel Gabriel, and My Father hath sent me for the salvation of the world”Surah 19:27-34 reports Jesus speaking as a new-born babe. This is rooted in an unbiblical and completely fictional legend that we know existed in Arabic speaking “Christian” communities, as it is written in the apocryphal Arabic Infancy Gospel , dated to the 5th or early 6th century AD.What is interesting and must be noted that this account is also mentioned in surah 19:29-30Jesus Speaks in the Cradle – Surah 19:29-30But she pointed towards him. "How can we talk to one," they said, "who is only an infant in the cradle?" "I am a servant of God," he answered. "He has given me a Book and made me a prophet,Remember the Islamic tradition says the Quran was revealed over 23 years by Gabriel to Muhammad. The Quran is about 10% of the word count of the Bible. A note is made Allah reveals the above verse in the past tense and that Jesus was given the complete Bible immediately. The theological implication is that Jesus was in existence before His birth in eternity with Allah. Any other interpretation would mean we would have to rewrite the revelation to conform with the Islamic tradition which then destroys the Muslims claim that the Quran is protected and unchanged.Jesus Brings Clay Birds to LifeThe Quran has Jesus moulding clay birds and breathing life into them as a young boy. For a faith that so adamantly stands against the deity of Jesus one is surprised to find Jesus as the creator and gives of life equal to that of Allah. We know this is a fable heard by Muhammad and not a revelation from the True God of Creation.Jesus Bringing Birds to Life - Surah 3:49And [make him] a messenger to the Children of Israel, [who will say], 'Indeed I have come to you with a sign from your Lord in that I design for you from clay [that which is] like the form of a bird, then I breathe into it and it becomes a bird by permission of Allah. And I cure the blind and the leper, and I give life to the dead - by permission of Allah. And I inform you of what you eat and what you store in your houses. Indeed in that is a sign for you, if you are believers.See Also Surah 5:110Surah 3:49 and 5:110 both tell of Jesus making clay birds and bringing them to life. This myth was earlier recorded in the Gnostic "Infancy Gospel of Thomas," yet the Quran reports it right alongside his biblical miracles as if this were historical and in the true Gospels. It also appears in the "The Gospel of Thomas the Israelite". Here is what the passage says:-Extract from “The Gospel of Thomas the Israelite”The child Jesus, when five years of age, was playing on the road by a dirty stream of running water; and having brought it all together into ditches, immediately made it pure and clean; by saying a single word. Then having moistened some earth, he made of it twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath day when he did these things. There were many other children playing with him. Now a Jew, seeing what Jesus did, that he was playing on the Sabbath day, went his way to (Jesus') father Joseph. He said, "Behold, your son is at the stream of dirty water, and having taken up some mud, has made of it twelve sparrows, thus desecrating the Sabbath. On this Joseph went to the spot, and cried out, "Why did you do these things on the Sabbath day which it is not lawful to do?" Jesus then clapped his hands at the sparrows and cried aloud to them, "Go off!" So they, clucking, flew away.” The Jews seeing it were astonished, and went and told their rulers what they had seen Jesus do."Note:- That these earlier sources are a verifiable hard copy proof and that this text was plagiarised as a divine revelation. In other words, the author of the Quran simply adapted many know stories put an Islamic twist to it and claimed it was sent from Allah.This is a fact Islam cannot ignore and by doing so simple hides the truth from the ignorant Muslim who blindly accepts Islam and the teaching that there is no God but Allah. If we are to accept them as a divine revelation then the truth as such as in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Thomas the Israelite become the Gods of the Quran. Another dilemma created by the Islamic source documents that require an answer.The Islamic Scales of JusticeIslam’s idea of life hereafter is totally dependent on the balancing of the scales between good and bad deeds. Islam teaches that on Judgment Day a scale will be produced in which the actions (good and bad deeds) of men will be weighed. Those whose good deeds prevail will enter paradise, whilst those whose evil deeds out-weigh the good will be cast into hell.The Balance of Scales - Surah 7:7-9Then We will surely relate [their deeds] to them with knowledge, and We were not [at all] absent. And the weighing [of deeds] that Day will be the truth. So those whose scales are heavy - it is they who will be the successful. And those whose scales are light - they are the ones who will lose themselves for what injustice they were doing toward Our verses.This Balancing of the Scales of Justice has its source in the Apocryphal work entitled the "Testament of Abraham," which was written in the second or third century of the Christian era. This is a mythical story of the patriarch Abraham's ascension to heaven, where he beheld amongst other marvels, the great throne of judgment. And, the story proceeds as follows: -"On a table lay a book; its thickness was six cubits and its breadth ten cubits. And on the right and left of it there stood two Angels holding paper and pen and ink. And in front of the table was seated a bright beaming Angel holding a balance in his hand ……… The one on the right was registering the righteous acts, but the one on the left the sins. And the one in front of the table, the one who held the balance, was weighing the souls."It need hardly be said, that Muhammad had ample opportunity for interaction with Jews, from whom he could learn the popular stories of the time of the early patriarchs and others and thinking these were the true accounts from Yahweh included then into the revelation of the Quran in the hopes he would gain a Jewish following.Hanging MountainsAnother fable which Muhammad learned from the Jews which was incorporated into the Quran is a fanciful story of God's holding a mountain over the Israelites in order to frighten them.Holding Mountains over People’s Heads - Surah 7:171And [mention] when We raised the mountain above them as if it was a dark cloud and they were certain that it would fall upon them, [and Allah said], "Take what We have given you with determination and remember what is in it that you might fear Allah."This story has no foundation in any fact, but it is to be found in a Jewish tract called the Abodah Sarah . The Torah relates nothing of the kind but simply states that, while God was giving Moses the Law on Mount Sinai, all the people stood at the foot of the Mount. The Jewish commentators, however, soon turned this into a fanciful story of God's holding the mountain over the people. The story, as found in the Abodah Sarah, God is represented as saying to the Israelites: -"I covered you over with the mountain like a lid." In another Rabbinical version of the story we read that God inverted the holy mountain above them like a pot, and said unto them, “if ye receive the Law, well, but if not, there will your grave be.” This legend, which was current amongst the Jews of Arabia, were soon to be incorporated it into Muhammad’s Quran and instructs Muslims for all time to believe Allah will drop Mountains on your head if you do not obey him. Doing a simple investigation of this story is taken directly from a rabbinic tradition recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.Star is Missiles Throw by AngelsThe story quoted above is only equalled for absurdity and fantasy by that quoted of the devil's endeavour to hear what is going on in heaven, and is then driven away by meteors which are thrown at him by the Angels. Thus we read in the Quran:-Satan Eves Drops in on Heaven - Surah 15:16-18And We have placed within the heaven great stars and have beautified it for the observers. And We have protected it from every devil expelled [from the mercy of Allah] Except one who steals a hearing and is pursued by a clear burning flame.Shooting Stars are Missiles Thrown at Demons - Surah 67:5And We have certainly beautified the nearest heaven with stars and have made [from] them what is thrown at the devils and have prepared for them the punishment of the BlazeOf all the stories I have researched for this book, I am absolutely amazed at how unsuspecting Muslims would actually consider this type of tale to be from the True God of Creation and not simply the imagination of a great storyteller. I was surprised that this is echoed in a Jewish fable preserved in the Hagigah, where it is said that the demons "listen from behind a curtain" in order to obtain a knowledge of future events. No intelligent Muslim can accept this as coming from a divine origin and bears witness to the testimony of the human origin of the Quran.Seven Sleeper in the CaveMen of Ephesus Sleep for 300 Years - Surah 18:9-13, 25Or have you thought that the companions of the cave and the inscription were, among Our signs, a wonder? [Mention] when the youths retreated to the cave and said, "Our Lord, grant us from Yourself mercy and prepare for us from our affair right guidance." So We cast [a cover of sleep] over their ears within the cave for a number of years. Then We awakened them that We might show which of the two factions was most precise in calculating what [extent] they had remained on time. It is We who relate to you, [O Muhammad], their story in truth. Indeed, they were youths who believed in their Lord, and We increased them in guidance. And they remained in their cave for three hundred years and exceeded by nine.This mythical story, which is absolutely devoid of foundation, was current in Arabia long before the time of Muhammad. It is found in the writings of a Syrian, named Jacob of Sarug, who died in 521 A.D, which tells the story of seven young men of Ephesus who fled from the persecution of the Roman Emperor Decius. They took refuge in a cave where they fell asleep and only awoke some one hundred and ninety-six years later to find Christianity had been triumphant.This narrative forms part of a family of legends popular among Jews and Christians of the 7th century. Muhammad must often have heard the legend, from the Christians of Arabia and Syria, and imagining it to be true, pretended that he had received it as a divine revelation and included this tale into the Quran.Muhammad and the Flying DonkeyEvery Muslim is familiar with the story of Muhammad's celebrated night journey known as the Mi'raj. This night journey is the very foundation stone of the Islamic prayer ritual five times a day. Yet the Quran has only the briefest reference to this wondrous event. One is left to rely on the Hadith written 200 years after Muhammad’s death in order to understand the verse.Flying Horse to Temple Mount - Surah 17:1Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of Our signs. Indeed, He is the Hearing, the Seeing.Islamic tradition portrays in detail a literal bodily journey by night upon the back of a fabulous steed, not merely to the further temple (the temple of Jerusalem), but to heaven itself, where the Prophet ascended from story to story, until he reached the very presence of God and learned many of the secrets of heaven.It is no surprise that the story comes from Arta Viraf Namak and Persians folk tales which was written some four hundred years before Muhammad’s birth. Arta Viraf Namak account is very similar to Muhammad’s account - agreeing in many of its details - in which a young magi priest of saintly life, ascended to heaven under the guidance of an Angel, and after passing into the very presence of God and beholding the felicities of heaven returned to the earth to tell Zoroastrians what he had seen.A note is made that in the Saana Manuscripts the Quranic verse of the Mi'raj is not in the ancient text. Suggesting the development and evolution of the Islamic faith well after the death of Muhammad.Jihad Virgins are a MythThe Quranic stories of the “Houris of Paradise” are likewise borrowed from the Persians. Every reader of the Quran is familiar with the pictures of the sensual paradise found here, and of the Houris with large black eyes who recline upon luxurious couches waiting for the embrace of the faithful.Garden Tale - Surah 55:46-76 (Paraphrased)But for he who has feared the position of his Lord is two gardens - Having branches. In both of them are two springs, women reclining on beds whose linings are of silk brocade, and the fruit of the two gardens is hanging low. In them are women limiting [their] glances, untouched before them by man or jinni. As if they were rubies and coral. In them are good and beautiful women. Reclining on green cushions and beautiful fine carpets.These tales of the Houris are derived from ancient Persian legends about beautiful female spirits, who inhabit Paradise and captivate the hearts of men. These “Pairakas”, as they are called, must often have been described to Muhammad in song and story; and the very word “hur,” by which they are described in the Quran, is itself of Persian origin, and not the Pure Arabic as Islam claims. The root is from the word “Pahlavi” or “hur” meaning light, and thus sufficiently indicates the source of the whole story.The facts revealed above are not new and are well known to Islamic scholars. Rather than admit the influence of external text inserted into the Quran we find the employment of the doctrine of Taqiyya in the knowledge that Muslims may not question the Quran.But as the facts described above leaves the Muslims without the textual evidence to back their faith, which leaves me wondering what is the nature that drives Muslims to accept these tales noted in the Quran. One must conclude that Muslim do not educate themselves in understanding the Quran and simply follow the lead and deception employed by their spiritual leaders.The outlined facts prove that Muhammad adopted ideas and doctrines from the Hanifs, Sabians, Zoroastrians and others. The presumption on is left with is that the rest of the Quran is also borrowed and not a divine revelation.Other borrowed works in the QuranSurah 2:34 recounts the casting out of Satan from heaven for refusing to bow down to Adam. It alludes to this story as if it is a fact of history with which the reader is expected to already be familiar. As it turns out, it was indeed a known story of the day, but not from the Bible or history. Rather, it can be found in the entirely mythical book, "The Life of Adam and Eve."Surah 5:32 gives a specific moral and legal application to the story of Cain and Abel. This application is not only drawn directly from the 3rd-century Jewish legal tradition of the Mishnah; it practically quotes a portion of Sanhedrin 4:5 verbatim.Surah 21 tells a story of Abraham destroying idols in his homeland. He is then cast into a fire by the people but miraculously delivered by God. This story is a Jewish legend recorded in the second-century Midrash Rabbah.No one is suggesting that Muhammad had a library of all of these documents and copied them all into the Quran. There is no evidence that the author of the Quran ever actually read the Bible, much less these other sources. Instead, these documents are merely records of the kind of myths and stories that were being passed around among Jews, Christians, Arabic Folktales and their heretical offshoots during this period. The Quran tells these stories right alongside similar narratives found in the Bible with an Islamic twist. Distorting the truth ever so slightly, that highlights the deception Christians and Jews are warned against that are used by Satan and his host of demons.The author of the Quran did not know the difference between the true Biblical events of history and the mythical tales of man's imaginations. The Quran, therefore, was not a divine revelation as Islam claims, but the word of mere human mortals. In closing, I note that the above is not a full exposé of the borrowed works and pagan rituals in the Quran. For a faith that claims its revelation is eternal, perfect and protected by the hands of the Almighty Creator, it offers little or no confidence in the deity, known as Allah.