The InsideView 20 – The Top Sales Industry Social Media Users

December 9, 2009 in Sales 2.0 | Tags: , , | by insideviewblog | 1 comment

Social media is changing hundreds of industries and professions, and sales is no exception. Though not everyone is ahead of the curve, there are a select few that are trailblazing for the rest of us.  To recognize those members of the sales industry who in their use of social media are bringing together important news, intelligence and theory, we are pleased to announce the first 10 members of the InsideView 20. This list of sales industry leaders is composed of sales executives, writers, trainers, analysts and more, all of whom are making savvy use of many of the social media tools available today and helping usher in the renaissance we like to call ‘Sales 2.0.’ These are the folks, who like InsideView itself, are doing their part to deliver us to the future of the sales industry – one that is highly connected, informed and efficient.

With out further ado, here are the first 10 members of the InsideView 20 (in no particular order):

1. Chris Powell, VP of sales and founder of Industrial Interface
Twitter: @TechSalesLeads
More: Industrial Interface home

If you work in sales, you need to follow Chris on Twitter. His feed is chock-full of sales industry insights and links to relevant articles and studies.

2. Randy Ferrell, VP of Sales at Care2.com
Twitter: @randyferrell
More: Care2.com

Need another reason why Twitter is a brilliant service? You get to regularly see what is on the mind of a VP of Sales for a forward-thinking organization. Randy frequently tweets links to really interesting articles that are related to the issues his company works on, such as the environment, health, human rights and animal welfare.

3. Paul Cummings, VP Sales and Marketing for Impression Management Professionals
Twitter: @paul_cummings
More: Impression Management home

Paul is VP of Sales at a sales training and leadership development organization, so following him is like getting a double dose of what you need in the Sales 2.0 world. From Webinars to articles – great stuff, Paul!

4. Helene Zemel, Senior Regional Sales Director for AmeriPlan

Twitter: @hzemel
More: Health Plans Plus blog

Helene tweets and blogs regularly, keeping her followers entertained and informed on both her personal interests (she’s a classically-trained pianist) and the issues shaping her professional world (healthcare reform and industry trends).

5. Megan Heuer, Research Director at SiriusDecisions
Twitter: @megheuer
More: Sirius Blog

Meg is a regular contributor to her company blog, examining topics like what sales really needs, and an active tweeter, sharing links and constantly joining the conversations she finds important. As part of the research team at her firm, she’s no doubt gathering a cornucopia of insight from the social Web.

6. Brad Trnavsky, President of Sales Management 2.0

Twitter: @bmtrnavsky
More: Sales Management 2.0 profile

In addition to tweeting about the latest sales and marketing resources, Brad has created an entire social community for the sales management profession at Sales Management 2.0 with more than 1,100 members. If you’re not tapped into that conversation, we highly suggest doing so now.

7. Maurice Cheeks, Apple Educational sales executive
Twitter: @MoCheeks
More: MoCheeks.com

Maurice is a frequent blogger, Twitterer and general social media force who shares thoughts about a wide range of subject from media to sales to philosophy — sounds about right for an Apple employee.

8. Alden Mills, founder of Perfect Fitness
Twitter: @aldenmills
More: Perfect Fitness blog

You’ve probably seen the Perfect Pushup device in stores and on TV, now meet the man behind the muscle by following him on Twitter and checking out his blog, which gives you extra tips and clearly written posts on how to get the most out of your workout. This former Navy SEAL is not only tearing it up in the gym, but is also active on the social Web. Great stuff for advancing his goal of “perfect fitness.”

9. Kendra Lee, President and IT sales expert at KLA Group
Twitter: @KendraLeeKLA
More: KLA Group

Following Kendra on Twitter is not only a way to get insight into the latest sales and marketing events, but also a clear answer to issues such as the best way to follow up with leads and why you should take a long, hard look at your actual sales processes.

10. Bill Rice, founder and CEO of Kaleidico
Twitter: @BillRice
More: Better Closer blog

In addition to founding a company that provides a CRM solution to the mortgage industry, Bill writes regularly on smarter marketing and social selling at his blog, and keeps his Twitter followers in the know on the latest tips and tricks for the best sales strategies.

Thoughts from Dreamforce 2009: It’s all about the Data

November 19, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

Two days into this year’s Dreamforce conference and we’re noticing that data is a big trending topic.

And we’re ecstatic.

Quality of data is the key to the sales intelligence business and we pride ourselves in being able to deliver smart, fresh and complete information to sales people all around the world in real-time. BNET’s David Weir wrote an in-depth article today from Dreamforce on the changing landscape of sales intelligence industry and the increasing importance of data gleaned from social media. Weir gives InsideView’s Sales 2.0 business model a strong endorsement in the piece, noting, “Meanwhile, the legacy biz-intel companies are still out there, trying to adapt, but disruptive technology companies like InsideView look to me to be poised to eat their lunch.” To read the full article, please click here.

As we noted in our announcement earlier this month, the constantly increasing sources of data now available on the Web have led to the rapid abandonment of traditional editorial providers like Hoover’s and OneSource for Sales 2.0 solutions like SalesView, which are able to quickly aggregate relevant information from across the Web and deliver it immediately.

Throughout the #DF09 expo floor this year, you’ll see folks working in the “better data” realm left and right. Everything from ensuring accurate account views to monitoring sentiment information to the real-time aggregation end like we work in — and this all of course validated by the huge announcement from salesforce.com yesterday on their new Chatter launch — it’s becoming all about the data.

Just what we like to see!

NINE WAYS TO GET SOCIAL AT DREAMFORCE

November 11, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

Are you headed to DreamForce next week? The InsideView team will be there, demoing, speaking, and most importantly helping attendees learn more about using social data to drive ROI in their businesses. The show this year is packed with interesting companies, sessions and even fun contests. If you’re interested in the confluence of social media and the enterprise and how it all mashes together at Dreamforce, we’ve gone ahead and picked some of the more interesting ways to fill your Dreamforce dance card.

  1. Sales 2.0 Night – Get cocktails and network with Sales 2.0 leaders Thursday, November 19th, 6pm – 8pm at the Sculpturesite Gallery – RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/y8nfbec
  2. Attend InsideView’s panel “How to Tap into Social Media to Drive Sales Results” Wednesday, Nov 18th @ 3:30 PM, at West Mezzanine 254
  3. Follow the #DF09 hashtag on Twitter
  4. Check out some of these cool vendors’ booths: Genius, Xactly, BlueWolf
  5. Party in the Cloud Tuesday 8-10pm at Two Bar. RSVP here: http://bit.ly/2pCMjV
  6. Get on the Napa Valley Wine Train: Dreamforce attendees get a special deal
  7. Enter our contest to win an Aston Martin for the weekend: Register here
  8. Join the mosh pit at the Black Crowes concert
  9. Share InsideView’s James Bond-themed Dreamforce video:

NetSuite partnership to deliver First Social Intelligence Software for Both Core CRM and ERP Business Processes

November 10, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

We are thrilled to announce that InsideView has partnered with NetSuite (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of cloud computing business software suites, to create InsideView for NetSuite, the first Social Intelligence application to bring social media to both CRM and ERP, optimizing core business processes that are essential to driving the success or failure of every business. InsideView for NetSuite now allows NetSuite users to have instant access to relevant intelligence harvested from emerging social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Jigsaw and NetProspex, as well as editorial sources, such as Thomson Reuters and Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s Company), directly within NetSuite, empowering users to significantly improve business efficiencies across sales, marketing, billing, procurement, and HR operations.

InsideView for NetSuite was built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud development platform and is the first social intelligence application delivered natively within NetSuite. The new application expands our partnership with NetSuite beyond its original sales intelligence focus to deliver the power of social intelligence throughout both front-office sales and marketing and back-office financial operations. By leveraging the social intelligence delivered by InsideView directly within the NetSuite interface, businesses can gain new insights into their customers, prospects, employees and vendors to realize cross-enterprise productivity improvements.

Our partnership with NetSuite will allow InsideView’s technology to go beyond Social CRM for sales and marketing workflows and extend into Social ERP optimized for back-office operations such as:

–  Billing / Collections: Automated monitoring of financial events such
as funding developments, analyst ratings, earnings calls, cost cutting,
bankruptcy, etc., allows for the real-time prioritization of accounts and
collections efforts while relationship mining helps expedite billing
issues.
–  Procurement: Consolidated contact search allows for easier resolution
of bidding, pricing, or payment issues and integrated competitor profiles
help identify and evaluate other potential vendors.
–  Recruiting: Automated monitoring of talent acquisition opportunities
across target companies and consolidated contact search assist in sourcing
candidates by title, industry, company size, key event and specific
competitors.

We are very excited to enter this new phase of our partnership with NetSuite and for the beginning of what is sure to be a great future for Social ERP. If you would like to read more about today’s announcement, please click here: http://bit.ly/2OA7TW

Hundreds of companies switching from legacy data providers to InsideView

November 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

The tide is changing in the sales intelligence industry. Hundreds of businesses have moved on from legacy sales data providers such as Hoover’s and OneSource to InsideView’s Sales 2.0-powered Sales Intelligence solution, SalesView. And the pace of companies switching to our Sales 2.0 solution is accelerating. SalesView customers are achieving higher sales productivity, identifying additional customer engagement opportunities as well as realizing broader CRM adoption across their sales teams.

The recent proliferation of data sources is making it difficult for legacy data providers to keep up with this accelerating trend, leading to scaling issues. Data explosion is also resulting in conflicting or incorrect information between providers. Legacy sales data providers typically use a difficult-to-scale, editorial-based approach to offer static company and contact information. As a vendor-neutral intelligent data aggregator, InsideView is in a unique position to leverage its Smart Cloud platform to address these problems, ultimately delivering the most relevant and accurate sales intelligence.

Independent research corroborates the higher productivity levels of InsideView customers. According to Peter Ostrow, research director for sales effectiveness at The Aberdeen Group, “InsideView customers are achieving 32% better performance than non-customers, in terms of current lead conversion rates and hitting quota, and year-to-year growth in revenue and win/loss ratios.”

Check out what people are saying after they switch to our SalesView application:

“Our decision to switch to SalesView from Hoover’s was driven by our desire to consolidate multiple data sources into a single stream as well as improve the quality and relevance of the intelligence our business development team relies on daily to formulate target account strategy,” said James Warren, director, global business development at RightNow Technologies. “Another key factor in our decision was the accurate prospect information SalesView delivers.”

“Since our switch to SalesView earlier this year, call preparation has become much more efficient, and conversations with prospects a lot more informed,” stated Eric Johnson, vice president of worldwide sales operations at Serena Software.

“The primary reason for our decision to replace Hoover’s with SalesView was its tight, easy-to-use integration with Salesforce.com,” said John Knotwell, senior director of sales operations at inContact. “The single point of access is a significant sales productivity enhancer, enabling fast and effective prospecting and account planning.”

“After an in-depth evaluation, we selected SalesView as our standard sales intelligence platform primarily due to its breadth of company and contact coverage as well as the tight integration with Salesforce.com,” said Neil Florio director of marketing for Qlikview. “The watch lists and associated smart alerts deliver the sales team timely and relevant information about our prospects.  And, as an added bonus, the Salesforce.com integration has helped increase CRM adoption within our team and improve our overall CRM data quality.”

“Our trial with InsideView demonstrated significant value over Hoover’s based on head-to-head tests in several active campaigns. The depth of contacts was far superior to Hoover’s and Smart Agents™ brought relevant news about target accounts directly to our sales team,” said Glenn Haertel, executive vice president at SynQ Solutions. “SalesView’s tight integration into Microsoft Dynamics CRM was another key factor in our decision-making.  We adopted SalesView even though we still had six months left on the Hoover’s contract.”

Innotas Hits Sales Sweet Spot With InsideView

October 16, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

We’re pleased to announce that Innotas, an on-demand IT governance solution, has successfully deployed SalesView. In the year since Innotas began utilizing SalesView they have registered incredible results, including a more than 150% growth in year-over-year revenue, a 200% increase in call volume, 240% increase in transactions and nearly 1,000% increase in customers contacted!

Kevin Kern, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Innotas noted about SalesView, “Before deploying SalesView, we were experiencing the all-too-common problems that sales teams face: Inaccurate and incomplete data, conflicting customer list information, and insufficient and redundant prospecting activity meant there was no single source of ‘truth’ in our data. SalesView has corrected these issues and contributed greatly to our tremendous revenue, transaction and pipeline growth over the past year.”

SalesView has helped Innotas create a systematic way to manage sales territories more effectively and deliver improved information and visibility into opportunities. The application also simplified the prospecting process and improved cross-selling with Innotas’ existing customers.

As Kern also noted, “Simply put, better data means warmer sales calls — and that’s huge.”

It’s tremendous to see what Innotas has been able to achieve in its target market with SalesView. We’re looking forward to hearing more about their continued growth and SalesView’s role in achieving excellent results.

InsideView reports Strong Third-Quarter Revenue Growth

October 7, 2009 in Uncategorized | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

What a year it’s been! We’re really excited to announce today that InsideView has experienced significant growth since the same quarter as last year, including a revenue growth of 294% over the third quarter of 2008. It’s been an extremely busy quarter with the announcement of partnerships with top tier information providers, such as Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s company), Cortera and NetProspex, as well the launch of the InsideView Smart Cloud™platform.

The InsideView Smart Cloud is the first sales intelligence solution to allow plug-and-play addition and validation of content, a critical component for keeping up with the constantly changing information sources across the Web. To read more about the platform, check out TechCrunchIT’s article on the launch here.

Overall, we’ve seen great growth across our business during the third quarter. Some additional financial highlights include:

–  163% bookings growth over same quarter last year
–  294% revenue growth over same quarter last year
–  250% customer growth over same quarter last year
–  235% seat growth over same quarter last year

And we’re moving right along. Be on the lookout for exciting news coming from us soon.

Live blogging from Sales 2.0 – Brainshark shares 320% ROI details

September 10, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

We’re here at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago for the Sales 2.0 Conference and just listened to the ‘Sales Lead Management 2.0 – Best Practices for a Profitable Lead Pipeline’ session. Panelist David Fitzgerald, executive vice president of sales, marketing and services for Brainshark, gave an engaging presentation on Brainshark’s very successful performance last quarter and savvy use of Sales 2.0 technologies, such as SalesView.

Some of the business challenges that Fitzgerald noted that Brainshark had been experiencing prior to their accelerated sales growth included:
- Increasing Sales Productivity – how to achieve more effective sales prospecting.
- Increasing Marketing Campaign effectiveness
- Improving the quality of the data in SFDC
- Named Account Management – Brainshark had a need for hierarchy information, access to named account information and demographics for territory account assignments

Brainshark made the decision in February 2009 to begin using InsideView as their sales intelligence provider and during its first six months of SalesView deployment they have achieved more than a 320% return on investment (ROI) and a 12% increase in their pipeline! Some of the specific reasons that he attributed SalesView helping to increase Brainshark’s sales productivity included its easy-to-use integration with SFDC, as well as the quick access the application provides to high level contacts, social media buzz, competitive news and account hierarchies. He also noted that SalesView increased their marketing campaign effectiveness through the improved quality and quantity of leads and demographic data it provided.

To illustrate the success that Brainshark has experienced with InsideView, David gave the example of a significant deal that one of his reps used to close a deal with Wolters Kluwer, a five billion dollar information and business intelligence company. Tim McDonough, strategic account manager at Brainshark, recorded a 2-3 minute testimonial (using the Brainshark technology of course, very cool idea).  In it he highlights how SalesView helped him quickly find key executives’ contact information and build a customized executive presentation based on intelligence found by SalesView Smart Agents and the new ‘Buzz’ tab.  Throughout the 10 week sales cycle, Brainshark also continued to receive automated alerts via SalesView, keeping him informed about any key events at the company.

InsideView testimonial by Brainshark strategic account manager Tim McDonough

InsideView testimonial by Brainshark strategic account manager Tim McDonough

Brainshark’s success with SalesView is reflective of the type of sales productivity and performance gains that we are seeing across InsideView’s client base. We are very excited to see our clients utilizing SalesView in such effective ways and turning the potential of Sales 2.0 technology like ours into solid success metrics.

Social CRM – Don’t Forget the Sales Reps!

August 25, 2009 in social crm | Tags: , , , , , , | by insideviewblog | Leave a comment

To follow-up on our last post on the ongoing discussions about social CRM (sCRM) we thought we would offer more of our take on sCRM and how we see our role in this emerging field. Much of the sCRM thinking and product development to-date has been around increasing collaboration and communication channels for customer management and support. (If you are curious to read a very cogent article on the evolution of sCRM, check out Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post on ZDNet ‘Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship.’) Dion does an excellent job covering how Web 2.0 technologies have been increasingly integrated into CRM platforms and concludes that “Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.”

So is Social CRM mainly a way for companies to interact faster and in more ways with their customers? We think it can be more. Making the social Web accessible and useful to sales and marketing teams, not just customer management groups, also fits into our vision of the benefits of sCRM. For example, our Sales Intelligence application, SalesView, enables sales and marketing professionals to receive relevant and timely information from across the social Web and traditional news and information sources directly in their CRM application — should this type of integration of social media and CRM be considered something outside of sCRM?

As Michael Krigsman’s recent post on Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 notes, “In today’s social environment, the greatest threat of failure comes from standing aloof and not becoming engaged.” And we would argue that this sentiment applies to all aspects of the CRM process – not just tracking the conversations of current customers across the social Web, but prospective ones as well. The common thread is the need to locate the right conversations for your business that are occurring across the social Web and engaging in them intelligently and quickly.