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InsideView has been featured in a brand new book all about Sales 2.0 by authors Brent Holloway and Anneke Seley (“Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practicies and Technology, 2008, John Wiley & Sons). The book sets out to tackle the new challenge of sales teams…namely, identifying and communicating with customers in this Web-based, information-overloaded world. This has been a great year for innovation in sales intelligence technology and this book is coming out at just the right time to capture the recent advances in this industry.
As part of its chapter titled “Sales 2.0 Technology: Selecting the Right Enabling Tools,” the writers describe InsideView at length as part of the theme of sales intelligence and getting to know the customer:
“Never before has there been so much customer and prospect information…salespeople can now leverage the Internet and emerging Sales 2.0 technologies to learn more about their qualified prospects and their specific needs before a sales call. Some emerging companies have taken notice of this new challenge. InsideView is a business search and intelligence company that aggregates traditional subscription-based and Web 2.0 user-generated data sources and then uses customizable agents to alerts Sales of compelling business events.”
The section goes on to describe SalesView in good detail and highlights specific ROI examples from our users.
The book is a great resource for anyone looking to not only understand where the sales profession is heading, as well as the challenges it faces, but also how to successfully meet this exciting future head-on. Sales 2.0 is quickly moving from the future to the present, and we are excited to have been there from the beginning.
We are very pleased to have been included today in CRM expert, critic and evangelist Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet blog post about companies to watch in 2009. His end-of-the-year series has covered what he considers both the trends, as well as the true movers and shakers in all-things-CRM (and, more specifically, CRM 2.0) — everything from mobile CRM to the acceleration of “CRM 2.0″ to SaaS delivery to tomorrow’s big players — both “industry giants” as well as “up and coming” companies.
We’ve worked hard to innovate the socialprise — that is, where the social Web meets the enterprise — and this year has been a flagship year in that effort. We are proud, at the end of such a year (marked by strong CRM partnerships, recognition in the media, and a swath of wonderful customers), to be included in what Paul calls “genuine gems” in the future of CRM 2.0.
Number one on his list? InsideView. He says, “They are deeply rooted and involved. Their service is invaluable – and most of all is cool without being there to be cool.”
What’s more is that Paul “gets it.” His series on CRM in 2009 is insightful and squarely on par with our own vision. Features of Sales 2.0, which we’ve recently described at length here, are also weaved throughout his articles, and it’s very exciting to be at this place in the CRM space as the year comes to an end.
Here’s looking to 2009!
Our series on the major tenets of Sales 2.0 continues along, in this post we’ll be focusing on alignment. Over the past few weeks we’ve talked about acceleration, collaboration, professionalization and accountability, which leads perfectly into the final tenet: Alignment. We are basing much of our content on the recent article “Sales 2.0: How soon will it improve your business?” by Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner. You can read the piece in its entirety at SellingPower.com, or in this recent article at InsideCRM.
As the power of the social Web rapidly increases communication and connectivity, selling and marketing are joining their separate silos into a seamless and completely aligned organization. In fact, the core character of the Sales 2.0 world is that it relies on sales and marketing alignment, with shared goals and new responsibilities throughout the sales cycle. Driven by acceleration and collaboration – from lead generation and qualification all the way to closed deals – Sales 2.0 is melding what once were isolated pipelines into one powerful tube. In some companies, marketing is held accountable (and rewarded) for transactional business and sales for consultative business. Now, new sales technologies allow salespeople to launch their own marketing campaigns, read a prospect’s “digital body language” and instantly see which prospect opened their emails. New customer engagement technologies help customers recognize and define their own problems and discover how to remove the barriers to the sale.
For example, Genius.com allows marketing to send out personalized emails on behalf of sales and instantly alerts reps of prospect activity. Sales can record the entire experience and contact those who have visited a Web page.
The world of Sales 2.0 is a rapidly expanding universe that institutionalizes a collaborative and repeatable sales and marketing process, enabling the adoption of best practices across the entire company. The result: dramatic improvements in performance. Today’s smarter and far better informed prospects demand more of companies. Sales 2.0 is a game-changing approach that will result in higher-volume sales, higher-value sales, and higher-velocity sales with significant improvements in overall profitability. The big question is not why should a company move up to Sales 2.0, but why not now?
Selling Power, one of the premier voices on the sales industry, focused their latest issue on “1,009 Ideas for Building Sales in a Touch Economy,” and we were thrilled to see InsideView featured in their section on Lead Management. Selling Power notes that InsideView is “one of the best sources for finding valuable leads going forward.” The article provides an in-depth analysis of the role of Web 2.0, particularly LinkedIn, in generating quality leads and why the new sales tools that they highlight are becoming indispensible resources for sales professionals. Regarding SalesView, the author notes that it is effective at “cutting through the clutter” and that the application “accurately finds and alerts [sales] reps to key events that affect account management.” This issue of the magazine is definitely worth taking a look at, as it tackles a number of timely topics for sales professionals during this challenging economic period and provides many insights about how to improve performance. We are very excited to receive this recognition by Selling Power, as well as to know that our technology is making a real impact for sales professionals during this daunting moment in our economy.
InsideView was recently featured in an article on “Preparation-How And Where To Find Company Information” on the blog Fill the Funnel. The post notes that InsideView provides “amazing capabilities” for those looking to research companies and prepare themselves to make substantive contact to prospective clients. The article also cites a number of other useful Web technologies for salesmakers, as well as insights about best practices for researching and selling. Some of the other important Web tools that the author cites for sales people include Manta, Yahoo Finance and Google.
We continue our series on the major tenets of Sales 2.0 by focusing on accountability. We are basing much of our content on the recent article “Sales 2.0: How soon will it improve your business?” by Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner. You can read the piece in its entirety at SellingPower.com, or in this recent article at InsideCRM.
Selling is shifting from a freewheeling organization to a culture of accountability. Whether it is the optimization of sales pipelines, the resizing of a territory or performance monitoring to reward the right sales behavior at the right time, Sales 2.0 solutions increase accountability for all stakeholders while reducing costs. Armed with precise data, marketing managers can track the effectiveness of each campaign, and sales managers will no longer act on hunches but will manage by metrics and hold their salespeople’s feet to the fire.
There are already several solutions available to support this characteristic of Sales 2.0: LucidEra helps sales managers quickly analyze the effectiveness of their sales organization. Easy-to-use analytics helps users understand what they need to do to improve their sales performance without increasing sales costs. Xactly Corp. has created an on-demand sales compensation solution that includes an online incentive program. The moment salespeople reach a certain performance level, they can instantly choose from an exciting selection of motivating rewards.
Umberto was recently interviewed by The Deal about social networking and the enterprise at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We’ve included some choice quotes from the interview below, but for your viewing pleasure, you can now watch the full video here.
“We’re a ’socialprise’ application,” explains InsideView Inc. founder and CEO Umberto Milletti, who came up with the coinage. “We help enterprises leverage social information within their customer relationship management application to allow their sales and marketing people to be more effective.”
“Companies see their users using Facebook, their employees getting on LinkedIn and doing blogging, but they don’t quite know how to use it, how to make sense of it,” Milletti says. “Socialprise applications allow an enterprise to use social media, but do so in a structured environment, which is an enterprise application. In our case, it’s a CRM application.”
