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Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. — Arthur C. Clarke
About 32,000 years ago, French cavemen started drawing on their walls to help each other solve the crucial problem of the day: Where can I find big meaty animals, and how do I kill them?
Since then, our communication tools have advanced beyond bone chisels and ochre paint, but the central objective hasn’t changed so much. We’re all still looking for that woolly mammoth.
For most salespeople, the search involves gathering data, from which to glean insights, enabling a conversation to begin, in the pursuit of a sale.
It’s a multi-step journey. Unfortunately, too many data providers act as if the first part – amassing raw information about a prospect – is all you need to close a deal.
At a basic level, any piece of data is just a fact. This company had $50 million in revenue last year, for example, or that CEO’s name is Pat Paterson. No matter its size, any database is simply a compilation of facts, and nothing more.
A dictionary is not a great novel just because it contains all the words of a great novel.
Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Awhile back, we condensed InsideView’s product goals to a catchphrase: Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Roughly translated, it means we’re aiming to provide the information you need (Complete), in real-time (Fresh), cleverly parsed into unique, relevant analysis (Smart).
Smart comes first in that mantra, and it’s not a coincidence. To us, it’s the key differentiator between InsideView sales intelligence and Old-School Data. Facts are common; intelligence is rare.
A fact is the news that Company X plans to acquire Company Y. Intelligence is the proper interpretation of how that event will affect operations at the two firms, as well as how the merger will shift the landscape of its industry.
Deeper intelligence is to demonstrate the ways you can benefit from it all, by detailing how the acquirer’s goals dovetail with your own product’s features, and pointing out that the CEO sits on a charity board with your own boss.
Old-School Data companies want you to believe that “data” and “intelligence” are synonyms. That’s why their marketing pitches always emphasize quantity over quality, as well as the horsepower of their data-gathering engines.
More data does not mean better data. Even if it did, it would not make those vast accumulations of facts more useful in-and-of themselves. Analysis is what turns information into knowledge, and intelligence is what turns that knowledge into wisdom.
Smart companies know that.
Guest post by Santosh Shukla, InsideView Hyderabad office.
Posting on Twitter, updating a Facebook profile, putting that Youtube video demo and uploading pictures to Flickr may be free of cost, but it’s wrong to think that social media for marketing and sales is free.
Social media are now standard tools of the Sales 2.0 workplace. But if you are like me, the “social” part of social media sometimes gets in the way of the work. That means you inadvertently spend some time to look at the tweets of people you follow, retweet some and end up spending much more time than you intended. Similar things happen when you go to LinkedIn to find a connection, and end up reading and joining irrelevant discussions.
Thus, a result-oriented foray into social media turns out to be a long walk into unknown (but interesting) woods and by the time we realize, the damage is already done. Time is money, and you’ve just wasted a pile of it.
Here some tips that I use to get the most out of social media while staying focused:
- Link your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts to save the time and effort of updating same status/message at different places.
LinkedIn with Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?twitterSettings
Facebook with Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/
- Create lists on Twitter to follow tweets on related topics like Sales2.0, Golf, psychology etc. to be focused on reading only what you want to read at that moment.
http://help.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists
To follow the tweets of the IV 20 Top Sales Industry social media users here – http://twitter.com/skshukla/Sales2-0
- Use intelligent tools that allow you to focus on the crux and not deviate by being in your work window. SalesView helps you to read relevant blogs, tweets of the prospect that you are targeting within your CRM so you don’t have to leave it to get the social media benefits. It also finds the LinkedIn connections and Facebook friend connections for prospect accounts within your CRM.
- Follow top 20 Sales Industry Social Media Users and some more stars to get the latest and greatest information and views of the Sales (and Marketing) industry without spending too much time elsewhere.
- Talk to people who have pioneered in linking social web and enterprise, the creators of term “socialprise”.
I am sure you have some more tips that you use to efficiently use your time on social media and get the desired results. Please feel free to share them.
To follow all the Sales2.0 leaders’ tweets, just follow @skshukla/Sales2-0
Traditional data vendors like to talk about the size of their content sets. “We’ve got 20 million records!” one shouts. “Thirty million!” screams another. “We’re headed to infinity and beyond!” bellows a third.
It reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s line about the farm boy who, upon confronting a mountain of horse manure, broke into a grin. “With all this manure”, the boy reasoned, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”
Like the little farm boy, database information providers ignore the obvious. For one thing, the dirty little secret of information providers is that database size and accuracy are inversely proportioned, because information is perishable, like fruit. And at an average level of accuracy, a database with 30 million records in it will contain nearly 10 million errors.
That’s why in all the clamoring about size, there’s fairly little talk about accuracy. Oh, this provider or that one will claim their data is “the best.” But ask them for hard-and-fast metrics about content accuracy and the conversation gets muddled.
The fact is, there are only so many accounts a sales organization can or should call upon, regardless of its business model or sales process. Even if it’s 1 million potential accounts, the rest is just clutter.
Salespeople want timely, relevant and actionable sales intelligence on the companies and people that matter to them – the customers and prospects they’re actually calling on. Simply building out a fat, cumbersome data apparatus is not the way to deliver that.
As a company, InsideView’s sole focus has been to improve sales productivity and sales velocity. Our objective is to give you all the information about people and companies you need but to leave out the superfluous records you don’t care about.
Deep information about dynamic young companies? Got it. The leadership teams at corporate titans? Got them, too. Real-time news alerts on a diverse, international group of firms you care about? Yup. Social media profiles from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites? Even those. And if we’re missing any companies you’re calling on, you can add them “on demand” with a single mouse click.
Phonebook-style business directories that include every dry cleaner in Tuscaloosa? Sorry, you’ll have to look elsewhere for those records. But don’t worry, we know some places where you can find 30 million of them. Just hold your nose and you’re bound to find a pony in there.
Gordon Anderson
Vice President of Content, InsideView
