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The Altimeter Group’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang recently hosted a Webinar called “Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.” The discussion revolved around an emerging trend in Social CRM platforms, including the business implications of choosing to acknowledge and interact with your customers rather than allow conversations to carry out without your organization’s knowledge or participation.
At the heart of the Webinar lived the fact that customers are using social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up. As a result, organizations are turning to Social CRM technologies to engage their customer base in both praise and complaint.
Altimeter defines Social CRM as a means to “understand where, what and which conversations are happening, and how to engage in conversation.” Social networks have become the customer’s virtual soapbox to share all information and commentary about their favorite, or least favorite, companies – a scenario that must be acknowledged and dealt with appropriately by company representatives.
If you are pioneering your company’s Social CRM initiative, or have been tasked with finding a solution for customer engagement, the Social CRM Pioneer Group is a great resource for more information and feedback from experts.
Wang and Owyang point to the importance of “listening before talking,” noting that by doing so an organization can identify top influencers, rank top conversations, prioritize top channels and gauge the tone of conversation. InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti discussed the relevance of listening before talking in a Sandhill article earlier this year, stating “In a prospect-driven buying process, sales reps need to actively listen and develop a conversation with prospects.”
Social media has led to a demand for immediate response – with Social CRM, companies can be among the first to respond to a public complaint, rather than getting lost in the eventual mass of commentary. Look no further than last year’s United Breaks Guitar scenario. Within hours of posting a video complaint about the airline mishandling his musical equipment, millions of viewers had shared the homemade PR nightmare. With an active Social CRM platform, United could have potentially calmed the waters with a fraction of the public interest.
Several additional notes from the Webinar:
- For companies, real time is not fast enough: Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up. Example: Although Motrin responded to angry moms within 24 hours – it was too slow.
- Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social: No matter how many community managers companies hire to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now.
- Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed: Support problems can quickly became a PR nightmare (United Airlines guitar incident) – had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could service the disgruntled customer better.
There’s no shortage of smart and important voices when it comes to where software and information-tech is headed, but there are only a few who seek to bring the entire industry together under one roof. The Software & Information Industry Association – formed 27 years ago in the early age of software publishing – is one of them, working across the myriad corporate, legislative and educational horizons to make sure that the space stays friendly for innovation.
We’re excited to announce that our CEO, Umberto Milletti, has been named to the SIIA Board this year (Software Division), and it’s an honor to be among such an excellent and diverse group of both established and emerging software leaders. SIIA provides a great forum for sharing and developing the ideas that will shape the creation of the next generation of software applications, and how they can help organizations achieve superior business results.
A key trend that we foresee in the software industry is the growing intersection between enterprise applications, like CRM and ERP, and social networking/Web 2.0 applications – essentially what’s known as Enterprise 2.0. And to this end, Cloud computing will be a key ingredient. As a company working in this exact space, we’ll bring unique perspectives – both of success and challenge – as well as overall thought leadership, in how these applications can grow and, as a whole, how the industry can press forward and how we can all achieve an end goal of business value and growth.
We’re very excited about working with such a great set of leaders, and here’s to a great year with SIIA!
As we all know, there is no better way to learn than through failure. And on that note, we’d like to announce our sponsorship of the SalesFail Contest.
We are out to find the most entertaining stories of failed sales experiences. With an award of $2500, this will be the one chance that sales professionals get to earn a commission on their past sales fails.
If you happen to be in sales, or have ever tried to (unsuccessfully) sell anything, enter your story at SalesPop (or see what is being discussed on Twitter or Facebook).
Today we were pleased to announce our $11.5 million Series B funding round, led by current investors Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners. During a time when companies and businesses are looking to be more productive and efficient – especially coming out of the recession – we’re proud to get such a vote of confidence in the way we are stepping up to meet that need.
As Rembrandt general partner Jerry Casilli put it, “InsideView is leveraging the explosion of social media to help businesses dig out from the recession and supercharge their sales teams for growth.” In their coverage of the news today, TechCrunch added to this, noting our ability to “give businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients.” We consider that a crucial element to growth in the current economic climate.
Indeed, we’ve worked hard in the past year by growing our customer base, helping establish an innovative sales community embracing the principles of Enterprise 2.0 – known as the Sales 2.0 Alliance – and a sound, yet innovative freemium business model. It’s exciting to continue this momentum throughout 2010.
Adds Casilli, “The triple-digit revenue growth that the company has been achieving quarter in and quarter out is a testament to a remarkable management team, a unique and right-timed product, and the power of the Freemium go-to-market model paired with a strong value proposition.”
Here at InsideView, we have a strong team based in Hyderabad, India (the capital of state of Andhra Pradesh) – a city attracting a lot of technology innovators looking to leverage global talent (Facebook recently announced their new office there), and we’re very proud of their hard work. We are pleased to announce that last week, following a weekend of presentations and competition in front of hundreds of technology leaders, InsideView beat out more than 150 other companies to take top prize in the multinational corporation category at the Annual Software Products Showcase hosted by ITsAP, a non-profit representing the software and IT industry in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
The best product award, given to SalesView, faced some steep competition, and points to a thriving environment of innovation in Andhra Pradesh overall. Indeed, the vision of ITsAP is to “position Andhra Pradesh as the leading intellectual capital of the world, by nurturing entrepreneurship, research and innovation, to achieve global excellence in IT products and services.” There was no shortage of intellectual capital at the event!
Our India-based team is right in the thick of this entrepreneurial corridor and this is a certain vote of confidence in what we’re doing for sales productivity, including outside of our headquarters here in San Francisco and on a world-wide scale.
More on the summit can be found at ITsAP’s event page and you can also join the organization on Facebook.
Great work and kudos to our team there!
Today’s post highlights blogs that are terrific resources to managing, maintaining and mastering the sales cycle. We’ve broken them out by three stages of the sales process that they specialize in – lead generation, lead management and lead nurturing /qualification. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments.
Lead Generation
B2B Lead Generation Blog: Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, runs a blog about B2B lead generation, sales leads and marketing for the ‘complex’ sale.
Dig It: SalesDog.com is one of the Internet’s most visited sales-success sites, with insight from several of America’s leading sales experts, bringing practical selling tips and strategies to salespeople, sales managers, business owners and entrepreneurs.
The Virtual Handshake: A resource guide for Web 2.0 technology users, including blogs, social network sites, virtual communities, relationship capital management software and more.
Lead Management
Sales Lead Management Association Blog: Articles to help you become more successful in the lead management sales business process. The blog allows you to respond to posted articles, share your thoughts, opinions and ideas.
Sales and Sales Management Blog: Paul McCord, best-selling author, sales expert, coach and trainer, provides insight about sales and sales management issues, specializing in sales trends and topics including introductions vs. referrals, use of incentives and much more.
Lead Nurturing/Qualification
The Online Marketing Blog Network: The network brings together expertise from the sales and marketing online community, contributing news, ideas, strategies, commentary, insights, research and more
Inside Sales Experts Blog: Shares thoughts about best practices for sales, lead generation and nurturing and revenue generation, including trends, tips, models and metrics.
B2B Sales and Marketing Blog: Industry discussion about lead generation, qualification and nurturing, focused on providing ideas about global business-to-business sales support, growing the sales pipeline and increasing sales numbers.
For an expanded list of all-things-sales blogs, check out the Top 100 Blogs to Boost Your Sales Skills.
With all of the buzz surrounding Superbowl commercials, we wanted to build a list of our favorite, most entertaining sales commercials – all for your entertainment.
The videos below are a great mix of metaphors, infomercial pitches and, well, some we cannot categorize. Although they may not be of the highest quality, they are certainly entertaining.
Leave a comment and let us know your all time favorites.
Ever get the feeling that you’re working with a bunch of monkeys?
The Credit MacDaddy plugs his business with an awkward rap
“EZ Divorce Law” now known as “DivorceDeli.com”
Larry Love, owner of “Better Days Auto Sales,” loves his cars and loves you
Vince with ShamWow here…
Motivize! Pulverize! Realize! with Get Your Basketball On
The Red House Furniture’s theme cannot be described in one caption
Bobby Denning furniture and appliances and reality and auction and…
An insurance company going for the scare factor
