You are currently browsing perramond’s articles.


We are happy to announce our March 2011 release. This month we focused on usability enhancements that will help you drive your sales team’s efficiency and sales productivity. Enjoy!

Here are your V61 March release highlights:

New Company Detail View
Company List Sorting
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users – Seamless Export & Sync






New, Streamlined Company Detail View

Quickly find and leverage the most actionable insights. Starting at the top you will see a nice clean layout that allows you to easily scan basic sales data (such as industry, revenue, employees, address, etc) so that you can quickly qualify a new lead or get up to speed on an existing account. More importantly, we’re drawing your attention to actionable sales intelligence with a new navigation for the Smart Agent results (a.k.a. selling triggers). We’re also doing a better job of summarizing the number of contacts available at company and how you connect to them (including our Smart Connections, your LinkedIn connections, or your Facebook friends.) Think of it as a dashboard for prospecting, qualifying, and your engaging customers.

New Company Profile Design

Company List Sorting

Prioritize prospect lists by revenue, employees, location, etc.  With the introduction of company list sorting you can easily prioritize your prospects before exporting them to CSV or XLS.  When you generate a company list the default sorting will be by name but you’ll notice that the columns allow you to sort by business type, industry, revenue, or employees.  Target the right companies at the right time with on-the-fly prioritization.

company prospect list sorting

Seamless Data Export for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Enable CRM users to sync and export data with a single click.  This new facility allows you to set up proxy / delegate user authentication for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance. What that means is that all of your users can sync and export data from InsideView without being prompted for CRM login information. Make it easy for users to keep your CRM updated with the most accurate business information, contact details and social intelligence.

seamless data sync and export for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

We appreciate your business and the great product feedback you continue to provide. Please share with us by submitting your ideas (and voting up other users’ suggestions) on the InsideView Community. If you have any additional questions or would like to schedule a follow-up training for your sales team, please contact us at support@insideview.com. Thanks again!


How fast can software go from 0 to 60? February marks our 60th release of InsideView in just five years! We have more contact accuracy and social selling enhancements for you this month. Enjoy!

Here are your V60 February release highlights:

Enhanced On-Demand Contact Search
User-Generated Contact Profiles
Fortune 500 and 1000 Search
More Contacts and Improved Accuracy



On-Demand Partner Contact Search

Search and add contacts from more partner content sources. This enhanced feature allows you to quickly search and add contacts from our partners when a contact is missing from InsideView. When you search the People tab within any company profile or view a specific Contact in your CRM you will see results from InsideView and our partners in the same interface. Simply click on the name / title of interest to add them to InsideView database. It’s like on-demand cable for your prospecting.

User-Generated Contact Profiles

Generate a contact and automatically find social profile data. When you’re unable to find a contact in InsideView or our partners, this new feature allows you to generate a new contact yourself. InsideView then immediately starts identifying social profiles for your contacts. “Socialize” your contacts in on-the-fly.

user-generated contacts

Fortune 500 and 1000 Search

Quickly identify Fortune 500 and 100 prospects. This new feature allows you to easily identify and target companies on the Fortune 500 and 1000 lists. You will see new search criteria in the ‘Size’ section of the company and contact search interface, which you can use in conjunction with any of our other firmographic, social, and event-based search criteria. If you’re going after the big guys, your job just got a little easier.

Fortune 500 and 1000 search

More Contacts, Improved Accuracy

Reach more prospects directly with higher success rates. Over the last several months, InsideView has been hard at work improving the availability and the accuracy of our contacts. We’ve carefully evaluated the accuracy of our different content partners, we’ve added more overlapping content sources, we’ve invested in our own web-harvesting and crowd-sourcing technologies, and we’ve refined our Entity Triangulation algorithms along the way. Contact accuracy is a big challenge for the industry and while we realize our work will never be done, we’re confident that intelligent aggregation is the right approach. We hope you’ve already noticed these improvements in accuracy.

contact accuracy

We want to thank you for choosing InsideView as your sales intelligence solution. We appreciate your business and the great product feedback you continue to provide. Please share with us by submitting your ideas and voting up other suggestions on the InsideView Community. If you have any additional questions or would like to schedule a follow-up training for your sales team, please contact us at support@insideview.com. Thanks again!


It’s not yet February and here we are announcing our second release of 2011.  Ah, the beauty of Agile development. We have more usability, social selling, and CRM workflow features on tap in this release.

Here are your V59 January release highlights!

New contact preview UI
Facebook connections
Twitter profile search
User License Management
Salesforce users – Custom Automated Watchlists

New contact preview UI

Preview contact details and social profiles for any contact. This new feature allows you to check out contact details, including their social media profiles, in seconds. Simply place your cursor over any contact name anywhere in the InsideView application to get these details. Think of it as a social business card.

InsideView contact preview UI

Facebook connections

Find and leverage your personal relationships for business.  This new capability seamlessly brings in your Facebook connections (along side InsideView Smart Connection and your LinkedIn connections) to give you yet another path into customer and prospect accounts.  It’s like friends with benefits, in the business sense that is.

Facebook connections for business - InsideView

Twitter profile search

Quickly find your customers and prospects on Twitter. Now you can easily search for your contacts on Twitter to gain insights into their interests and business needs.  Whether it’s finding out what they’re reading, who their favorite sports teams are, or what their organization is up to – you’ll be better prepared to engage them with relevance.

Twitter profile for business - InsideView

User License Management

Manage users and license assignment yourself in InsideView. This new feature allows your designated InsideView administrator to manage the assignment of InsideView licenses across your sales and marketing team. Your CRM or support contact can still help you provision licenses but we thought you might want to have the option to do this yourself.  With more than 800 paying customers it’s a wonder we didn’t do this sooner.  Better late than never!

InsideView user license management self-serve

Salesforce.com users – Automated Watchlists Part II (Custom Criteria)

Track ANY important CRM account or opportunity. Following up on v1 of our automated watchlist feature, you can now create watchlists based on completely custom Account or Opportunity criteria in your Salesforce CRM. That means that anyone can now generate a watchlist, regardless who “owns” the Account.  This opens up a whole host of use cases. For example, a sales manager can now generate a watchlist to track all of their reps’ open opportunities that are $25,000 or more and forecast to close in Q1.  An account manager or support team member can now generate a watchlist to track all newly acquired customer accounts with a net value of $100,000 or more.  A demand generation rep supporting multiple field sales reps can now create a watchlist (or multiple watchlists) to track the key accounts being targeted by each of the field reps.

Customer automated watchlists for Salesforce - Part 2

Thank you for choosing InsideView as your business and social intelligence solution. We appreciate your business and the great product feedback you continue to share with us. If you have a product suggestion please share with us on our new Idea Exchange on the InsideView Community. As for any training or support-related questions, please contact us at support@insideview.com. Thanks again!


What better way to ring in the New Year than with another feature-packed release to boost your sales productivity?  Our January 2011 release of InsideView will be available this Saturday morning, January 8th.

In addition to enabling social selling, there were two other key themes that emerged during our Customer 2.0 Roadshow this summer – driving adoption through better CRM integration and maintaining industry-leading contact accuracy.  We’ve been hard at work on both fronts and in our January 2011 release you will find features like automated watchlists for Salesforce.com, Single Sign On integration for NetSuite, and a new company preview UI.  You will also find integrated LinkedIn profiles for nearly all contacts and the ability to easily flag any incorrect contact data.

Here are your January 2011 release highlights!

•    User feedback for contacts
•    More integrated LinkedIn profiles
•    New company preview UI
•    In-product feature updates
•    Redesigned summary alerts
•    NetSuite users – Export & Sync with Single Sign On
•    Salesforce users – Automated Watchlists

User feedback for contact accuracy

You can now easily flag and update any incorrect contact data you come across in InsideView and be notified as soon as the record is updated.  This feature leverages the reach of our user community to identify incorrect contacts and the expertise of the InsideView content team to validate user feedback.  We believe this hybrid approach will help provide the most complete and accurate contact information available for B2B sales professionals.

user feedback for contact accuracy

More integrated LinkedIn profiles

You will now see integrated LinkedIn profiles for nearly all contacts in InsideView.  This allows you to quickly access title, work history, education and other details seamlessly via the LinkedIn API without having to leave InsideView, or your CRM for that matter.

more integrated LinkedIn profiles

New company preview UI

Preview company details and key insights for any company.  This new feature makes it easier than ever to qualify prospects,  find actionable  insights, and surface customer connections at-at-glance.  Simply place your cursor over any company name anywhere in the InsideView application to get these details.

Company preview UI on mouse-over

In-product feature updates

Always stay up to date on the latest InsideView releases and new features.  This new capability notifies you about our new releases and helpful features you may not be taking advantage of, directly within the product.

in-product feature updates

Redesigned summary alerts

Quickly scan summary emails by business event and company name.  We’ve redesigned our daily (and weekly) summary alerts to better summarize the key selling trigger events so you can quickly scan for relevant business events and company mentions within your watchlists.

redesigned daily alerts

NetSuite CRM users – Sync & Export with Single Sign On

Add or update CRM accounts, contacts, and prospects with a single click.  This feature is now enabled via Single Sign on so data export and sync are totally seamless.  You can also map InsideView data to any of your custom fields in NetSuite.

NetSuite sync & export via Single Sign On

Salesforce CRM users – Automated Watchlists

Track your most important CRM accounts and opportunities.  This feature allows you to automatically create and maintain watchlists based on your existing Salesforce CRM data.  Setting up an automated watchlist is as easy as creating a view or report in Salesforce.  Never miss an opportunity or threat again!

Salesforce - automated watchlists

Thank you for making InsideView the leading business and social intelligence solution for B2B sales and marketing professionals.  We appreciate your business or your continued feedback.  We always want to hear from you so we can continue to make InsideView better every month.  Please send us your product suggestions to feedback@insideview.com.  And for any training or support-related questions, please email us at support@insideview.com.  Thanks again!

Watch the video


It may be the dog days of summer but the InsideView development team has been hard at work churning out new features to help boost your sales productivity.  We are happy to announce that our August 2010 release of SalesView will be available this Saturday morning, August 14th.

If you’ve been using SalesView for more than a few months or have seen our B2B social intelligence announcement from last week, you already know that much of our product innovation has focused on enabling social selling and engaging with the new breed of B2B buyer, Customer 2.0.  That theme continues in our August 2010 release with features like social profile integration and social media sharing options.  Our customers continue to drive innovation as well and so you’ll also find features like multiple watch lists and a streamlined prospecting interface in this latest release.

Here are your August 2010 release highlights!

•    More powerful list building
•    Multiple company watch lists
•    Integrated LinkedIn profiles
•    Social media sharing

More Powerful, Streamlined List Building

The new list building user interface has been streamlined to make prospecting more intuitive.  We have consolidated the company and contact search criteria in a single screen so that you can find the right prospects with fewer clicks.

smart prospecting and list building

Manage multiple company watch lists

This new feature allows SalesView TEAM users to track multiple company watch lists.  With the ability to create up to five (5) watch lists you can easily track and manage different groups of companies (e.g. customers, prospects, competitors, partners, territories, etc.)

trigger event selling with multiple=

Integrated LinkedIn search and profile details

This new feature makes it easier than ever to search and view LinkedIn profile details within SalesView.  This capability is also available within your CRM contact mash-up view.

integrated social profiles enable social selling

Share news alerts via social media or your CRM

This new feature makes it easy to share compelling events and news articles via social media (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.)  If you use Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand you can also save Agents/News directly to your CRM as a task, note, or attachment for follow up.

share news alerts via social media and your CRM

Release Preview Webinars

To learn more about the August 2010 release join one of our scheduled webinars.  Click here to register for one of the following dates/times:

August 12th      Thursday : 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET
August 13th     Friday : 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET
August 16th     Monday : 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET
August 17th     Tuesday : 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET

Thank You… and keep the feedback coming!

Thank you for making InsideView the leading business and social intelligence solution for B2B sales and marketing professionals.  We couldn’t do it without your hard-earned business or your on-going feedback.  Speaking of which, we always want to hear from you.  For product feedback and suggestions, please email us at feedback@insideview.com.  For any support-related issues, email us at support@insideview.com.  Thanks again!

Share

http://www.toxel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/cake02.jpg

Yesterday marked the one year birthday of the SalesView Buzz tab.  The Buzz tab launched on May 11th, 2009 as the first Twitter integration for CRM (including Salesforce, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite CRM.)  While the launch was received with a great deal of enthusiasm by media and analysts (after all, what journalist wasn’t smitten with Twitter in the Spring of 2009?), the benefits of having Tweets about customers and prospects available directly within CRM were not immediately obvious to many B2B sales people.

Similar to the adoption pattern for our Facebook mash-up and LinkedIn integration before, customers and prospects started to identify and leverage actionable sales intelligence from the social media stream.  One of my favorite anecdotes comes from a meeting with the VP of Sales at a key customer account a few months after we launched the Buzz tab.  As part of our regular quarterly account review we walk customers through recent features & enhancements.  This included the Buzz tab at the time so we had him bring up the SalesView Buzz tab (i.e. Twitter & Google blog search) for his own company.

As it turned out, one of the most recent Tweets mentioning his company was a person looking for competitive product recommendations:

  • “We’re evaluating marketing automation solutions – (our customer) vs. (competitor #1) vs. (competitor #2). Thoughts?”

TA-WEET!  Yes, that was a hot lead and yes he was impressed.  The icing on the cake was that within a few minutes the VP of Sales had logged in to see the Buzz tab for himself and by that time someone had already responded as follows:

  • “Definitely (competitor #1)… we went through the selection process over 1 year ago and have been happy since.”

TWUH-OH!  He interrupted our meeting to make sure the right sales rep followed up on this lead immediately, before his competitor (or their fans) could further slant the conversation to their favor.

Now obviously you will not always have hot leads like these land in your lap but this example does speak to how important a customer acquisition channel Twitter has become.  As with other traditional and emerging channels, it provides new ways in which to listen and engage with the new, social customer  (a.k.a. Customer 2.0) .  The nature of Twitter, which is real-time and entirely public, requires that you sales reps keep an ear to the ground at all times, lest your competitors should be the ones to pounce first.

SalesView Buzz tab - InfoGROUP

Share

Weeks after Paul Greenberg’s thought-provoking post on ZDNet, the debate continues as to whether Twitter could/should evolve into a Social CRM or remain a channel/medium (read: a “non app”).  This on-going conversation in the Blogosphere & Twittersphere, have actually done a lot to bring together the social media crowd and social CRM (“CRM 2.0″) proponents.  There’s also some promising talk of collaboration between industry pundits Paul Greenberg and Brian Solis.

One of Paul’s central arguments here is that Twitter is not (and should not become) an application, but rather remain “just” a channel / medium (albeit it a powerful, extremely trendy, and perhaps transformation one.)  Most of the reader comments agreed (no shocker there… Paul has a pretty loyal following, and he has a nasty habit of being right most of the time.)

One particular blog comment from “kotharia” struck a chord.  The gist was that while leveraging Twitter as a listening & communication channel is a good start, “these emerging channels have a potential to generate a huge volume of conversations (unstructured data) which cannot be harnessed easily.”  Hmm, this problem sounds familiar.  They went on to suggest that “One would need effective tools to harness & synthesize the data to enable better decision making.”

BINGO!  One thing is guaranteed… just like all other media, traditional and social, Twitter will exacerbate information overload. We happen to focus on solving this problem specifically for sales & marketing professionals but really the principles are applicable across all knowledge workers.  You need a layer of intelligence / analytics operating on top of Twitter (along with all other potentially useful data sets and information sources) if you want to make it relevant and actionable.  SalesView is focused on doing just that for sales/marketing/support professionals, WITHIN their CRM.  Call it social CRM, CRM 2.0, socialprise, or just plain cool… the bottom line is that it has a huge impact on sales productivity.

Twitter ups the ante in terms of volume and frequency, but the challenge is not a new one. Before our current love affair with Twitter, most organizations had not yet figured out how to filter & analyze the thousands of online news sources, much less the hundreds of thousands of business blogs out there. So we can’t assume that Twitter is “noisier” (as measured by signal to noise ratio, not volume) than any previously available media. It’s just a bigger fire hose!

Here’s the approach we’ve taken to date with the InsideView Smart Cloud platform.

Basically we look at channels / media / content as plug & play. Blogs come along, plug it in. Twitter comes along, plug it in. Rest assured that in the next 6-12 months, some OTHER shiny new thing will capture the hearts & imagination of sales & marketing so what then?  Just plug it in. After all, the next-next-big-thing promises to accelerate the commoditization of content and worsen information overload. Unless, that is, you have tools that can filter & analyze data in the cloud to identify only the relevant & actionable information.

That’s where we think things are going. What do you think? Reply here or Tweet us at http://twitter.com/insideview.

Release notes for SalesView release v40

——————————————————–

HIGHLIGHTS

User-Driven Executive Coverage – We’ve made it possible to add any executive to SalesView from our partners ‘on-demand’.  Just as you’ve been able to add companies to SalesView whenever a lead or account of interest is missing, you are now able to add new business contacts to SalesView on-the-fly (searching by name or title key words.)  This is extremely useful for your lead qualification and account research!

User-Driven Executive Coverage

Expanded Smart Connections – We’ve improved our Smart Connections technology to help you identify more ‘hidden’ relationships.  For example, you can now leverage colleagues’ previous employments and view all 2nd level connections.  These enhancements have more than tripled the number of connections visible within the average lead / account.

Expanded Smart Connections

One click CRM export – We’ve streamlined the account, lead, and contact export process for Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand customers.  You can now export executive profiles with a single click from the People tab in the CRM mash-up.

One-click CRM export from SalesView mash-up

——————————————————–

OTHER ENHANCEMENTS

Improved performance – We’ve significantly increased speed, particularly for your CRM mash-up views, by streaming Smart Agent trigger events ‘on demand’ and persisting Smart Connection results so they are not calculated at load time.

Launch executive profiles from summary alerts – We’ve added the ability to drill down to business contact details directly from your daily/weekly summary alert emails whenever an executive is mentioned in a Leadership Change trigger event.

CRM export preferences – We’ve persisted CRM mapping / preferences so that you are not prompted to select their CRM each time you export a new Account, Contact, or Lead from SalesView.

Custom Smart Agent creation – We’ve added a prompt in the Analyze tab to let you know about any badly formed custom Smart Agents.  If you happen to create too broad of a Smart Agent definition, you will see a prompt within a few minutes so that you can quickly refine your key words and logic.

——————————————————–

InsideView – The Sales 2.0 Leader

SalesView is an on-demand sales intelligence application that increase sales productivity and accelerates sales cycles.  SalesView leverages socialprise technology to bring insights from both traditional editorial sources and emerging social media into enterprise applications.

Release notes for new SalesView release v39

(InsideView – The Sales 2.0 Leader)

SalesView is an on-demand sales intelligence application that increase sales productivity and velocity.  SalesView leverages socialprise technology to bring insights from both traditional editorial sources and emerging social media into enterprise applications.

**************************************************

NEW FUNCTIONALITY

Embedded LinkedIn “Company Insider” widget – We launched a tighter integration with LinkedIn showing summary connection information before launching to the detailed LinkedIn search results. You will find a new tab in the company details page and a popup box in the Analysis Console and connection results page.

Tagging Lead source as “SalesView” during Export and Data Sync – When exporting new leads or enriching existing ones, we now populate the lead source field in Salesforce.com with “SalesView.”

Identify news sites that require registration or paid subscription – News sites requiring registration will now display a subtle “lock” or “dollar sign” icon.

Introduced PRO monthly payment option – Users can buy SalesView PRO as a reoccurring monthly subscription.  This promotional offer will be available at least through March 21st.

ENHANCEMENTS

Enhanced agent summary text – Our trigger even summary text now emphasizes keyword matches over company name so that users can quickly understand the relevance and context of the article. We also show matches in the article title.

Enhanced duplicate account matching algorithm – During export of Accounts and Contacts to Salesforce.com, we now match website and partial company name to identify potential duplicates.

**************************************************

This week we launched a new way for InsideView users to share our technology with others who might benefit from Sales 2.0 innovations: the Trusted Advisor Program, or “TAP.”  We know that our own clients — the companies who use SalesView — are in touch daily with customers of their own. The TAP allows such folks to deliver additional value to clients and earn generous referral fees when their customers decide to deploy SalesView.

In the current economic environment, sales and marketing organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to do more with less. This has fueled demand for Sales 2.0 technologies, which hold the promise of increasing sales productivity and accelerating sales cycles. Growing interest in Sales 2.0, along with SalesView’s viral growth through word-of-mouth in 2008, prompted us to create the TAP in order to meet demand.

Sales expert and longtime InsideView advocate Jill Konrath has recently noted that Sales 2.0 is the future of the sales profession, and that “InsideView is a perfect example of how Sales 2.0 technologies are improving sales productivity.” Our own director of product management, Marc Perramond, says that the number of SalesView customers tripled last year, ironically due to the sour economy: “Most of that growth came in Q4 with the financial crisis in full swing. It may seem counterintuitive but the typical sales exec is facing hiring freezes or even staff cuts, so they need tools to make their existing teams more productive.”

We hope our new TAP partner initiative will help us scale to meet this growing demand for Sales 2.0 technologies and generate more business for our partners and their customers in the process. And as our lawmakers focus heavily this week on bolstering the U.S. economy, we like to think of the TAP as our own pipeline stimulus plan.

UPDATE:

InsideView takes the “Make-A-Referral-Week” pledge to stimulate the economy – http://tinyurl.com/dmn783

make a referral week


Download the latest research

Follow InsideView

Sales Intelligence Facebook - InsideView

InsideView LinkedIn

Sales Intelligence - Twitter



InsideView CEO Blog

Join Us at the Insider Summit

Social Selling University

Archives

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 167 other followers