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Twitter for CRM – The Buzz Tab Turns One

May 12, 2010 in Mash-ups, Sales 2.0, Sales Intelligence, Social CRM by perramond | 3 comments

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

[tweetmeme source= "insideview" only_single=false]

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

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Twitter: brand new channel, same old challenges

April 9, 2009 in Sales 2.0, Technology by perramond | 6 comments

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.

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RELEASE NOTES: SalesView – v40

April 1, 2009 in Product Updates by perramond | No comments

Release notes for SalesView release v40

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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

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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.

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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.

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RELEASE NOTES: SalesView – v39

March 2, 2009 in Product Updates by perramond | No comments

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.

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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.

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A Sales 2.0 Stimulus Plan

February 18, 2009 in Leads by perramond | No comments

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


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