InsideView is putting together our Insider Summit and everyone is invited. If you are a sales or marketing professional responsible for lead generation and revenue, this years Insider Summit is going to leave you with real examples and training on how to do your jobs better. InsideView is the standard in sales intelligence applications helping more than 100,000 sales professionals, and over 1,000 market-leading companies including Adobe, AIG, BMC, Cap Gemini, Experian, and SuccessFactors.
Here’s just a peek at some of the great sessions we have already planned for the Insider Summit.
Increasing Lead Quality and Conversion by Building a Sales Intelligence Culture
7 Ways Sale Intelligence Helps Manage Sales Operations
Where is the ROI? Social Selling Metrics
Turning Cold Calls into Warm Calls with Sales Intelligence
9 Social Selling Tools You Should Not Go Without
How Sales Intelligence Can Make You a Better Sales Executive
Keeping the Lead Engine Running Smoothly: Data Hygiene and CRM Integration
How to Get in Front of those Elusive Executives
Panel Discussions with Industry Experts and Marketing & Sales Leaders Topics will include: Changing Buyer Dynamics, Social Selling, Managing Change, Staying Competitive, and others.
Since we are still in some of the planning phases, if there is a topic you feel would be informative to sales and marketing leaders, leave us a comment or jump over to our community to post it in our discussion group.
Dreamforce 2011 was an amazing event. With over 40,000 registered attendees, this marked a new milestone for Salesforce’s annual conference in San Francisco. We had an excellent time meeting with our customers that have InsideView embedded into their CRM and met a ton of new people that wanted to know more about how our application can help drive sales and marketing efforts.
After a lot of planning on our booth and theme, it all came down to the actual event and seeing if we were able to execute as well as we wanted. Turns out we did a bit better than expected. WooHoo Insiders!!
Knowing that there was going to be a focus by attendees on Radian6 getting acquired by Salesforce and the growing trend for companies trying to become more social, we stuck with a focused message around “Cutting through the noise.” One of the chief complaints I hear about social media being used by B2B companies is that listening is great but getting to the relevant conversations that can be leveraged by sales people is difficult. That’s where sales intelligence comes into the picture and has shown to increase revenue for B2B companies.
The first Keynote by Marc Benioff focused on the Social Enterprise and showed how companies from all over the world have started collaborating and engaging within social networks and Chatter. This messaging was music to our ears since we have been leading the charge with delivering social intelligence to companies for the past 5 years.
This really got people here excited because the Social Enterprise is much larger than just sharing news with people in Chatter groups. There are very few applications that people can use to gather social intelligence on companies that enable sales and marketing teams to get alerts and monitor trigger events within their accounts. Having links to a contacts social profiles are nice but when that gets compiled with relevant business events and you’re able to see how you are connected to people in ways LinkedIn can’t show, you have a powerful application that can drive revenue in any company.
Social Selling Panel
We held a session during Dreamforce around how companies can cut through the noise of social media and get very targeted intelligence on what their customers and prospects are doing. Our speakers included Umberto Milletti, InsideView; PC Christopher, Avaya Inc.; Mark Stock, Adobe Systems Inc.; Mike D’Onofrio, Concur Technologies Inc.
Social media is changing how customers interact with enterprises and how they buy. At the same time, customers’ social media conversations with peers are creating “big data.” For sales reps, making sense of all this data is overwhelming. The session showed how winning sales organizations are increasing their performance and gaining an edge on their competitors by harnessing big data and using changing customer behavior to their advantage. Each of the speakers gave real world examples of how they leverage sales intelligence to grow their pipelines and close more deals.
The Metallica Axe
We launched a mini-Dreamforce campaign around Metallica who was playing at the Global Gala. That all came about when we heard the first rumor/leak that Metallica was going to be playing at the event. We searched all over and found the most awesome giveaway possible. An autographed Metallica guitar. Then we spun up a Twitter profile for the @metallica_axe and started building the buzz. The Metallica guitar giveaway was so successful that we had people coming to our booth wondering how we worked out a deal with Dreamforce to have this as the giveaway. There was no deal, we just wanted to give away the most amazing prize during the event.
We wanted to focus on the people around Dreamforce so we identified some of the top influencers and built a presentation to showcase them.
The autographed Metallica guitar was such a hit that Marc Benioff sent us a message when there were problems getting into the concert.
The Winner of the Guitar
The winner was pulled from about 1000 names. Rebecca D. or SFDC_Nerd as she is known on Twitter was the lucky lady who walked away with the prize. After a bit of back and forth with Jetblue, Rebecca and the guitar were given VIP passes back to Boston where the axe will be cherished.
Conclusion
Dreamforce 2011 was a great event. One of the largest events we attend every year. Getting to meet so many customers and talk to people wanting help with sales enablement is a wonderful experience. Now we just have to start thinking abut how we are going to out-do ourselves next year.
Talking to sales executives about the results of sales intelligence has opened the door to many new conversations. One of those is the growing need for marketing departments to understand the use of applications like InsideView in the overall strategy of identifying new prospects beyond just buying lead building lists from data providers and focusing on specific companies and contacts that can benefit from their products and services TODAY vs. in the future. As more and more companies are trying to blur the lines between sales and marketing, leveraging sales intelligence applications to be used by both groups has become more important.
We were approached by the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) on becoming a sponsor to their event and what we could offer to their large audience. The synergy between our message and the marketing professionals attending the event was obvious. Marketing professionals are focusing on the use of social media to communicate and engage with their customers and prospects, how that translates into sales is become even more important as a ROI is attached to these activities online.
InsideView will have a booth at the event and we will be in great company. Companies like Adobe, ExactTarget, Marketo and Social Media Examiner will have a presence as well as be providing speakers during the show.
We believe that marketing departments are hungry for information and applications that can build strong relationships beyond the one to many approach typically rolled out. Sales intelligence allows for marketing to target companies with pin-point accuracy and then give sales teams the same relevant information with the social media connections for those companies and contacts.
InsideView will be speaking about this during the event in a session titled Social Selling: The Sales Strategy that Will Lift your Marketing Success where we will give an explanation of where social media plays a part in sales, how to build strategies to engage customers through their lifecycle and why marketing should be focusing on the 1:1 relationship.
You go to college, get accepted into a MBA program and take all the core courses designed to introduce you to the various areas of business such as accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, operations management, etc. But where does social media fit into this? That was a question on the minds of a large group of professors that attended the recent Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference 2011 hosted by the American Marketing Association.
Social Marketing Meets Sales: The Role of Social Media in Professional Selling
That was the title of the session being run by Robert Peterson Ph.D, Professor in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University and Michael Mallin Ph.D. Professor of Marketing and Sales at the University of Toledo. The epic resumes of these two people is just too much to list. They have both been involved in shaping business minds for a long time and have contributed research that has made an impact on not just the universities they work for but the students that have passed through their classes.
Social media trends and how social plays a part in the sales process was a special request by the organization that these two took on to put together. They were referred to me by the sales methodology company Miller Heiman (thanks!) as the expert in social selling and it only took me two emails to fill a panel of 4 other experts in the field. Anneke Seley, Craig Rosenberg, Maria Pergolino and Adam Metz were great enough to take time on a Sunday afternoon to discuss and answer questions from people with degrees that were almost intimidating. (for me anyway)
Social Media in the Classroom
Teaching social media does not come easily to academics, especially when it comes to specifically teaching social media for sales. The attending professors heard the panel discuss why social selling is important, what’s been working, and how to either develop courses around the subject matter of leveraging social media for sales or incorporate social media into the courses they are already teaching.
In the discussions the professors all agreed that Social Selling in the Enterprise was a key topic being raised by their students. Understanding what social networks, sales 2.0 tools were available and more importantly how to use them was a focus for the coming school year. I believe everyone on the panel delivered. It was exciting to see professors taking notes and raising their hands to get more education on this growing field of study so they could pass it along to their students.
Social Selling 101
Getting to talk with educators about Social Selling University, explain why it was created, the success it has already had and the plans for the future was great. All of the attendees validated the path we are on and wanted to talk about things they could use in their courses. I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing Social Selling courses being offered from some of the MBA programs in the near future.
In addition to the panel and the discussions we had during the session, InsideView offered any of the professors and their MBA students licenses of our application so they could use sales intelligence in their studies and projects they are working on during the year. If you are a college professor or an MBA student, contact us and lets talk about getting you a license too.
The annual event by Salesforce was lit on fire when it was leaked that Metallica was going to be playing at Dreamforce. What’s a little more noise added to an event that draws a crowd of about 20,000 people all drinking off the SaaS fire hose. It was about this same time that we were working on our Dreamforce plan for the year. We needed a prize that would be as great as prior years. We introduced our sales intelligence in 2009 so gave away an Aston Martin fitting for anyone with secret agent desires of being the next James Bond of selling. In 2010 InsideView was bringing social media relevance to sales people and building the foundation of Social Selling for the Enterprise so we delivered a 63′ 3D TV. This year had to be even BIGGER. [tweetmeme source= "insideview" only_single=false]
I think that there are so many companies now talking about social media and with the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce it’s bound to be the focus of the event. Sure, we will be focusing on leveraging social media for sales too and our thought that we deliver the best application for Social Selling for the Enterprise is our driving focus. That’s the keyword, FOCUS. The industry is exploding with sales 2.0 and old companies trying to jump on the social selling train and the truth is that there is room for a lot but we haven’t found a company yet that can deliver trigger events along with social connections to drive a dramatic decrease in sales research and deliver an ROI on social selling.
After about 10 minutes and a few searches online we had found what we feel is the best giveaway during Dreamforce. A guitar autographed by the entire Metallica band during the 2000 Summer Sanitarium Tour. The official contest announcement is scheduled for later this week but I’ll tell you that you should give our Facebook page a big Thumbs UP if you want the information of how you can bring home a piece of Metallica history.
