Sales people that are inside or field based should always have a plan. Since most sales teams are measured on monthly, quarterly and annual goals, the question is always “How are you going to get there?”. Sales people need to have a plan that encompasses their entire strategy around hitting their number and building a healthy pipeline that can bring in deals for the long and short term.

Even with a pipeline and a list of target accounts you need a written plan. Having a written plan is the baseline for any successful sales person. If you do not have your plan written down, there is a higher chance that you will miss opportunities and lose focus.

Components of a sales plan.

1. Situation (Whats going on?)

• Targets. (Who are my target companies)
• Environment. (Is the industry hot or cold?)
• Competitive landscape. (Who’s the competition? Do they have an advantage because of market share, informed sales people?)
• Friendly contacts. (Do you have partners to help with the goal)

2. Sales mission.

This is an explanation of what you plan to accomplish. Not a short summary of what you want, put some thought into it and write out a couple paragraphs of ‘what’ you want and ‘why’ it NEEDS to happen.

My goal is to saturate my sales region with information about the InsideView product learning the details of the businesses I come in contact with and understanding their needs. Working with them to solve their pain by implementing a solution that gives them business clarity and a means to create a new leads and explain the value of sales intelligence vs. sales data.

By doing this I will gain new contacts in a growing industries by selling awesome products and gaining market share for my growing company insuring my long and profitable career in sales.

That’s just an example.

3. Execution. (this is where the rubber meets the road.)

• Concept of the Plan (Understanding line item 1 how are you going to position yourself?)
• Specific tasks. ( How many calls are you going to have to make? How many hours are you going to put into it? Brainstorm on everything you can think of that will bring about the result you want.)
• Coordinating instructions. (What marketing campaigns are being executed that can be leveraged? What features are being released? Create a starting point.)

4. Support. (Who’s going to help you?)

• General. (Who do you report to and how do you close the deal?)
• Material and Services. (What tools do you have available? White papers, demonstrations, communication tools?)
• Damage control. (When something goes wrong in the deal, who do you turn to?)
• Personnel. (Do you have product marketing or engineers to back you up?)
• Miscellaneous. (Every other support platform you can use.)
• Actions on close. (Send out an email on the win and ring the bell)

This seems like sales 101, but I’d venture to say that 60% of the sales professionals I know do not have a clear written plan of what needs to be done and how they plan on achieving the goal, and the other 30% never follow through. The 10% of high achievers in any company will have some variation of this report handy and revise it as needed.

For sales people, having a plan and executing it, is the difference between steak, lobster and a BMW or PB&J and a Yugo. Consistently hitting your numbers or worrying how you are going to pay the bills this month. Where do you fall in the mix?

In the age of social selling LinkedIn is the B2B sales network of choice. There are many blogs and sites that cater to the B2B sales professional but LinkedIn is by far the place most sales people flock to when trying to find out more information about who they should be talking with. The only limitation is that a normal LinkedIn account limits some of the information you can view, messages or InMails you can send and doesn’t let you connect with people that you do not have a direct relationship with.

Connect with more people on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more than a place to keep your work history up to date and can be used for more communication than to just keep in contact with past colleagues. I have used LinkedIn for years as a way to contact and communicate with customers and new prospects and now I want to extend that opportunity to all of you. By upgrading your Linked account you get added to the OpenLink Network.

The OpenLink Network lets LinkedIn users find and contact other professionals who are interested in meeting new people. The OpenLink Network is available exclusively to premium account holders.

What a Paid Account Includes:

Social networking service LinkedIn is free, but if you choose to upgrade to a paid account, you have access to additional features. What are the four top advantages in updating your account?

1. Send messages directly, without waiting for an introduction from one of your contacts (called “InMails”), which the site says get a 30 percent response rate;

2. Access the Profile Organizer that allows you to track important profiles in a dedicated workspace, organize profiles into folders and add details to contacts such as notes and contact information;

3. View more profiles when you perform an advanced search (free accounts limit you to 100 search results); and

4. Access more specifics on who’s viewed your profile.

There are three types of paid accounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro. The Business account costs $24.95 per month and allows you three InMails per month, 300 profiles per search and five folders in the Profile Organizer. Business Plus costs $49.95 and allows you 10 InMails per month, 500 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer. The Pro account costs $499.95 per month, allows you 50 InMails per month, 700 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer.

More information on the specifics of paid accounts can be found here.

Let InsideView upgrade you to a Premium Business Account.

We are giving away a free 6 month Business Account to one of our friends. All you need to do is go over to the InsideView page on LinkedIn and leave us a recommendation. While you’re there you might as well follow us on LinkedIn also so you can keep up to date on other promotions and business news we share. We will choose a winner of the 6 month Business account on Dec. 15th and we will contact the winner through LinkedIn.

Leave InsideView a recommendation and you could receive a 6 month paid LinkedIn Business Account upgrade. $150 value

Infographic by our friends at HubSpot.

Do you really want an upgraded LinkedIn account, leave us a comment telling us what you would use it for.

B2B marketing organizations are frequently unable to get results with traditional tactics for lead generation — oftentimes poor data quality and lack of richness impacts both purchased and house lists.

To improve performance, marketing organizations are looking to the Internet as well as social media, but finding relevant insights from the mountains of information now available online is overwhelming. By tapping into business and social intelligence, leading organizations are dramatically transforming their marketing performance in terms of key metrics such as lead volume, lead conversions, and revenue impact.

Join this FREE live Webinar to learn:

• What is Intelligent Marketing?
• How to improve B2B marketing performance using social media
• Best practices and case studies for Intelligent Marketing

Speakers:

Aaron Kahlow, CEO, Online Marketing Connect

Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO, InsideView

Jason Jue, VP Marketing, Rackspace Hosting

Jennifer Smith, Moderator, American Marketing Association

Follow the link below to join the discussion of  how social intelligence can help drive lead generation and conversion.

Leads are coveted. Leads are adored. We score leads and we nurture leads. Leads are measured in meticulous detail, and continue to keep many, myself included, up at odd hours of the evening. Leads are made famous in movies and television alike. My favorite all time sales guy, Dwight Schrute, spent one entire Office episode asking one question:  ‘When are the leads getting here man?’

At best, the lead qualification process energizes and enables fruitful sales engagements which delivers prized funnel into the forecast. At worst, lead qualification is a cycle dialing, canned email popping machine who slowly beats prospects into submission.  If you are seeking ways to improve your ability to accelerate lead qualification, and aren’t interested in beating your prospects into submission, here are a few things to consider:

• Knowledge is Power – It is critical to provide timely and relevant sales intelligence at the fingertips of your lead qualification team, and in many cases this falls right within your CRM. When I say sales intelligence, I don’t mean employee counts, revenue, URL, and geographic location which is typically what lead qualification teams leverage. I am talking about surfacing social profiles and social connections, presenting the climate of the prospects business and uncovering what is being said and about that prospect in the online world. Customers, particularly Customer 2.0, will appreciate this knowledge on the front line and will become more open to meetings and demonstrations and allow you to accelerate more leads into the funnel.

• Speed, I am Speed – Speed is also extremely critical in terms of engaging with leads. Study after study shows the material degradation of leads as the seconds fly away. Without providing a tightly integrated sales intelligence solution to your sales team, those resources will waste critical minutes attempting to uncover some form of intelligence. Lead qualification team members will run to LinkedIn, Google, legacy data providers like Hoovers and Onesource to hopefully extract something meaningful. That wastes valuable time and will not provide a complete and relevant profile of your prospects.

• Call Around the Lead – The ability to profile contacts and executives wider and deeper in an organization is paramount to improving lead qualification since let’s be honest, your decision makers are not out filling lead forms all day. The fact that someone came to your website or attended a campaign event demonstrates that at least someone believes there is a need for your solution. Through a comprehensive sales intelligence solution, such as SalesView, your sales team will be able to uncover additional contacts and easily find a credible message to have a better conversation.

As the buying process continually evolves and the competitive landscape becomes more and more crowded, differentiating yourself on the very first engagement has become more critical than ever. Using real time and accurate sales intelligence to improve your conversations and quickly engage with multiple contacts in a credible fashion will drive many more leads into opportunities and ultimately allow your Inside Sales managers get a better nights sleep.

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

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