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Your professional connections can create new opportunities.
To be an effective sales person, it’s best to know how connections you have can get you into new accounts. Instead of relying on more data and names of contacts to call, leveraging intelligence in your sales process can build your pipeline faster. We are expanding further on our lead of people insights of selling to people not contacts. Connection based prospecting is a enhanced way of identifying prospects that you have direct connections to through co-workers, past employers or reference accounts.
Leverage your existing connections for accelerated pipeline growth.
Having connections into a prospect company makes getting in contact with a decision maker much easier. If you foster your professional connections correctly, your network should be happy to introduce you to someone within their company and make a warm introduction. Maybe you are looking for new accounts to contact and you find out that 4 of your coworkers and 2 people you worked with in the past have direct connections to people in a large account you’d like to talk to. That would make getting a warm introduction easier than trying to figure out how to cold-calling into a prospect.
Instead of blindly targeting companies based on contact data focus on getting new customers based on the number of connections you have into the company. People you work with, reference accounts and past coworkers will add a layer of trust to your communication with a decision maker. Leverage those connections to get an opportunity.
We have several new enhancements in our application this month. You can see more about all of them in the InsideView Community.
After tremendous growth in the US, InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, announced today the beginning of its global expansion beginning with its InsideView UK and Ireland Edition. Thousands of US companies now deploy InsideView’s award-winning company and people intelligence to increase the productivity of their customer-facing employees, improving metrics across the customer cycle, including lead conversion, win rates and customer retention and expansion.
With the UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView takes this competitive advantage worldwide, providing professionals with effective intelligence that helps them be more targeted, relevant and timely in their sales and customer management efforts. The UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView will be generally available in Q1, as a stand-alone application as well as a mash-up within market-leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.
“There is a worldwide demand for more intelligent ways of doing business, nowhere is this more true than in marketing, sales, and service. Our expansion today is part of our commitment to bring professionals around the globe the kind of intelligence that drives productivity, relevance and revenue.” – Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView.
Global Demand for InsideView’s Sales Intelligence
InsideView is seeing huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland-based businesses, where over 45% of the population is active on social media including Facebook and LinkedIn, making it the second largest market in the world for new solutions that can drive ROI from social media.
Sales Intelligence has become an imperative as the deluge of data, the changing buying process, and new social media dynamics have surfaced in customer processes. InsideView provides professionals with the most relevant information about customers and prospects, and alerts them on the best time for outreach. This intelligence results in highly effective, productive and lucrative customer-facing employees: In fact, companies that employ InsideView’s style of intelligence see a ten percent improvement in top-line revenue.
Sales Intelligence Tailor Made for the UK and Ireland
Thousands of users are already using InsideView for targeting UK and Ireland, and with this launch they and other customers will have access to deeper and tailor-made sales intelligence . InsideView gathers and analyzes tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions, resulting in more effective sales and even improved CRM engagement.
For its UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView is partnering with top global and local providers of business information, as well as gathering and analyzing information from all major online news publications, user-generated, and social media sources specific to UK and Ireland.
InsideView is also teaming with leading CRM system integrators including Outsourcery, Ciber, Alfapeople, ConsultCRM, The CRM Business and No Blue to bring its intelligence to relevant CRM platforms in the UK and Ireland. ConsultCRM, one of the UK’s leading Microsoft Gold Partners specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is delighted to be partnering with InsideView in its go-to-market expansion.
“Our clients are constantly under pressure to maximize the value from their Microsoft CRM deployment. InsideView adds immediate value because it offers ready-integrated real-time company intelligence, contact data, news, tailored alerts and even social media,” said John Pearson, Sales Director at ConsultCRM. “We are excited to be working with an offering that truly answers the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question for CRM users in sales and account management.”
A New Type of Connection
What are People Insights? Connections are more important than ever for reaching and engaging your prospects. More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails, while more than 80 percent do engage when referred by a connection – whether through a friend, colleague, customer or industry peer. Intelligent Connections grow your reach beyond social networking sites (your personal connections) to automatically leverages your extended business network of coworkers, executives and board members, previous employers, and customers (your corporate connections). Even young professionals, who often have a limited Rolodex and professional network, can now instantly leverage their company’s extended network of corporate relationships.
“The biggest business impact comes from knowing how best to connect to prospects, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone.”
Going beyond the business card
“There is little value in basic contact data – for example a phone number or email address – for today’s business professional,” says Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What’s important is cutting through the noise and getting the accurate information that matters about leads and prospect. The biggest business impact then comes from knowing how best to connect to them, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone. And for a busy sales or marketing pro, this kind of insight needs to be delivered directly where they are working most – email or CRM application.”
“There is no competitive advantage to be gained by using basic contact data. Everyone has access to phone numbers and email addresses, and response rates are abysmal,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What creates differentiation is cutting through the noise and engaging people. The biggest value of People Insights is knowing how best to connect to people, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when is the best time to reach out.”
With the launch of People Insights, sales and marketing organizations can now easily find the right person to contact, identify any mutual connections, get a complete picture via social media profiles, view recent news mentions, and be alerted about when to reach out. No other solution brings together such a comprehensive set of insights about people within a business context.
Sell to people, not contacts
Most good sales people know this already. This is supported by research by Marketing Experiments that dives event deeper. When engaging with new prospects look at them as people and learn about WHO they are not WHAT they are.
Adds Intelligence to the Social Enterprise with Launch of CRM+
Beyond Data: InsideView Brings Intelligence to Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations
By going beyond mere business data to provide complete customer intelligence, Our latest product CRM+ revolutionizes the way all CRM end users – from sales, marketing and service, to operations and partner channels – know their contacts and prospects, build trust, execute productive one-to-one relationships and, ultimately, drive more revenue. With today’s launch, we set a new standard in bringing holistic and social intelligence to the fingertips of all B2B CRM users.
“We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others – and intelligence is a key reason for this.” – Aberdeen Group
“What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels: the intelligence needed for meaningful one-to-one relationships.,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “For example, just as sales has used intelligence to increase conversion rates, marketing uses contact intelligence to hone their campaigns, account management uses current news to time renewal offers, and professionals such as business development use intelligence to open new relationships.”
“Overwhelming ‘big’ data falls short in providing the intelligence needed for one-to-one business in marketing, service, sales and operations. For example, it’s a no-brainer to have current contact information on a prospect, but what about a holistic view of how you’re connected through former reference customers? Or a news article showing the company just made an acquisition? What about their latest tweets? It’s time for forward-looking intelligence in CRM to correct the ‘rear-view mirror’ approach currently provided by data companies,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO and founder of InsideView.
What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels” Umberto Milletti
CRM+ is for any company looking to empower all external-facing employees with real-time intelligence on prospects and customers, suppliers and partners. InsideView’s CRM+ provides just that to ensure all users are looking at the same information, improve KPI, and create more meaningful one-to-one relationships. InsideView CRM+ does this within workers’ process flow within their existing CRM platform.
Independent research firm Aberdeen Group has already shown the benefits of InsideView’s intelligence on sales results: At least a 10 percent increase in top-line revenue and more than 10 percent increase in quota attainment, to name a few. When intelligence is applied to additional areas – such as marketing and customer service – the impact is even greater.
“Providing intelligence to not just sales but to other parts of the organization including marketing, customer service, and operations makes a big difference in terms of overall organizational performance,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research. “We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others – and intelligence is a key reason for this.”
“As companies continue to embrace social CRM, they need intelligence – not data – to manage the rapidly changing landscape of customer relationships,” Milletti added. “We are excited to launch this next big step in providing this meaningful, actionable and results-driving intelligence to the entire social enterprise.”
On top of all the work to continue optimizing the application for our growing list of customers, we wanted to highlight some enhancements to the application that all of you should be seeing with the latest release.
Updated Connection Summary: You are now able to get a snapshot of any personal & professional connections from any company. This was a request brought to us by a few customers that wanted a snapshot in the record so they could see who they were connected to and how they were connected.
We now identify for you if you are connected through a coworker, a reference account or through previous coworkers.
The result is that you can now look at the snapshot and have more intelligence about who you want to drill into further to help make the introduction or use as leverage to connect with your target.
The new Connection Dashboard gives you a list of connections that you have access through using our Smart Connections. These are not direct connections that can be found using networks like LinkedIn but more implied connections that look at my past employers and other information from my profile to identify ways I can be connected to my target.
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
We are happy to announce that our July 2011 (v64) release is now live.
V64 release features:
• Text-only alerts for Blackberry users
• Enhanced partner contact search
• Improved Twitter profile search
• Salesforce – Multiple contact sync
• Salesforce – Self-service field mapping for CRM administrators
V63 release features:
• Add a company on-demand
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook – Data Sync & Export
• NetSuite CRM – Partner intelligence
• Salesforce – Easy watchlist set-up
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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