You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Sales 2.0’ category.
There is little to no doubt that as sales intelligence continues to emerge in the industry, it will become a crucial component in your job resume. As companies continue to sense the empowerment sales intelligence brings to their sales teams, experience with such platforms are beginning to become a standard for incoming sales professionals.
Here is an example of a job description for a Sales Associate Specialist:
How does experience with sales intelligence empower a sales professional?
It is best to answer this question by deriving some of the key duties from this job requirement and how sales intelligence can bring these duties to their fullest potential.
Identify key client prospect contacts: Sales intelligence platforms, such as InsideView, has the ability to build Watchlists - Watchlists help you track and monitor a list of companies for relevant business opportunities and challenges. By building a company list through sales intelligence, representatives have the ability to easily find companies within their targeted industry without spending hours of time researching.
Market to the key client prospect contacts: Using People Insights from InsideView, sales professionals now have the ability to approach the right people, with the right message, at the right time. With this tool, representatives no longer have to go digging through the Internet finding recent news about key prospects – People Watchlists deliver them daily notifications where it becomes easy to market.
Set up phone qualification calls for the territory Account Executive: The standard of cold calling and using data has begun its final bow out of the sales cycle. Of course it has its benefits of dialing 100+ people in one day and getting a couple of leads out of it. However, sales intelligence platforms brings real-time “people” information. It’s not just contact data (phone, email, address, etc.)…it’s contact information combined with social profiles (Twitter, Pandora, Facebook, etc.), University experiences, news articles, and more. When sales representatives make that initial call, they have everything they need to make a personal connection with the potential client.
Why are sales intelligence platforms becoming a job requirement?
Today we are in the midst of a social revolution. As more people across the globe become connected through the Internet, our methods of business are rapidly changing. Sales is at the tip of the spear with this new transformation of business. The issue is, not all sales representatives are utilizing the incredible resources online – primarily because researching takes time, eating up sales productivity.
More than 1/4 of sales teams use 50% or more of their time researching. (Aberdeen)
Sales professionals should no longer be expected to perform to their fullest capabilities spending half of their day researching potential prospects. Companies are starting to realize they can no longer afford to hire sales representatives who bring are not productive with research and given poor data quality. Sales intelligence platforms aggregate crucial pieces of material needed to empower sales teams in order to make effective sales calls. Companies, such as TriNet, are starting to realize that leveraging InsideView and sales intelligence cuts down time wasted researching and increases sales productivity.
“InsideView has helped us greatly improve our sales effectiveness. In doing so,we have been able to halve our research time, triple our call-to-opportunity ration, and generate more than 20% more opportunities.” Mark Stock, Sr.Director of Sales
There is little question sales intelligence is becoming a crucial tool for sales teams and professionals throughout multiple industries. Companies that require the experience of these platforms understand the power it gives to their sales professionals and the enormous benefits it has for their sales infrastructure.
Welcome to the year 2012! I hope the first couple of weeks is everything and more you could have hoped for in terms of sales and getting jazzed for a fresh start. I compiled a list of some blog posts I thought you all might find interesting. They outline a lot of really great best practices to get you up and running this year. For those who didn’t quite hit your marks last year, now might be a good time to start switching things up a bit. Spend the morning or afternoon reading these from some truly influential figures in sales.
- Personality Study of 1,000 Top Salespeople-Harvard Business Review - Heavy Hitter Sales Blog
- 12 Ways to Increase Sales – Inc.
- Being True To “You” – Paul Castain’s Playbook
- Optimism is a Selling Skill. Is Your Glass Half-Empty or Half Full? – Salesopedia
- How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK – Guy Kawasaki
- 5 Leadership Tips for Sales Managers - Better Closer
- Seven Steps to Sales Transformation – Selling Power
- 8 Ways to Increase Sales – InsideView
- Want the Sales? Watch What You Say… – Joanne Black
- The Beauty of Imperfection – Jill Konrath
Shoot us at a tweet @insideview if you like our collection of blog posts!
How a few shifts in your sales process can have a huge impact on sales revenue.
I read a great article on Inc. yesterday on 12 ways to increase sales. The author Geoffrey James pointed out some of the most important things a salesperson or sales manager should do to increase sales in 2012. He hit the nail on the head when it comes to why these 12 ways to increase sales revenue will work, I want to tell you how to do it in 8.
1. Reduce the number of opportunities you pursue. It’s not a numbers game. By focusing your sales energy on fewer opportunities that have a higher chance of closing, you can give these customers more of your time to move the deal along. Leveraging traditional sales drivers and trigger events you are aware of, you will know which prospects have a much higher percentage of closing.
2. Increase the percentage of time you spend selling. There will always be admin work. As a salesperson you may not have the ability to hand your busy work off to others but there are ways that you can still increase your time selling. Most sales people on average spend 10hrs a week researching prospects. By leveraging technology and sales intelligence you can cut that amount of time in half and free up some of that precious time to be talking to prospects and customers and sell more.
3. Stop buying technology because it’s cool.
Stop spending your money on the next shiny object. Invest in technology that is actually going to help you sell. Focus on tools that will provide you
- Trigger events that effect your prospects and customers
- Valuable connections through multiple social networks and existing business relationships
- More personal insights that turn your CRM contacts into people you can relate to and add context around
- Highly targeted and intelligent prospect lists
4. Terminate weak engagements–politely but immediately.
Just as your company should have a solid lead qualification process to identify new opportunities you should spend the time to disqualify deals. A sales team should know what their ideal customer looks like and focus their energy on them. If a prospect doesn’t fit the mold, quit trying to force them into it.
5. Hone your lead generation effort.
Sales people need to understand the art of lead generation is shifting to an online world. Stop waiting for your phone to ring and look for the people you can help in real time. Social networks are a goldmine for the socially savvy sales rep. If you know what you are looking for, finding new opportunities with social media isn’t difficult. For example our sales team found this update on Twitter and jumped in.
What’s a good company database alternative to Hoovers? They don’t seem to want to sell me anything.
— Ross Mayfield (@Ross) January 10, 2012
These types of updates are something your sales team needs to be on the look out for. After 24 hours, Hoovers still has not replied to Ross’s update on Twitter. Listening is key. Leveraging connections and personal insights our sales team was able to connect and help Ross with his business needs.
6. Don’t focus on the gatekeepers.
Understand who the real decision makers are. Get to know them as people instead of the contact that makes decisions at XYZ company. Stay engaged with them during the sales cycle by engaging with them outside of the actual sale. Connect with prospects on social networks and try and help them with other questions they may have and add valuable insights on their industry.
7. Stay on top of your opportunities.
Build a watchlist on your opportunities so you can be fed news and other alerts to things that are changing within their company. Leveraging technology to keep your finger on the pulse of your opportunities will insure that nothing slips by you and you can even stay a step ahead during the sales process.
8. Outflank your competition.
I say it during my speaking engagements: Be different, Be better. Your prospects are getting 100+ emails a day and called as many times a week. This tactic may work some of the time but don’t do what your competitors are doing. Stand apart from them by leveraging your connections to get the introduction, connect with the decision makers on social networks to have more engaged conversations in a medium that they are already spending time in.
It works!
2012 is here folks. New goals and high ambitions are in place as the slate is cleaned for the new year. It’s time to stoke the 2011 coals and fuel the 2012 fire. Here are 15 posts I put together with some very interesting predictions and strategies for this coming year. Hope you enjoy it and best of luck for this fine year!
- 30 Social Media Predictions for 2012 From the Pros – Social Media Examiner
- 5 Sales Management Questions We Answered in 2011 – Selling Power
- 8 Great Marketing Infographics To Inspire Your 2012 Objectives – B2B Marketing Insider
- 11 B2B marketing trends to watch (or wish) for in 2012 – Customer Think
- How to Get Your Prospects to Call You Back in 2012 – InsideView
- Sales Discussions That Need To Disappear in 2012 – Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook
- Things I’m Wishing For In 2012 – Insider Sales Experts Blog
- Social Media: Five Facts to Bank On in 2012 – Ad Age Digital
- CRM 2012 Forecast – The Era of Customer Engagement – ZDNet Blog
- SaaS Predictions for 2012 – Smart SaaS
- Top 7 Critical Sales Trends for 2012 – Heavy Hitter Sales Blog
- 12 Sales Trends for 2012 – Barrett Sales Blog
- Bring on 2012 – Salesopedia
- Your 2012 Marketing Plan: Tell Me What to Do – Business Grow
- How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK – Guy Kawasaki
It’s a new year and you have new sales goals but you can’t dismiss the facts gathered from 2011. 92% of executives you try to contact will not return your phone call. You should already know why, unless you have an amazing reason for them to listen to your message, they will delete it in the first 5 seconds. If you don’t give them a compelling reason to spend the time to call you back then you get forgotten about.
When calling on a prospect for the first time there are some simple steps you should take to make sure they return your call.
Leveraging existing connections
When doing your 2012 prospecting, make sure you focus on people you are connected to. Your customers (if they are happy) should be willing to make introductions or serve as references to other companies that you are trying to engage with. 84% of the people you try to connect with leveraging an existing connection will respond. If there is ever a more compelling reason to stop dialing for dollars, this would be it!
A Little Research Goes a Long Way
Do your homework on the person you are calling before you pick up the phone. Stop treating the names in your CRM as contacts and start thinking about them as people. If you dont have a prospect watchlist created for your prospects, do some research on them through social media. Are they active on networks like LinkedIn or Twitter? What are they saying. I’m sure there are some good pieces of information you can gather that will give you better personal insights on them.
Warm up every cold call.
Before calling, connect with the prospect on social media or by sending them the tried and true email. Send a short, personal letter saying something like, ‘I’d like to introduce myself. I’ve noticed your company has been actively growing the size of your widget factory and I’d like t know if I can help with anything’. Make sure you enclose something of value and indicating that you’ll be calling in a few days to gauge interest. Then, promptly follow up.
Build a conversation about the prospect first.
Building from that last two, you should know about your prospect as a persona and know about their specific business needs. Using the trigger events you monitor around their company and industry coupled with what you have gathered about the individual, structure your first conversation all around them. I’m not saying to avoid a sales pitch but make sure your pitch is completely focused to them and their company. Talk about what you have discovered and see if there is anything you are missing. Highlight how your product has helped companies like theirs recently and see if they are in a position to look at it in more detail and find additional value.
Closing out the year we wanted to look over the content that you have found most interesting and shared most often. 2011 was a big year for sales intelligence and the use of technology by sales teams to be more effective in finding new opportunities and closing more deals.
This is the list of the top 25 sales intelligence posts that people read during 2011
- 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
- How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
- Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
- 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
- Gamification of the Sales Process
- 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
- 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
- The History of Apple CEOs
- Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
- Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
- Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
- 10 of the Best Sales Sites
- The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
- 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
- Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
- Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
- 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
- 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
- The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
- Should Sales People Be Blogging?
- The Problem with Big Data
- The Future of Social CRM
- Do You Listen to Your Customers?
- 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1
- A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence
This is part two in a study we created along with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
Sales Intelligence drives revenue.
“Based on the 12 ways sales people leverage the internet it is clear that B2B sales teams spend a lot of time researching prospects and customers on the web and social networks. It’s no longer an issue of not having any information ahead of time, the issue is that there is an overwhelming amount of personal insights available. Sifting through it to find the relevant information you can act on today appears to be the challenge at hand. Sales intelligence drives revenue by feeding sales people trigger events and insights within a company or contact.” (Koka Sexton)
Make the most of a B2B Social Networks more advanced features and functionalities.
“On the B2B side of the house, LinkedIn is the networking tool in the US with some 130 million members of the 100 million-plus community. Many people know how to invite people to their network, but they usually do not know what to do after that.”
Here are a few of the ways that savvy B2B salespeople will leverage B2B social networks:
- Advanced people search: Create prospecting lists based on the criteria of your ideal buyers. Save the list, and LinkedIn dynamically updates and alerts you weekly to the new people matching your criteria who have joined the network. Each week, you can then plan your strategy with respect to how you’ll approach the initial interaction.
- Applications: Use the applications to add video, compelling presentations, white papers and case studies or sync your blog posts to your profile. Keep your content fresh and people pay attention. In the past eight weeks, I’ve secured four paid gigs and in every single case, I was told it was because my profile stood out from the rest and because they liked the video. It is all about engaging people and enticing them to want to know more.
- Polls: Create a poll to gather real-time trending information that you can share with your prospective buyers.
- Status updates: Ongoing status updates that are ‘relevant’ and provide value to others keep salespeople visible; because at the end of the day, it is all about visibility.
- Groups: Leveraging groups (the right groups!) gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate credibility, but not selling!
- Use the Answers section to listen and respond to the questions that people are asking. Every single day people ask what products to buy and from whom.
- Events: Hosting an educational session for potential clients? Use the events functionality and use it to share with your network.” (Giamanco)
Monitor prospect discussion and social data for buying signals.
“Prospect research has changed forever. In no other time in my life have we seen prospects update their own information and update you on what they are doing in their personal and professional lives! Today’s modern social salesperson is exceptionally prepared for their sales calls. One tip: Company data is interesting (e.g., … [alerts] about your sales prospect’s company: ‘New product launch!’), but prospect social data is even more interesting, because it will tell you what the person really cares about (‘Just got back from sales training in Florida, learned a ton!’).” (Rosenberg)
“Leveraging twitter for sales is very effective. Once you know how to use Twitter as a sales tool, you can get insights into people and companies in realtime.” (Sexton)
“Watch for buying signals across the social Web. One of the greatest opportunities for salespeople via social media is to see into the buying cycle far earlier than we’ve typically had access to. Before social media, we could deepen our understanding of the buyer and use outbound marketing to connect with a particular need, try and find resonance with a buying signal, etc. But that, at best, was a fishing expedition most of the time. Now, if you know the buying signals and pain/problem keywords your prospects typically exhibit before they’re ready to buy, you can watch for those discussions and keywords across the social Web. Do a couple keyword searches on Twitter, for example, and you’ll be surprised how many people, in real-time, are talking about their existing challenges, their frustrations with competitive products and more.” (Heinz)
“Social media is a great tool for salespeople, but for not for the reasons that some people believe. Social media isn’t a replacement for the prospecting activities that success in sales requires, as some seem to suggest. It is a simply a set of tools that allow the execution of some of those activities. There is way too much focus on using social media tools for inbound marketing, and way too little on leveraging the tools to better enable the execution of the fundamental roles of salespeople: opening new opportunities. Opening new opportunities isn’t a passive activity, and salespeople who wait for their prospects to find them aren’t successful by any of the measures we use in sales. The salespeople who are successfully using social media are using the tools to identify and open communication with their dream client contacts. They are using tools like LinkedIn to identify the people who they can most easily create value for within their target accounts. More still, they are researching their prospects, discovering what they are reading, what they are writing about, and where their interests lie. Social media better enables salespeople to know who to call and how they might best create value for those people.” (Iannarino)
It can be a pain in the rump trying to find a couple of blog posts worth spending your morning reading and jump-starting the week. Literally hundreds and thousands of sales blogs with self-proclaimed “best sales solutions” trying to cram their way into your Twitter feed, Google search results and your existence. Fret no more as I have done the searching for you and found what I deem some great sales blog posts. Take a look and have a phenomenal week.
- The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study – CRM Outsiders
- 5 Steps to Create a Killer Google+ Business Page – BrainSell Blog
- Are You Lost In a B2B Sales Lead Paradox? – Marketo Blog
- New Study Says Customers Think Companies Don’t Give a Damn ABout Their Time…Just Their Money – Brent’s Social CRM Blog
- Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business - Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog
- Eight Business Apps That Will Change the Way You Work - Emergence Capital Partners
- How Much Will You Sell in 2012 With Social Media? - Selling Power
- Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make – Selling to Big Companies
- Data Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data – DataMyth
- Three Steps to Develop Yourself – S. Anthony Iannarino; the Sales Blog
In the last post we explained that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that slow down the process of finding new prospects and getting them into the sales funnel. Knowledge about your customers, finding new prospects and having a sales process that takes too long is a common pain point for businesses.
- 42% have insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospects
- 40% do not have the ability to identify the most likely buyers of their product
- 34% complain of having a sales process that is too long
- 21% See an increased customer churn forcing them to focus on filling the funnel
I predict in 2012 that these numbers will not change too dramatically but the results from companies that are actively leveraging technology and sales intelligence as a method of combating them will. Sales managers should be constantly on the lookout for ways to solve these business pressures and based on research by the Aberdeen Group, the top performing sales organizations have built strategies that can drive measurable results in building a sales pipeline and increasing the quality of leads.
- 59% of the best in class companies have leveraged sales intelligence tools to identify or disqualify prospects with more accuracy
- 53% of companies have been able to identify existing customers that have upsell/cross sell opportunities
- 48% of companies have increased the quality of leads intheir pipelines
- 28% use technology to capture and share sales knowledge internally.
- 21% of companies reduce the amount of time doing sales research
This research is important because it’s showing that companies that are having the problems listed above are able to continue achieving results by leveraging sales intelligence in traditional and non-conventional ways. Top performers in lead qualification teams understand that moving less qualified prospects out of their view has more value than dumping a volume of under vetted opportunities on the sales team. By not relying on data but the contextual news and social profiles of the companies and people you are contacting, better decisions can be made on which prospects to pursue and which leads to abandon.
The research study on the science of sales intelligence goes a long way in showing that companies that want to increase revenue quickly with your existing sales team can do so by leveraging technology to speed up the sales process. A strategy around using sales 2.0 applications to identify strong/weak prospects should be a key focus for your 2012 sales plan.
Just a quick poll: Are the issues described above the same as for your company?
You’ve finished your leftover turkey and the Christmas lights are starting to come up (cue Jingle Bell Rock!)…time to relax and look forward to the holidays? Wrong. At least not totally wrong. With the beginning of the holidays comes the end of the 4th Quarter. Like any team in sports, you don’t want that 4th quarter, second half or 9th inning to come down to the wire because it will shave years off your life. Here are 10 great blog posts that will get you ahead of the curve for the end of the year, allowing you to drink that egg nog a little deeper.
- Converting B2B Sales Data into Social Intelligence – Social Media B2B
- Five Ways to Measure If Facebook “Likes” Work for Your Business – Selling Power
- Myth #1: More Data Is Better – DataMyth.com
- 3 Big Data Myths for Enterprises – Smart Data Collective
- CEOs on Sales – What Company Leaders Want from Sales Leaders – The Sales Operations Blog
- Salesperson: Hunter or Farmer? – The New Sales Coach
- Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed to Sell? – Partners in Excellence
- Social, Content & Selling – a Chief Revenue Officer’s Take – Inside Sales Expert Blog
- Four Keys to a Great 4th Quarter - Salesopedia
- Six Simple, yet Powerful Benioff-isms – The Sales 2.0 Advocate
