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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.
BroadVision, a pioneer and innovator in eCommerce solutions has selected SalesView, to ramp up their sales productivity. We’d like to thank BroadVision and extend a warm welcome.
Earlier this week I spent the afternoon at Altitude 2010, hosted by HP and Box.net, where I had the pleasure to be around Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to discuss the future of Cloud Computing in the Enterprise.
Every speaker had the same belief, that the move to cloud computing is inevitable, because of its superior value, scalability and availability at a reduced cost. There was also broad agreement that we will continue to see a consumerization of enterprise technology, drawing on the best aspects of consumer products (user-friendly, viral, freemium…) to increase the value that corporations get from IT.
While these trends seem unavoidable, the pace of adoption is likely to remain measured. Unlike consumers who quickly flock to new, better things, corporations are deliberate and often slow to adopt.
Putting one and one together, I thought: what an opportunity! An inevitable trend that evolves slowly gives those who are not timid a competitive advantage. In the world of sales, that advantage is the opportunity to be amongst the first to adopt a new trend, and to show our customers and prospects that we are ahead of the curve. Companies want to do business with people and companies who lead, and not with laggards.
Are you spending enough time to understand the trends in your market (in my case they include Sales 2.0, Customer 2.0, Social Media for Sales, Social CRM, Data vs. Intelligence)? Do you have an opinion on how they will impact your market? Do you make your opinions known (via email, blogs, twitter…)? Do you know how to translate those views into a relevant outreach that will get the attention of your prospects and customers?
If you want to be viewed as adding value to your prospects and customers, the answer has to be resounding yes for all of the above.
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. — Arthur C. Clarke
About 32,000 years ago, French cavemen started drawing on their walls to help each other solve the crucial problem of the day: Where can I find big meaty animals, and how do I kill them?
Since then, our communication tools have advanced beyond bone chisels and ochre paint, but the central objective hasn’t changed so much. We’re all still looking for that woolly mammoth.
For most salespeople, the search involves gathering data, from which to glean insights, enabling a conversation to begin, in the pursuit of a sale.
It’s a multi-step journey. Unfortunately, too many data providers act as if the first part – amassing raw information about a prospect – is all you need to close a deal.
At a basic level, any piece of data is just a fact. This company had $50 million in revenue last year, for example, or that CEO’s name is Pat Paterson. No matter its size, any database is simply a compilation of facts, and nothing more.
A dictionary is not a great novel just because it contains all the words of a great novel.
Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Awhile back, we condensed InsideView’s product goals to a catchphrase: Smart. Fresh. Complete.
Roughly translated, it means we’re aiming to provide the information you need (Complete), in real-time (Fresh), cleverly parsed into unique, relevant analysis (Smart).
Smart comes first in that mantra, and it’s not a coincidence. To us, it’s the key differentiator between InsideView sales intelligence and Old-School Data. Facts are common; intelligence is rare.
A fact is the news that Company X plans to acquire Company Y. Intelligence is the proper interpretation of how that event will affect operations at the two firms, as well as how the merger will shift the landscape of its industry.
Deeper intelligence is to demonstrate the ways you can benefit from it all, by detailing how the acquirer’s goals dovetail with your own product’s features, and pointing out that the CEO sits on a charity board with your own boss.
Old-School Data companies want you to believe that “data” and “intelligence” are synonyms. That’s why their marketing pitches always emphasize quantity over quality, as well as the horsepower of their data-gathering engines.
More data does not mean better data. Even if it did, it would not make those vast accumulations of facts more useful in-and-of themselves. Analysis is what turns information into knowledge, and intelligence is what turns that knowledge into wisdom.
Smart companies know that.
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.
I work at sales intelligence leader, InsideView and we’re in the same building as Zynga at 444 De Haro Street in San Francisco. I used to be addicted to FarmVille, playing it daily on Facebook. I couldn’t handle the pressure and responsibility of my e-farm and stopped playing a few months ago. I call it a vacation and imagine some day I’ll be back on that farm, tending away. Despite my lack of use, it looks like Zynga is growing like crazy. I see their staff around the building every day looking pretty happy to be at work and often wonder what goes on behind the doors of their many offices. So I decided to do some research in our own product, SalesView.
Within minutes I found these articles from ITProPortal, The Money Times, PCWorld, cnet news and more outlining the possibility of Zynga bailing out of Facebook and starting their own social gaming network using SalesView (see image below). From there I found even more commentary on the subject, including Michael Arrington’s post on TechCrunch.
I quickly became concerned about the idea of adding yet another website to my list of social networks. Would social network aggregators like FriendFeed, Netvibes, TweetDeck be so popular if people really wanted to have more destinations to go to on the internet? Social content needs to be “where I’m at” and if it’s not I need a damn good reason to go there.
But as a social news aggregator, this is great for InsideView. The more decentralized information there is about people and companies the more important it is that there are tools out there to show the right information in the right place at the right time. And we can do that.
–
Beth GoldmanManager of User Experience
beth.goldman@insideview.com
5/4/10 – John McCormick
Watching all the buzz around Salesforce.com’s newest app “Chatter”, and Marc Benioff leading the charge in a jump from “Cloud 1” to “Cloud 2”, it got me thinking of all the technological change that has occurred in sales over the last few years. Remember when Zack Morris was ordering pizzas in class from his gigantic cell phone? Now we are all glued to our iPhones, Blackberrys and Droids… and can email, post and play a game while ordering pizza in class.
When I read Marc’s post on moving to Cloud 2, it occurred to me that a similar movement is underway in the sales intelligence world, popularly referred to as Sales 2.0. We have moved from static to dynamic data, from editorial based information (think Hoover’s) to user generated content (think Jigsaw and NetProspex.) We’ve moved from a “who do I know” mentality (think Rolodex) to a “how are we connected” mentality (think LinkedIn and Facebook.) And we’ve moved from a research mentality (think news clippings) to a follow/subscribe mentality (think network updates, RSS feeds and email alerts.)
The days of going out to do manual research and putting it all together are past us. Having actionable sales intelligence delivered to me through my CRM just makes sense. Today’s top chefs don’t go out and go to Safeway, then Whole Foods, then to the Fish Market – they have all their ingredients delivered to them. Why should sales intelligence be any different?
| Cloud 1 —–> Cloud 2 | Sales 1.0 —–> Sales 2.0 |
| Type/Click —–> Touch | Search —–> Follow / Subscribe |
| Yahoo/Amazon —–> Facebook | Black Book —–> Facebook / LinkedIn |
| Tabs —–> Feeds | Newspaper —–> Blogs / Wikis / RSS feeds |
| Chat —–> Video | Mass Email —–> Event Based Prospecting |
| Pull —–> Push | Customer 1.0 —–> Customer 2.0 |
| Create —–> Consume | Call Volumes —–> Meaningful Interaction |
| Location Unknown —–> Location Known | Onsite Visits —–> WebEx / GoToMeeting |
| Desktop/notebook —–> Smart phone/Tablet | Cold Calling —–> Social Calling |
| Windows/Mac —–> Cocoa/HTML 5 | Hoover’s/OneSource —–> SalesView |
The point here is this… we are already doing all these things separately – but why? When all the information I need can be delivered to me within my CRM and help make my message more relevant – seems like a no brainer. Do you think Zack Morris would still be using something that is outdated by 10+ years?
Guest post by Santosh Shukla, InsideView Hyderabad office.
Posting on Twitter, updating a Facebook profile, putting that Youtube video demo and uploading pictures to Flickr may be free of cost, but it’s wrong to think that social media for marketing and sales is free.
Social media are now standard tools of the Sales 2.0 workplace. But if you are like me, the “social” part of social media sometimes gets in the way of the work. That means you inadvertently spend some time to look at the tweets of people you follow, retweet some and end up spending much more time than you intended. Similar things happen when you go to LinkedIn to find a connection, and end up reading and joining irrelevant discussions.
Thus, a result-oriented foray into social media turns out to be a long walk into unknown (but interesting) woods and by the time we realize, the damage is already done. Time is money, and you’ve just wasted a pile of it.
Here some tips that I use to get the most out of social media while staying focused:
- Link your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts to save the time and effort of updating same status/message at different places.
LinkedIn with Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?twitterSettings
Facebook with Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/
- Create lists on Twitter to follow tweets on related topics like Sales2.0, Golf, psychology etc. to be focused on reading only what you want to read at that moment.
http://help.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists
To follow the tweets of the IV 20 Top Sales Industry social media users here – http://twitter.com/skshukla/Sales2-0
- Use intelligent tools that allow you to focus on the crux and not deviate by being in your work window. SalesView helps you to read relevant blogs, tweets of the prospect that you are targeting within your CRM so you don’t have to leave it to get the social media benefits. It also finds the LinkedIn connections and Facebook friend connections for prospect accounts within your CRM.
- Follow top 20 Sales Industry Social Media Users and some more stars to get the latest and greatest information and views of the Sales (and Marketing) industry without spending too much time elsewhere.
- Talk to people who have pioneered in linking social web and enterprise, the creators of term “socialprise”.
I am sure you have some more tips that you use to efficiently use your time on social media and get the desired results. Please feel free to share them.
To follow all the Sales2.0 leaders’ tweets, just follow @skshukla/Sales2-0
Today Salesforce.com announced the intent to acquire Jigsaw. These are two great companies, and two of our best partners, who are coming together to provide better access to and management of data. With this announcement, two disruptors are joining forces, and this will accelerate the inevitable trend towards business and contact data becoming a commodity.
Jigsaw has been shaking up the data world since its inception, using crowdsourcing to make available for free contact and company data that historically companies have paid for. Jim Fowler, Jigsaw’s founder & CEO, talks about the inevitable commoditization of data in this post.
Salesforce.com also has a long history of disrupting traditional markets like SFA and CRM, by bringing the SaaS delivery model to the market and reducing costs. Through this acquisition, Salesforce.com and Jigsaw will accelerate the commoditization of data by lowering distribution barriers. Other traditional data providers will be forced to enter the data-in-the-cloud marketplace, increasing the quantity and availability of data.
What does this all mean for you? It means that contact and company data will become easier and cheaper to get. As the title of this post hints, this marriage will ” help free data” not only in the sense of “freely available” but also “available for free”. That’s the good news. It will also accelerate the proliferation of different, often conflicting data. That’s the bad news. And it’s the reason we believe that making make sense of it all will become increasingly important – which is the basic premise of our Smart Cloud platform.
For the world InsideView lives in (sales productivity and sales intelligence), the medium term impact will be an increased focus on effective aggregation and relevance filtering. Attention scarcity, rather than data scarcity, continues to be the major limiting factor for sales professionals. More data does not drive sales productivity, relevant intelligence at the right time in the right place does.
This announcement marks an important day for the Sales 2.0 market and validates our belief that the answer to the productivity challenge revolves around intelligent aggregation and relevance filtering.
