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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
SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the results of its 2010 Social CRM Survey. The poll’s results reinforced the notion that in the year 2010, CRM practitioners have been slow to embrace social. Those that have chosen to take advantage of this new technology have enjoyed a competitive advantage in the market and a considerable return on investment, placing them firmly ahead of their challengers.
According to the survey, 2011 will bring much change to the CRM market; virtually all of the respondents agreed that over the course of the new year they planned to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data. While nearly half of all respondents stated that having social CRM capabilities would impact their decision-making when purchasing their company’s next CRM system, it’s clear that social CRM will become a staple in the market by 2012.
Some companies have chosen to lead the charge on social CRM, and upgrade their CRM software before it becomes an industry norm. Insource Performance Solutions, a SugarCRM customer, is one of those companies.
“The integration between InsideView and SugarCRM allows us to leverage social media and other real time data sources to our advantage, all in a simple-to-consume, automated format,” said Chip Meyers, sales operations manager for Insource. “The merging of social and CRM system data gives us a competitive edge.”
SugarCRM users can get a FREE copy of InsideView for Sales in the Sugar Exchange Marketplace.
We appreciate making it through the rounds and becoming a finalist for the 2011 CODiE Awards.
InsideView is a finalist in two categories.
Best Content Management Solution
Recognizes the best software or platform that enables the creation, management and modification of information on the web, intranet, or other information resource. Includes content creation, categorization, workflow, publishing and delivery tools.
Best Solution Integrating Content into Workflow
Awards the best product, service, or application integrating content into a workflow application such as CRM, legal, scientific, financial planning and analysis, etc. Can be nominated as an end-user application or service or as a customized solution using APIs or other links into content.
The CODiE™ Awards recognize excellence in the business software, digital content, and education technology industries. Through a thorough review of products and services by people who know the industry, the CODiE™ Awards allow companies to validate their products against the competition. The products that qualify as finalists benefit from a comprehensive publicity program that involves traditional media outreach, social media activity, and opportunities for expressing thought leadership in the technology community through SIIA.
I responded to a poll on LinkedIn asking “What is your primary Client Relationship Management (CRM) software that you use?” and then took a peek at the results. I’ve been focusing a bit more on LinkedIn for sales people lately since it is the primary social network for companies and professionals. I thought the the information from a poll like this would be perfect for deeper analysis. Even though many of the answers were what I expected, I was caught off guard by one of the results.
Overall the numbers look great, there is still about 18 days to respond but with 1535 votes, this is an impressive number of people. CRM applications are what drives a company, customer engagement and pipeline in a way that helps executives and sales people keep track of what really matters and not focus on deals that are stalled and have a low chance of closing. Salesforce, Microsoft CRM and Oracle were the targeted choices with the option for people to choose “other” as well. Since there are probably a hundred other CRM applications that a company could use, these are the big 3 because of their enterprise adoption.
No CRM?
What surprised me in this this poll was that the creator added in a “None” option to the list. Makes sense but the number of people responding to the LinkedIn poll with this as an answer was concerning.
Of all of the responses, the largest number of “Managers” indicated that they do not use any CRM. None…zero. Though the poll is impressive for other reasons, I’d be interested in doing a follow up poll with this subgroup just to understand how they are managing their business.
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.
The Aberdeen Group’s recent study deconstructed the best-in-class inside sales deployments, surveying 476 organizations and found that sales practitioners using SalesView outperformed other companies in both performance and the adoption of best-in-class practices (as defined in this Analyst Insight). Aberdeen notes the significant increase in overall sales performance, quota achievement, win/loss and lead-conversion rates when compared to companies not utilizing the application.
Aberdeen cites SalesView’s technology, aggregating sales intelligence from social media and traditional sources, in turn increasing sales productivity and velocity. The study credits SalesView’s CRM integration with providing the following benefits:
- 27% increase in overall productivity
- 32% more sales reps achieve their quotas
- 31% more sales reps see a better win/loss rate
- 18% more sales reps convert leads to the closing stage
According to Peter Ostrow, research director for sales effectiveness at The Aberdeen Group, “Access to sales intelligence, especially when directly fed into CRM/SFA systems, is clearly one of the major enablers for the best-in-class companies in the study. Sales teams who are deploying InsideView’s sales intelligence application are indeed achieving 32% better performance than non-customers, in terms of current lead conversion rates and hitting quota, and year-to-year growth in revenue and win/loss ratios.”
Perhaps the most impressive statistic from the Aberdeen study was this: despite the 2008 and 2009 recession, InsideView customers posted year-over-year gains in quota attainment, revenue, win rates, and lead conversion rates.
While we’ve been able to share individual success stories of InsideView customers, it’s exciting to have analyst research affirm the positive impact that Sales 2.0 technologies like SalesView have on sales organizations in aggregate. Check out the entire report here.
Interested in learning how your organization can increase sales productivity and efficiency? Of course you are. Tune in tomorrow (Wednesday, 1/27) at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET for valuable insight from Peter Ostrow, the Aberdeen Group’s sales effectiveness research director. Peter will highlight the results and benefits of SalesView, along with other great perspectives.
The Webinar, “How to Blow Out Your Quota in 2010,” is complimentary and will teach you and your organization how to:
- Achieve an average of 87% overall sales team quota
- Increase average revenue by 17%
- Experience an average of 7% improvement of lead conversion rate
- Raise average selling price/contract size by 45%
Register in advance at http://tinyurl.com/yzm8c7t.
