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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!
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.
Let’s face it, making contact with C-level executives and other decision makers is not an easy task. 92% of C-level executives NEVER respond to email blasts or cold-calls. According to the 2011 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from CSO Insights, the average sales professional spends 25% of the workday researching potential prospects. Yet after hours of scouring the web, you still don’t know who the right buyer is and what technologies they use.
In this interview 1to1 Media‘s Tom Hoffman speaks with Ralf VonSosen, Vice President, Marketing at InsideView, about the steps that decision-makers can take to collect and act on intelligence about B2B customers.
Spray and pray tactics don’t work.
Contact data is not enough. A phone book is not an efficient tool to go after new prospects. Traditional methodologies of cold calling is dead, without context around your contact and having relevant information on your prospect you are not going to get their attention. Building a story around your product and how that can help a specific prospect can’t be achieved by dialing for dollars. That sales process just doesn’t scale any longer.
The average sales professional spends 25% of the workday researching potential prospects
Gathering personal insights
Once your sales teams learn to leverage sales intelligence applications and cut down their research times they can become more effective selling machines. Most sales professionals do not have the opportunity to go into a prospects office and look at the photos on their desk, understand their pains and get the complete view of their situations.
Contact data can’t provide this but through other technologies all sales people have the ability to get into the customers brain and see what they are dealing within the industry, corporate initiatives and even their personal lives. Traditional news and social profiles open up a world of possibilities to both customers and sales reps to make sure that communications are timely, relevant and welcomed. We are now dealing with the social enterprise where companies and the employees are actively engaged with social networks, sales teams that can adjust to this trend will reap all the rewards while companies that lag behind will be left wondering “Where did all my customers go?“
Every morning I arrive to work, I spend about an hour or so scouring the discussion boards of LinkedIn. Not only do I find the dogfights between business strategies to be extremely entertaining but I also love seeing perceptions on discussions from both sides of the equation. A topic wrestled by a number of business figures in many of these discussion boards is the reliability of cold calling for the emerging generation of social selling in business. Working in social media, I have seen the unbelievable results of building relationships and generating leads through social selling. As a result, I have grown increasingly biased towards social selling being the more successful strategy. To completely cement this ideology of mine, I scoured the Internet in search of the brightest minds to see what they thought of the dawn of this new era. Bare in mind these posts do not completely dismiss cold calling as an effective means for sales and lead generation but instead provide powerful, alternative strategies.
- Demand Creation vs. Cold Calling - Hubspot
- Why Cold Calling Is the Bottom of the Barrel – No More Cold Calling
- Never Cold Call Again – Enough with the Hype - Chad Levitt
- Have You Evolved Past Cold Calling – Marketo
- Cold Warm calling in the social selling era - Brian Jameson (Customer Think)
- Cold Calling: Forget Plan A, B & C. Let’s Use Plan D – Nigel Edelshain
- Your Cold Call is Lonely! - Paul Castain
- Ten Steps to Use Social Media to Get in the Door – Barbara Weaver Smith
- Is Social Media the New Cold Call? – Koka Sexton
- No, You Don’t Have to Cold Call-Ever – Paul McCord
- Is The Cold Call Dead? - Opportunity Engineers
- Social Media vs. Cold Calling – SalesHQ
- YES founder Carly Warm on turning cold calling into ‘warm calling’ - Carly Ward
- Social Media and Blogging For Business Can Turn Cold Calls Into Warm Leads - Web Savvy PR
- Startup Company Eliminates the Cold Calling With Twitter - Social Media Examiner
There are many alternatives to cold calling. Most companies have already discovered that their customers are spending their time online in some social network like LinkedIn, Twitter or forum. Customers are asking questions and getting recommendations for products and services from their friends, peers and field experts. InsideView customers that have adopted social selling into their sales process have reported a slow but steady decrease in the number of “cold calls” their sales team makes on a daily basis. Even though there was a bit of a controversy over the post Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel, it appears that sales leaders are beginning to leverage social media more for initial outreach to prospects and using the phone for cold calling less.
Alternatives to Cold Calling
I’m not trying to dig up the debate on cold calling, using the phone to talk to prospects will be a constant staple in the sales profession. That is until video conferencing and other tools take over. Tools like Skype are not just being used for internal chats, I connect and have short conversations through chat and video with Skype all the time with people interested in Social Selling University and InsideView. I was also introduced to an up and coming technology called iMeet that takes video conferencing to a different level by allowing you to see the social profiles for the people in the virtual meeting room with you.
InsideView is being leveraged by sales people to build territories, create watch lists for trigger events and identify social networks that their prospects and customers and active in. Using sales intelligence applications will not only identify hundreds of new prospects, it will also show you how these prospects are related to you and who in your network might serve as an introduction eliminating the “cold” and making it a warm call. All of this research can be done in a matter of seconds at a total cost of zero. Instead of making 50 cold calls in a day, a good salesperson can make a thousand warm calls in under an hour. If that’s not efficiency, then I don’t know what is.
What’s holding sales people back?
When it comes to doing pre-call research and getting some background on a prospect or company you are calling into, there is a lot of information gathered by just doing a Google search. The problem with this is there is very little context around the results. You can spend an hour digging through search results and other resources to get an idea of who the person is and what challenges their company is facing but you’re busy too and can’t justify a large amount of time to research to make a call that may only take 10-15 minutes. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, in a video interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner. “The gap is that people can’t find it.”
Another obstacle facing sales teams from reducing cold calls is that sales leaders are still afraid of social media as a tool. Sure they see the value as a research tool but having an entire sales team making connections and getting introductions online while their phones collect dust is a scary thought for them.
Cold calling is the process of approaching prospective customers or clients, typically via telephone, who were not expecting such an interaction. The word “cold” is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting a call or has not specifically asked to be contacted by a sales person -wiki. Basically, picking up the phone with a list of names and numbers and running down the list hoping that someone will pick up and then have the time or general interest in talking with you for a few minutes. Sure, this works if you have a dedicated sales team that puts on their Plantronics headsets and can spend hours a day making calls to people that have never displayed an interest in your product.
The Cold Calling Debate
I’ve been a little rash when it comes to my thoughts on why cold calling is the bottom of the barrel. When I was in sales, I was measured by the number of calls I made in a day and if I didn’t hit the “magical” number of calls my professionalism was called into question. This post is the #4 most tweeted article from all of my posts on the blog. The comments from the post were insightful and come from some of the leaders in sales, training and services industries.
A few blog articles were made in response to the post from people with their own take on the idea that cold calling is dead. Ken Rouge wrote in Predictive Sales Intelligence Will Redefine CRM and the Sales Process that “InsideView proves that the value of social media increases exponentially when it can be applied directly to the sales/buying cycle. Marketing automation solutions like Eloqua manage opt-ins and content, all directly linked back to lead generation and sales acquisition costs. Dialer tools like the PowerDialer for Salesforce manage and predict call cycles for lead generation, pushing the highest-quality leads and data to the reps right when they need it.
All of this is designed for a single purpose–to close the gap from “old” sales to new. Getting attention through marketing channels is harder than ever. So when a company finally does “get some love” from a prospect, the tools have to be in place to make every opportunity count, to have the highest chance to contact and close the deal.
While I don’t totally agree with InsideView that cold calling is “bottom of the barrel,” the shifting sands of demand generation and sales intelligence in 2011 means that true “cold” calling will almost be misnomer in the future. Our ability to “predict” who and when to call, what to say when we do, and the value proposition a prospect will most readily respond to will ever increase as the sophistication of the tools we use increases with it.“
One of our great advocates Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group referenced our article in her post “It’s the ‘cold’ that’s dead, not the ‘calling‘“. Not a day goes by that I don’t see numerous bloggers, tweeters, etc. arguing passionately that cold calling is dead. The problem is that people are confusing cold calling with outbound calling. Picking up the phone still works as part of a Sales & Marketing approach that integrates inbound marketing, social media, great content, lead nurturing, etc.
Brian Berlin who is a good friend and past manager of mine is the owner of Straightline Strategies even found some data to back up the idea that cold calling is not as bad as we might think.
Ending the Debate on Cold Calling
As a social selling advocate and sales professional, I would never stand on a soap box and say that using the phone to contact prospects is a bad idea. I can’t say that because I still make daily calls on my Plantronics headset too. The difference is that I don’t blindly call people that I have to convince that it would be in their best interest to spend a few more minutes with me to hear a sales pitch. Times have changed and sales processes must change to keep up. Should sales people blog? I have my opinions on that. I have more thoughts on why sales teams are not leveraging social media and it boils down to FEAR.
I agree with Trish, most people confuse cold calling with making outbound calls. Calling names based on a prospecting list generated by marketing with contact data is not needed in the age of sales intelligence applications.
“There’s the old adage that 90 percent of people hate cold-calling and the other 10 percent are lying,” says Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch Inc., and author of the book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.
However, even in today’s business world, picking up the phone remains one of the best ways to reach an organization’s senior executives. A 2007 survey by MarketingSherpa, a research firm that tracks what works in the marketing profession, found that only 11 to 17 percent of business prospects were annoyed by getting an unsolicited cold call. On the other hand, 45 to 53 percent of the executives interviewed said that a cold call they received had helped vendors leapfrog onto the consideration shortlist for purchases. – INC.com
Adding a layer of intelligence to your sales process will dramatically increase sales productivity and increase your opportunity win rates. Does social media answer all the needs of every sales organization? No. But it adds an additional layer that gives sales people an edge when identifying new prospects and making that first phone call less awkward. Even marketing automation companies like Marketo see the value in leveraging social media for sales.
Making a global shift from the ‘cold calling’ mentality will take time but the shift is happening. Much faster than most companies can adjust.
