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Selling to people has not changed dramatically over the past hundred years. You have a product or service, identify a pool of prospects and then discover how many of them you can help. Sure thats over simplified but when it boils down, those are some of the key components. What has changed a great idea over the past few years is not so much the overall process but the details of how to sell to people.
Most sales people do not have the opportunity to walk into the offices of their prospects, see the awards on the wall, photos on the desk and bag of golf clubs in the corner. These were the details a salesperson would use to break the ice, find some common interests and start a conversation. Without these insights, a salesperson is left to their own devices and would be left with being just another sales guy with a pitch. Get beyond the contact data of someones business card and get to know your prospect as the person and not just a contact in your CRM.
People buy from people. Business is done not necessarily with the company with the best product but more often with the salesperson who has found a connection with their prospect through a shared interest or a referral. In the post on the 8 ways to increase sales we outlined some best practices to follow.
More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails.
Sales intelligence can identify connections between colleagues within an organization and prospects to reveal opportunities for meaningful sales contact. By arming sales professionals with actionable information from social sources, media outlets, company information and changes in business dynamics they are more likely to trigger sales. Sales professionals can quickly identify relevant connection points and build profitable, trusted relationships with prospects and customers that win more business and drive revenue.
‘It’s like watching an Ancestry.com commercial’
You’ve seen the commercial, a site that starts connecting the dots between you and your family and then builds a map of your entire family tree. It lets you see your connections to people you may never have known existed just by following the trail of connections through out history.
How can that apply to B2B sales?
- What if you could identify connection across multiple social graphs and include people you may not be connected to through a social network?
- How valuable would it be to have social streams from your prospects so you could see the updates, pictures and interactions they share?
- Would it be beneficial to be able to follow these people so anytime they were mentioned in the news or online you would get an alert so you could show you are listening?
Early adopters of People Insights like Network Hardware Resale are already seeing an impact in lead generation, opportunities and revenue. NHR CASE STUDY
“Social media mapping is my favorite feature. It’s just so cool. It’s almost like watching that Ancestry.com commercial- it’s like ‘I got a leaf!’ It’s when you find that connection that absolutely breaks you into an account; and once you’ve done that, your energy in looking for more of those connections goes WAY up. That becomes your best lead gen strategy ever. Now you want to have and create personal relationships with people through social media so that you can leverage those relationships.” - Michael Lodato, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at NHR
Leveraging people insights isn’t just a good idea, it’s the only way you will increase your lead generation and create new opportunities in 2012. As explained in the post 5 ways sales intelligence can increase revenue, research shows that:
- 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
For salespeople and sales leaders, understanding how to sell to people not contacts will be the difference between hitting or missing your number.
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
We partnered 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)
The first step and one that was consistent across 100% of the successful salespeople was to get connected.
Use your existing connections and networks to actively pursue new introductions. 
“It’s so easy, on sites from LinkedIn to Facebook and more, to see who your existing ‘friends’ and connections already know. On LinkedIn, for example, you can quickly search for contacts you want to meet based on which of them are already connected to people in your existing network. This is one of the best ways to get referrals and introductions, not by asking your network to ‘keep you in mind’ but, instead, periodically asking for specific introductions. By getting specific, your conversion rate goes up and you’re talking to the people you specifically want to meet and sell to. In your existing organization, there is the sales team, but I’m thinking the rest of the company is a gold mine of potential introductions — especially founders, longtime employees and others who have spent a long time in your industry. They know people, people know them, and they’re more likely to help you make connections and new introductions.” (Heinz)
“Every time they receive a referral, email or leadership content, salespeople can highlight names mentioned in document, then research mentioned leaders, clients and customers — even competition — and send a note or invitation asking to join their conversations via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. By connecting with each other, you then can offer assistance or referrals and also build a trusted network of individuals to help build your referral base. Most people are thrilled you took the time to reach out to them when reading their books, viewing their videos, etc.” (Bieler)
“Successful salespeople are also using social media to identify the relationships that their prospective clients have to other people they already know. Successful salespeople aren’t afraid to leverage their relationships, to ask for introductions, and to rely on the people they know and what they know to open these relationships. Because these social media connections exist, what was once invisible is now visible; it’s easy to identify relationships and leverage them to find a way in. But it’s important to remember that your prospective clients are also using the tools to learn about you. Recently, I called on a major prospective client. After our meeting, he searched for my name on the Internet and found that we had a common connection on Facebook (his best friend from high school). He called his friend to get a reference on me before deciding whether or not to move forward. Fortunately, his friend recommended my work. Social media is no longer something salespeople can opt out of. It reminds me of what President Richard Nixon used to say about foreign affairs: ‘You might not be interested in the world, but it’s interested in you.’ ” (Iannarino)
Use Twitter and other social channels to build deeper, early relationships with new prospects.
“Here’s exactly how you do it (at least with Twitter, but other social channels can likely be done in a similar fashion). Build a list of the prospects in your territory or market. With the help of an admin or an outsourcing service like eLance, go and collect the Twitter handles of each company and as many of the individuals as you can find. Using your own Twitter account, follow those companies and individuals. Then, using a tool such as HootSuite, set up a separate column where you can specifically watch activity from those prospects. This makes it easier and faster to engage with them on a regular basis. Answer their questions. Share a resource. Retweet their articles. In other words, use their attention to this social channel to build value by interacting where they are already spending their time and looking for information.” (Heinz)
One of the best messages from Dreamforce was the realization from 45,000 attendees that data is good but it is not enough to move the revenue needle. The comments from current customers and new businesses that stopped by the booth validated that cold calling is dead and without a very targeted message with relevant information from both traditional sources and social media, a sales rep’s chances of getting contact and creating new opportunities is very slim.
With the announcement that Jigsaw and D&B are being combined to create Data.com, our customers are echoing our response that this is just further validation that data is a commodity and without a layer of intelligence to help sales, marketing and support identify the right people to contact, you may as just use last years Yellow Pages.
Where’s the value-add? D&B and Salesforce are pitching this idea as a marriage between two classes of data: Salesforce contacts and D&B business. (For “Salesforce contacts,” read “Jigsaw.”) But Jigsaw data already associates contacts with their companies, and already contains (by Salesforce’s own estimate) over 4 million crowd-sourced corporate profiles. Of course, this calls into question the authenticity (and accuracy) of those profiles versus D&B’s professional research.
Keeping the entire company on the same page with prospects and customers is something that CRM can help with but it’s not the answer. There are so many things changing with companies on a daily, weekly and monthly basis that it’s impossible for anyone or any company to keep up with all the changes in leadership, news and events. This is why we believe that sales intelligence is the answer.
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.
10 additional Articles on Data vs. Intelligence
- The problem with BIG data.
- 10 tips to drive sales productivity.
- Social Selling in the Enterprise
- The Only Sales Application on the Gartner Magic Quadrant
- Data Accuracy vs Quality
- Sales and Marketing alignment with social media
- Listen to your customers using social intelligence
- Is social media the new cold call?
- Using Twitter for social selling.
- Intelligence Trumps Data for Sales Productivity
We are excited that we were included for the second year running to the Gartner Research Magic Quadrant for Social CRM. InsideView is the only company in the Magic Quadrant specifically addressing the sales processes, intelligent monitoring, outreach and collaboration for sales professionals. This is only the second time that Gartner Research has addressed the growing market of Social CRM (sCRM).
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In the report’s introduction, Gartner analysts mandate measurable benefits of any social CRM vendor included in the Magic Quadrant. InsideView’s integrated, seamless sales intelligence has been shown by analyst firm Aberdeen Research to improve top-line revenue by more than ten percent.
“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,”
“InsideView distinguishes itself as one of the few vendors in social CRM focused on sales processes,” reads the Gartner report, available for purchase here. The report continues, “With an emphasis on usability, InsideView has promoted a compelling vision for applying search and relationship mining technologies to aid salespeople with key informational needs around sourcing contacts and leads, as well as monitoring business events and personnel within accounts.” Ease-of-use is also praised: “…easy to set up and personalize to specific needs (i.e., list building, lead generation, lead qualification, precall research in prospecting, account research, etc.).”
The report also highlights InsideView’s ability to uncover new sales opportunities and relationships, as well as to provide real-time intelligence and social information on leads and prospects through its unique Buzz Tab. One new area of emphasis by InsideView is the establishment of broader community: just last month, InsideView launched a Lithium-powered community for its nearly 100,000 users.
“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “It’s great to see the industry analysts agree on the importance of these one-to-one relationships. We are now expanding more into the areas of marketing and service as these recognize the need for deeper relationships. Look for some exciting announcements about our offering soon.”
What is Gamification?
One of the trending topics in business is gamification. If you are not familiar with the term, in short, gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-game experiences that can drive an audience to a desired behavior.The size of the audience available through gaming is enormous and rivals television as a medium.
According to Forrester, gamers span just about every demographic.
- 65% of Xbox gamers are male
- 59% of “social gamers” (like Farmville…) are women
- 23% of the “social gamers” are Boomers between 45 and 65 years old.
In general gamers are also more motivated to have ‘connections’ with people than non-gamers. In the world of sales, connections and engagement is key to driving pipeline growth and creating new opportunities.
A few definitions of gamification:
- A game is structured play, usually for fun.
- Gameplay is interaction inside of a game.
- Game Mechanics are constructs or tactics commonly used in games to encourage gameplay. These are things like badges, points, leader boards, levels, challenges, achievements and virtual sheep you can put on your virtual farm.
- Game Dynamics are strategies commonly used in game design based on psychological motivations. These include things like “Appointments,” in which someone does something to gain a reward, “Avoidance,” in which someone does something to avoid a punishment, or the “Free Lunch” dynamic, in which people feel they are getting something because of their behavior.
- Currencies are ways to give people incentives based on various motivations in a digital world: the need for financial reward, the need to do good, the need to help one’s community, the need for recognition and influence, the need for pleasure. We can assign currencies to each one of these motivations to reward people for desired behaviors.
Gamification for Sales
Turning the sales process into a game is not a stretch of the imagination for companies. In may ways companies with B2B sales people have already added game mechanics into the process on a small scale. Glenngary Glen Ross has an amazing scene in the beginning of the movie where Alec Baldwin is addressing the sales team where is explains First Prize is a Cadillac and Second Prize is a set of steak knives. This is how most businesses gamify sales to date.
- Commission checks
- Presidents Club
- Spiffs
These are all typically based around revenue for a company and these game mechanics drive the behavior of the sales team to sell more. This is where most companies end the game process but that is about to change.
Companies like Xactly have developed an application that drives compensation management , most typically marketed to businesses that have become buried in spreadsheets trying to track sales teams and their commissions. That’s a big enough problem to tackle for companies but their application has some functionality that brings gamification to the sales teams directly. At a recent event I heard Xactly discuss how their customers base compensation and commissions on a series of behaviors that lean more ‘reward’ to the sales person if they do things such as close a deal early in the month or if they sales can close a deal within a specific time frame.
This opens up a lot doors into how companies could introduce game mechanics for sales even extending beyond revenue events.
Game On for B2B Sales
Research shows that financial rewards for gamers is only one incentive and not even the primary factor that people play games. We saw this internally at InsideView when we wanted to drive social media adoption by the company. The only game mechanic we had to put in place was a monthly email that highlighted to most active employees on Twitter. The internal competition to be in First Place drove up the number of updates from employees 312%.
Sales teams could, and I think should be incentivised for a number of activities outside of just revenue generation. True, the primary responsibility for sales teams is to close deals but within that process of selling there are a number of activities or tasks that can be measured and applied with game mechanics to drive even more productivity. Image a sales team that saw their work as a game and wanted to unlock as many achievements as possible to be recognized publicly and financially?
I hear more and more companies trying to add a layer of gamification to their sales processes. There are several ways to do this and the achievements and metrics are different depending on each companies desired goals.
- Number of calls
- New opportunities created
- Engagement on social media
- Discussions created in company communities
- Leads generated by online/personal social activities.
The list can go on forever. The truth is that they are almost limitless and all drive business metrics across different departments.
Is your company thinking of implementing gamification to sales or have any game mechanics that have been working so far?
This is the first mentions of Salesforce having Metallica as their featured performer at their annual Dreamforce 2011. Metallica known for songs like The Unforgiven, Master of Puppets, Fade to Black. I was skeptical about the news but the profile is owned by a Salesforce.com sales rep. Sure it could just be a rumor but coming from someone within the company adds some credibility to the update I would think.
There has been no official statement from the Salesforce or Dreamforce team on this news but I would suspect that will happen soon. They need to get on that before the entire world knows Metallica will be attending their massive conference before they say anything. It’s also really nice that Shakeel is willing to give out some passes. I’m sure he’s going to be the popular guy within the #DF11 group if that’s the case.
Twitter has been spreading the news about Metallica fairly quickly and most people are excited at the news. Are you more or less excited about Dreamforce now?
Update: Marcus Nelson the head of social media for the company passed along this reply to my request. hmmm…. I didn’t hear a “NOT True” in there. I bet we hear something by the end of the day.
Salesforce has officially responded which makes me think Metallica IS going to be the performer. Why else would they @metallica (hence getting their attention) if they were not planning on signing them or already have. Again. Still all rumor but this is all adding up to a Heavy Metal Dreamforce.
Thank you Marc for confirming the news!
Business Insights, Contacts and News Immediately at Fingertips of Users of SAP CRM 7.0
InsideView, a sales intelligence leader, today announced its InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence 2.0 solution is now SAP-certified for integration with the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application 7.0, earning “Powered by SAP NetWeaver®” certification status.
Through the integration of InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence with SAP CRM 7.0, users now have access to complete and relevant intelligence on millions of companies and decision-maker contacts worldwide, directly inside the platform. Users can spend more time selling and less time researching their prospects and customers. InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence dramatically improves sales performance by bringing together traditional business information from the world’s leading sources, breaking news and social intelligence about companies and contacts into a single window within SAP CRM 7.0. The “all-in-one” sales intelligence makes it fast and easy to discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision makers, close deals, and grow customer relationships and top-line revenue.
InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence also incorporates all major social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs for easy access to warm connections and real-time insight about customers and prospects. Sales intelligence has been shown to increase revenue per sales person by more than 10 percent, compared to sales people who only have access to simple contact or company data.
“We are excited to deliver certified integration between InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence and SAP CRM 7.0, bringing rich business insight, alerts and actionable social media to customers,” said Heidi Tucker, Vice President, Global Alliances, InsideView. “The solution now integrated with SAP CRM delivers valuable functionality to empower 21st century sales warriors to achieve competitive edge.”
Jonathan Farrington has taken the lead in organizing one of the largest online events geared towards the sales profession. The 2011 Sales & Marketing Success Conference is an event where 36 of the top speakers, bloggers and experts from the sales world are getting together over a 5 day series to educate and enlighten sales professionals in succeeding, winning and exceeding expectations. We have come through the toughest financial crisis in history, and we believe it is now time to be positive and look forward.
Besides being one of the largest events of it’s kind that is sure to leave people with a ton of take aways, we have an opportunity to provide support for the relief efforts to the tragedy in Japan. There is a small fee for each session ($5) that will be collected and then donated to the Japanese Disaster Fund (via the Red Cross).
We are part of the launch event on Monday May 9th. This is the schedule for Monday: All times are Eastern (for GMT, add +5)
5 Must-do’s to Leverage Social Selling
for Your Lead Generation and Sales Teams
Presented at: 15:00 – 15:30 by Koka Sexton
Your customers have changed. How you find them and engage with them has changed too. They get information from their social network and trusted sources online, leaving information about what they need in their online social interactions. It’s more important than ever for sales organizations to recognize this opportunity to build relationships and generate new leads. You need to create a personal and trusted relationships via online interactions to beat the competition.
The sales environment continues to evolve. Most if not all companies are familiar with the term Sales 2.0 and now we are introducing Social Selling to the vocabulary of sales leaders. So whats the difference?
Like I mentioned in the post Sales 3.0 is a myth, adding a number to the end of a word doesn’t magically make it more high-tech or innovative. In the case of Sales 2.0, it was more of a wake up call to sales people that the game is changing and the internet and social media hold a lot of value in the buying cycle. Sales 2.0 is the term all sales professionals should understand and embrace. This isn’t science fiction or merely forward thinking, leveraging social networks and aggregated news sources for extremely targeted intelligence on your prospects has been described by the experts as a personal CIA for salespeople.
When you’re gathering information on a potential sales prospect, there’s an awful lot of places to look. A decent Google search only gets you part of the way there. You can look for mentions in the media, find them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but you also need to know what’s going on within that person’s company.
The Next Evolution is Social Selling
Social Selling is the use of sales 2.0 tools and targeted communication with the right people at the right time within social networks.
Putting a larger emphasis on leveraging social media in a sales capacity is something that many companies are trying to wrap their heads around. The stats are clear that sales intelligence increases sales win rates by 17% and sales leaders are adjusting their training budgets and processes to capitalize on this new revenue trend. This trend became even more clear with the purchase of Radian6 by Salesforce.com last month.
There is probably going to be a lot of debate around the death of cold calling for the foreseeable future. Does cold calling work? 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.
With so many tools now available for sales teams to use hat increase visibility to their customer decisions and needs, the obvious course of action is to engage your prospects and customers online and build even better relationships by leveraging social media. The problem is that most sales people are years behind customer support and marketing when it comes to leveraging social media communications to create any value. The good news is that good sales people are extremely adaptive and the ability to leverage social media for sales is already producing results. Read the rest of this entry »
