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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
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?
It’s not only sales managers that are interested in increasing sales productivity. Every sales rep that is serious about their career tries to be more productive and effective in their sales efforts. One of the best ways to learn to be more productive as a sales person is to learn what is working and what is not by other experts.
Sure, we have a bunch of posts on how to be a more productive sales person but there is always more tips and tricks that come from other well known people that should be shared.
- How Entrepreneurs Can Increase Productivity by 500% -TechCrunch
- Top 5 Sales Strategies for 2012. Accelerate Your Momentum with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
- The Three Types of Team Commitment
- What’s Driving Your Customers Away?
- 8 Ways to Incentivize Employees to Use CRM
- Negative Assumptions Before Your Calls Usually Come True
- What’s Your Plan Once You’ve Connected Via A Social Network?
- The 10 Biggest Referral Mistakes Salespeople Make
- Anatomy Of A Lousy Sales Email
- One Marketing Guy Who Gets It (What Sales Needs, That Is)
- Why Sales Forecasts Are a Joke
- The Presentation Trap: Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale
- 10 Tips that Separate the Good Sellers from the Great Ones
- Ignite More Sales with Sales Intelligence
- Determining What Metrics to Track with CRM
Any sales reps worth their salt does their homework before contacting a lead. The following best practices can pave the way for highly effective conversations with prospective buyers.
Ignite Smarter Conversations
Once a contact becomes a qualified lead or opportunity, sales needs to know who to reach and how, and what to say to get their attention. It’s no longer just who you know that will make business deals happen, but what you know about who you know, tightly synched with when and where you should know it. After all, according to IDC, IT buyers indicate that ~54% of sales reps are unprepared for their initial customer meetings.
To prep for the meeting, your reps can tap into sales intelligence to pinpoint what’s top of mind for the contact and immediately establish rapport on the call. With access to multiple data sources in a single place, your sales reps will spend less time on research, yet will be more effective on the phone.
A study by CSO Insights shows that even when using CRM:
- It takes sales reps an average of 4 voice mails or emails to get that first, pivotal appointment with a prospect
- They often have to wait 3 to 4 days for a response
- 60% of sales reps waste the equivalent of 6 selling weeks a year just trying to get customers on the phone.
Combined, traditional business information services and social media can help create the best prospect intelligence, enabling sales professionals to sort through potential deals and dealmakers. With insight into companies (for example, M&A activity, new leadership, and major initiatives), contacts (title, email, and phone number), and social profile information or people insights (“I see we have friends in common,” or “We went to the same school,” or “You recently tweeted about X”), your sales reps can start the conversation off right.
The sales reps that take advantage of the intelligence to be found in the online conversation are reaping the rewards. In a study of sales reps within 2,000 companies, the reps that turned to sales intelligence ended up with higher win rates.
How ‘smart’ are the conversations you have with prospects?
After tremendous growth in the US, InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, announced today the beginning of its global expansion beginning with its InsideView UK and Ireland Edition. Thousands of US companies now deploy InsideView’s award-winning company and people intelligence to increase the productivity of their customer-facing employees, improving metrics across the customer cycle, including lead conversion, win rates and customer retention and expansion.
With the UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView takes this competitive advantage worldwide, providing professionals with effective intelligence that helps them be more targeted, relevant and timely in their sales and customer management efforts. The UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView will be generally available in Q1, as a stand-alone application as well as a mash-up within market-leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.
“There is a worldwide demand for more intelligent ways of doing business, nowhere is this more true than in marketing, sales, and service. Our expansion today is part of our commitment to bring professionals around the globe the kind of intelligence that drives productivity, relevance and revenue.” – Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView.
Global Demand for InsideView’s Sales Intelligence
InsideView is seeing huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland-based businesses, where over 45% of the population is active on social media including Facebook and LinkedIn, making it the second largest market in the world for new solutions that can drive ROI from social media.
Sales Intelligence has become an imperative as the deluge of data, the changing buying process, and new social media dynamics have surfaced in customer processes. InsideView provides professionals with the most relevant information about customers and prospects, and alerts them on the best time for outreach. This intelligence results in highly effective, productive and lucrative customer-facing employees: In fact, companies that employ InsideView’s style of intelligence see a ten percent improvement in top-line revenue.
Sales Intelligence Tailor Made for the UK and Ireland
Thousands of users are already using InsideView for targeting UK and Ireland, and with this launch they and other customers will have access to deeper and tailor-made sales intelligence . InsideView gathers and analyzes tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions, resulting in more effective sales and even improved CRM engagement.
For its UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView is partnering with top global and local providers of business information, as well as gathering and analyzing information from all major online news publications, user-generated, and social media sources specific to UK and Ireland.
InsideView is also teaming with leading CRM system integrators including Outsourcery, Ciber, Alfapeople, ConsultCRM, The CRM Business and No Blue to bring its intelligence to relevant CRM platforms in the UK and Ireland. ConsultCRM, one of the UK’s leading Microsoft Gold Partners specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is delighted to be partnering with InsideView in its go-to-market expansion.
“Our clients are constantly under pressure to maximize the value from their Microsoft CRM deployment. InsideView adds immediate value because it offers ready-integrated real-time company intelligence, contact data, news, tailored alerts and even social media,” said John Pearson, Sales Director at ConsultCRM. “We are excited to be working with an offering that truly answers the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question for CRM users in sales and account management.”
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?“
Summer of Sales Intelligence: InsideView Sees Huge Gains in Customers and Major CRM Platforms, Delivers 8 Million Sales Triggers in Recent Quarter
Ten times more companies started using intelligence to sell better in 2011′s Q3 than any other quarter. That’s according to the latest numbers from InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence for the enterprise. The company also revealed it delivered more than 8 million unique new opportunity sales triggers to its customers during the same period.
Intelligence Over Data: Quality and Quantity in Harmony
InsideView’s sales intelligence provides something data simply can’t: a competitive advantage. Anyone can provide a current title, phone number or email address on a lead. Only InsideView can provide this basic information, but more. For example, a business event — like an acquisition or merger — that warrants sales outreach, or news event like a product launch, that matters to the ongoing sales conversation.
“While other companies are betting their business on providing more and more data, we’re finding accelerating demand for higher quality sales intelligence, not just more data,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “Sales intelligence is the combination of not only business data, but social context, how you’re connected to a lead or prospect, valuable news insight, and real-time triggers that inform you when to take action. In fact, we’re delivering 35 million unique news trigger events to our users a year to help them sell better and generate more revenue.”
Independent research firm Aberdeen Research has found that InsideView’s style of sales intelligence increases several key areas for sales success, including sales quota attainment, customer retention and overall revenue growth.
“We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others — and intelligence is a key reason for this,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research.
Big Growth and Launch of CRM+
InsideView’s own growth saw almost 10,000 new professionals using its free product, and over 250 enterprises signing on to its award-winning paid version, since July. In August, the company launched CRM+, which brought its intelligence technology to a broader business sector including marketing, service, human resources and more.
“InsideView gives businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients,” noted TechCrunch in coverage of InsideView’s CRM+ launch. “CRM+ now brings social data to all CRM users (marketing, operations, customer service, etc.), not just sales.”
InsideView was also the only provider of sales intelligence included in August’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social CRM.
Success On All CRM Solutions
InsideView’s leadership continues across all major CRM platforms:
- Salesforce.com: InsideView continues to be the all-time most popular sales app on the salesforce.com AppExchange.
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM: In July, the company was selected as a 2011 Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year.
- SAP: Earlier in the summer, InsideView gained the prestigious “Powered by SAP NetWeaver®” certification status.
- SugarCRM: In June, InsideView and SugarCRM combined forces to bring InsideView standard and out-of-the-box.
- Oracle CRM OnDemand: InsideView is part of the Inner Circle program.
- NetSuite: Collaboration through the Preferred Partner Program.
To learn more about InsideView, please visit www.insideview.com.
Many of you joined Hoovers with a mission to change the world, and you did just that in the late 90’s. However, in recent years your parent company has not fostered that original spirit. Consequently, innovation and market leadership have been replaced by layoffs and business stagnation.
Meanwhile, at InsideView we have continued to invest in our products and our people, growing our business at over 100% year-over-year. To keep up with our rapid growth, we need to find the most passionate, competent and innovative employees. I believe that many of you fit that bill, and I’m writing this open letter to invite you to join InsideView. You will find a fun, vibrant environment with very bright people, and an open culture that fosters collaboration and innovation.
We are passionate about our products and our customers. Last month’s data.com announcement made it clear to me that D&B has given up on Hoover’s in the critically important sales & marketing ecosystem, and that customers will need to look elsewhere to find sophisticated sales intelligence. I believe most of them will decide that InsideView is their best path to productivity, joining scores of Hoover’s customers that have already chosen to switch to InsideView.
We are looking for talent in every part of our business and in several locations. The positions include Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Content. Locations are in the field, at our San Francisco headquarters, and for our soon-to-be-opened Austin office (I love Austin’s entrepreneurial culture, and I see the opportunity for Austin to become a main hub for InsideView).
If you have a passion for innovation, customer success and are looking for a vibrant work environment, please email us at beyondhoovers@insideview.com for a confidential conversation. We’d also be glad to have you talk to any of the ex-Hoover’s employees who now work at InsideView, where they have found new opportunities to grow and delight customers.
We have just begun in delivering our vision, one where customer intelligence makes all customer-facing employees dramatically more productive. If you share my passion, we’d love to talk to you.
Umberto Milletti @umbertom
CEO & Founder, InsideView
In a recent report by the Altimeter group they identified that many companies have formalized their social media efforts for customer facing employees. I expected Marketing to be the top of the list but was surprised to see Sales so far behind with only 11% of the companies having a formal approach for engagement through social media. With recent studies showing that 61% of LinkedIn members use the site for Networking, Sales is a prime group to be engaging with prospects and customers in social media. Whats even more surprising is that 31% of companies still block social media from all employees.
If marketing is the focal point of social media engagement, sales NEEDS to be brought into the loop. Training sales teams to use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs can have a huge impact on building pipeline and driving awareness of your company. Customer centric marketing brings a 1:1 relationship with prospects and customers that can be transitioned and managed by sales teams.
Leveraging social media and online communities to drive revenue works. You may remember the post Should Sales people be Blogging where we explained how IBM is leveraging social selling. In the Social Selling University we have had great speakers like Jill Konrath, Anneke Seley, Joanne Black and others that have given Enterprise Social Selling tips and strategies to members of the community. Umberto Millet our CEO has written a number of articles around the revolution of social selling in B2B.
Enterprise social selling is growing up. With the growing desire for Social CRM within companies, collecting social conversations for analysis was only scratching the service. What the social enterprise does with those conversations is where the rubber meets the road. Social media is more than a tool for marketing people and it’s being well established that every department across the enterprise can leverage social media for everything from prospecting, opportunity management and customer retention.
On top of all the work to continue optimizing the application for our growing list of customers, we wanted to highlight some enhancements to the application that all of you should be seeing with the latest release.
Updated Connection Summary: You are now able to get a snapshot of any personal & professional connections from any company. This was a request brought to us by a few customers that wanted a snapshot in the record so they could see who they were connected to and how they were connected.
We now identify for you if you are connected through a coworker, a reference account or through previous coworkers.
The result is that you can now look at the snapshot and have more intelligence about who you want to drill into further to help make the introduction or use as leverage to connect with your target.
The new Connection Dashboard gives you a list of connections that you have access through using our Smart Connections. These are not direct connections that can be found using networks like LinkedIn but more implied connections that look at my past employers and other information from my profile to identify ways I can be connected to my target.
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
