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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
This is the final post in a study we created along 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)
Cultivate your own personal brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and beyond.
“The one thing I learned early in sales is that the most unique thing you are selling is not always the company or the product, but it is always you. Social media provides you a unique opportunity to build your brand — as well as endless opportunities to ruin your brand. The first thing anyone does before meeting with someone is to check their LinkedIn profile. Successful social salespeople carefully and thoroughly complete their LinkedIn profile, including a picture. All their social bios (Twitter, etc.) are meaningful, unique and memorable. Limit access to your Facebook if it has any offensive or borderline offensive photos.” (Rosenberg)
“Many sales managers dont think Twitter is a place for sales people. I disagree. With social media exploding as a form of communication, there are going to be more and more people leveraging the channel for business conversations. Not just brands but real people that want to solve business problems by asking others online. Learning how to listen and track people on Twitter will be a goldmine of information in some cases for salespeople.” (Sexton)
“Social media provides platforms for the individual sales rep to stand out from the crowd like never before. To be the one who is providing the most helpful information, the best references, and what is going on in that industry/market. I recommend that sales open their consideration more broadly than just the big three of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Each has its place and purpose in an overall social strategy that must be in place prior to any active social media use for a company or an individual producer. How about a personal landing page for you as an individual where prospects/customers can go to learn more about you? Take a look at creating an http://about.me page, and then highlight all of your other online activities with links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even your company website for example.” (Austin)
Establish your expertise by contributing to conversations — without selling.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand how the science of sales intelligence has an effect on driving revenue. In addition to knowing more about yur industry and prospects than your competition, you will be able to lock yourself in as an expert of your market. By not just being a salesperson, you will open more lines of communication that will lead to more opportunities.
“Step 1: Figure out where your buyers are. Step 2: Be there Step 3: Contribute without intruding on the safe social environment people are interacting in. You hear a lot of stories of vendors finding leads in social platforms, but a lot of salespeople are just ‘there’ — contributing and building both trust and reputation. This approach serves them well. Many people are not just turned off by sales in general, but are absolutely repulsed by salespeople invading their online conversation to sell them something. My advice to salespeople is to get ‘in the mix,’ but don’t sell. Join the community and have conversations with industry leaders, peers and end users. There are salespeople who have built their online presence to the point where prospects have reached out to them for advice. That’s a big win.” (Rosenberg)
“Directly share information, become an expert, and generate a following. You are an expert. You understand your market, your customer’s problems, and the information they need to be more successful. You read the trade publications and regularly (possibly daily) find articles that your prospects and customers should read.” (Heinz)
“If our customers are already there (as research would indicate), then we as salespeople can’t afford not to be there and participating. Initially, salespeople should use social media (blogs, discussion forums, websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) primarily for listening and learning—what are the customers saying/asking, what is competition doing, etc. They should be engaging customers there, as well as using traditional channels. They need to be taking part in social conversations, they need to be representing their products and solutions in those conversations.” (Brock)
“With all the talk in the market about the importance of customer/buyer engagement, it is vital that today’s B2B rep use social as a means to dialogue with their buyers and customers. As reps thought the dialogue must change from one of pure sales to one of helping shape the discussion and to establish themselves as thought leaders and knowledgeable about their market, their buyers’ challenges and seen as a resource for answers. The best way to do this is via social, and the more reps understand that their involvement in this medium and having an active part in the discussion is key to the buying decision, the more they will begin to engage.” (Hidalgo)
“Become an industry source of knowledge by using one or more of the many curation tools that are now available, many at no cost.” (Austin)
This is part two in a study we created along 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)
Sales Intelligence drives revenue.
“Based on the 12 ways sales people leverage the internet it is clear that B2B sales teams spend a lot of time researching prospects and customers on the web and social networks. It’s no longer an issue of not having any information ahead of time, the issue is that there is an overwhelming amount of personal insights available. Sifting through it to find the relevant information you can act on today appears to be the challenge at hand. Sales intelligence drives revenue by feeding sales people trigger events and insights within a company or contact.” (Koka Sexton)
Make the most of a B2B Social Networks more advanced features and functionalities.
“On the B2B side of the house, LinkedIn is the networking tool in the US with some 130 million members of the 100 million-plus community. Many people know how to invite people to their network, but they usually do not know what to do after that.”
Here are a few of the ways that savvy B2B salespeople will leverage B2B social networks:
- Advanced people search: Create prospecting lists based on the criteria of your ideal buyers. Save the list, and LinkedIn dynamically updates and alerts you weekly to the new people matching your criteria who have joined the network. Each week, you can then plan your strategy with respect to how you’ll approach the initial interaction.
- Applications: Use the applications to add video, compelling presentations, white papers and case studies or sync your blog posts to your profile. Keep your content fresh and people pay attention. In the past eight weeks, I’ve secured four paid gigs and in every single case, I was told it was because my profile stood out from the rest and because they liked the video. It is all about engaging people and enticing them to want to know more.
- Polls: Create a poll to gather real-time trending information that you can share with your prospective buyers.
- Status updates: Ongoing status updates that are ‘relevant’ and provide value to others keep salespeople visible; because at the end of the day, it is all about visibility.
- Groups: Leveraging groups (the right groups!) gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate credibility, but not selling!
- Use the Answers section to listen and respond to the questions that people are asking. Every single day people ask what products to buy and from whom.
- Events: Hosting an educational session for potential clients? Use the events functionality and use it to share with your network.” (Giamanco)
Monitor prospect discussion and social data for buying signals.
“Prospect research has changed forever. In no other time in my life have we seen prospects update their own information and update you on what they are doing in their personal and professional lives! Today’s modern social salesperson is exceptionally prepared for their sales calls. One tip: Company data is interesting (e.g., … [alerts] about your sales prospect’s company: ‘New product launch!’), but prospect social data is even more interesting, because it will tell you what the person really cares about (‘Just got back from sales training in Florida, learned a ton!’).” (Rosenberg)
“Leveraging twitter for sales is very effective. Once you know how to use Twitter as a sales tool, you can get insights into people and companies in realtime.” (Sexton)
“Watch for buying signals across the social Web. One of the greatest opportunities for salespeople via social media is to see into the buying cycle far earlier than we’ve typically had access to. Before social media, we could deepen our understanding of the buyer and use outbound marketing to connect with a particular need, try and find resonance with a buying signal, etc. But that, at best, was a fishing expedition most of the time. Now, if you know the buying signals and pain/problem keywords your prospects typically exhibit before they’re ready to buy, you can watch for those discussions and keywords across the social Web. Do a couple keyword searches on Twitter, for example, and you’ll be surprised how many people, in real-time, are talking about their existing challenges, their frustrations with competitive products and more.” (Heinz)
“Social media is a great tool for salespeople, but for not for the reasons that some people believe. Social media isn’t a replacement for the prospecting activities that success in sales requires, as some seem to suggest. It is a simply a set of tools that allow the execution of some of those activities. There is way too much focus on using social media tools for inbound marketing, and way too little on leveraging the tools to better enable the execution of the fundamental roles of salespeople: opening new opportunities. Opening new opportunities isn’t a passive activity, and salespeople who wait for their prospects to find them aren’t successful by any of the measures we use in sales. The salespeople who are successfully using social media are using the tools to identify and open communication with their dream client contacts. They are using tools like LinkedIn to identify the people who they can most easily create value for within their target accounts. More still, they are researching their prospects, discovering what they are reading, what they are writing about, and where their interests lie. Social media better enables salespeople to know who to call and how they might best create value for those people.” (Iannarino)
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)
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?
The annual event by Salesforce was lit on fire when it was leaked that Metallica was going to be playing at Dreamforce. What’s a little more noise added to an event that draws a crowd of about 20,000 people all drinking off the SaaS fire hose. It was about this same time that we were working on our Dreamforce plan for the year. We needed a prize that would be as great as prior years. We introduced our sales intelligence in 2009 so gave away an Aston Martin fitting for anyone with secret agent desires of being the next James Bond of selling. In 2010 InsideView was bringing social media relevance to sales people and building the foundation of Social Selling for the Enterprise so we delivered a 63′ 3D TV. This year had to be even BIGGER.
I think that there are so many companies now talking about social media and with the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce it’s bound to be the focus of the event. Sure, we will be focusing on leveraging social media for sales too and our thought that we deliver the best application for Social Selling for the Enterprise is our driving focus. That’s the keyword, FOCUS. The industry is exploding with sales 2.0 and old companies trying to jump on the social selling train and the truth is that there is room for a lot but we haven’t found a company yet that can deliver trigger events along with social connections to drive a dramatic decrease in sales research and deliver an ROI on social selling.
After about 10 minutes and a few searches online we had found what we feel is the best giveaway during Dreamforce. A guitar autographed by the entire Metallica band during the 2000 Summer Sanitarium Tour. The official contest announcement is scheduled for later this week but I’ll tell you that you should give our Facebook page a big Thumbs UP if you want the information of how you can bring home a piece of Metallica history.
Xactly Improves Sales Win Rate by 10%, Triples Lead Volume and Conversion Rate
InsideView, the social selling and sales intelligence leader, is proud to share the sales success story of customer Xactly Corporation, the leader in on-demand sales performance management. With InsideView, Xactly has dramatically increased its qualified lead volume and conversion rates, as well as improved its overall sales win rate by ten percent.
“We have been able to grow rapidly and increase market share, not only because of our highly differentiated product for incentive compensation, but also how we sell with InsideView,”
Prior to Xactly, organizations were constrained managing sales compensation on error-prone spreadsheets or with high-priced, on-premise solutions. Xactly established its market leadership by delivering a more cost-effective way for companies to easily manage sales commissions, while improving sales behavior and performance. Business has been strong for years, but the company wanted to take their sales performance to the next level, tightening all screws and treating each lead and prospect like gold.
By deploying InsideView across its entire sales force, Xactly sales reps now have immediate access to InsideView’s unique and integrated sales intelligence directly within Salesforce CRM. For every lead, prospect and existing customer, Xactly reps are able to get fresh and complete information, as well as real-time insights into everything from social media profiles, company news, financial information, competitive analysis and more. InsideView’s real-time application, including comprehensive up-to-the-minute sales alerts, allows Xactly’s reps to spend more time selling with the best information at their fingertips.
“We have been able to grow rapidly and increase market share, not only because of our highly differentiated product for incentive compensation, but also how we sell with InsideView,” said Steve De Marco, Vice President, Corporate Sales, Xactly Corporation. “With InsideView, our sales professionals are substantially better prepared for meetings than competitors because they understand their prospects’ unique business challenges and how to position our product as solutions for those challenges.”
“Even with a strong market position, Xactly was working to improve a common area in any sales organization: productivity,” said Ralf VonSosen, VP of Marketing at InsideView. “We are pleased to have had such a broad impact on their sales cycle — not only total lead volume, but the conversion of the leads and ultimately the company’s win rate. This is the power of integrated sales intelligence.”
InsideView significantly improved Xactly’s sales cycle by constantly monitoring and alerting reps of actionable items related to leads, prospects and existing customers.
Social Selling University has continued to grow in numbers. After a great launch of the program at the beginning of this month with an All-Star series of webinars focused on leveraging social media for sales. We have also started building a community of sales 2.0 professionals interested in learning more about building a pipeline of new opportunities through social networks.
With an increased focus on enablement through sales intelligence, we are planning on more product enhancements and training. We are leading the conversation for sales people or why social media is important to the sales process.
Recent Social Selling Webinars
Social Calling – Integrating the Who, What & When of Prospecting <~~ WebEx Link
Is your calendar chock-full of meetings with well-qualified prospects? Is cold calling working great for you? Are you having a ball making cold calls? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you may want to attend this webinar.
You’re now dealing with a super-frazzled and super-distracted “Customer 2.0″. The volume cold call is as “dead as a dodo” when dealing with “Customer 2.0”. But smart prospecting is very much alive.
What you will learn
- Why the cold call is dead if it means “smiling and dialing”
- How to use the Who, What & When of prospecting to maximize your chances of getting into your prospect’s office
- How you can use Sales 2.0 tools and techniques to increase your cold calling results dramatically, causing an approximately an 8 x improvement.
- Some of the key Sales 2.0 tools for prospecting and how to use them.
Driving Sales Productivity with Social Intelligence <~~ WebEx Link
Engaging today’s socially-savvy customer requires a lot more than a grasp of the basic facts and figures about their companies. It requires relevance at the time of engagement. Sales reps need a 360 degree view into their prospects that incorporates recent business events, social conversations and social relationships – in other words social intelligence.
In this webinar, you will learn:
- What exactly is social intelligence
- Why social intelligence trumps sales data in driving sales productivity
- How to leverage social intelligence to engage the right prospects at the right time with the right message
- Why leveraging social intelligence is absolutely critical to your sales success today
Social Selling for Executives: What the Management Team Needs to Know to Succeed with Today’s Customers <~~ WebEx Link
Are you a top executive in sales and marketing wondering how a social media strategy fits in your business? Or are you a sales or marketing professional who wants to discuss the benefits of social selling with your manager, an executive team or board of directors? Listen in as Anneke Seley presents data, metrics and customer case stories to illustrate:
- Why and when you should include social media in your selling strategy
- How companies large and small are using social selling
- How you can get started with social selling
