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

1. 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
2. How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
3. Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
4. 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
5. Gamification of the Sales Process
6. 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
7. 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
8. The History of Apple CEOs
9. Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
10. Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
11. Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
12. 10 of the Best Sales Sites
13. The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
14. 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
15. Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
16. Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
17. 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
18. 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
19. The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
20. Should Sales People Be Blogging?
21. The Problem with Big Data
22. The Future of Social CRM
23.  Do You Listen to Your Customers?
24. 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1 
25. 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)

• 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)

• 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.

Many of our customers and students of the Social Selling University have asked what they should do once they decide that their sales team should leverage social media more during their sales prospecting. We have created a 5 step process that

1. EVALUATE WHAT YOU’RE DOING.
Many people on your team probably already use LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, etc. Take stock of how you’re currently connecting with and listening to customers, and see what seems to be working. Where are you successfully engaging and building relationships with prospects and customers?

2. START BY LISTENING.
Just as you wouldn’t run into a cocktail party and start shoving your business card under everyone’s nose, don’t jump on Twitter and start jabbering about your business. Instead, listen to what your target market is saying. Get a sense for who your customers’ mouthpieces are and their communication and interaction styles.

3. SHARE INFORMATION.
Create a way for your team members to share information internally. There are a variety of CRM-compatible tools to facilitate the tracking and sharing of information companywide. So if at a trade show your marketing manager meets a prospect who loves to ride horses, that information can be entered into a collaborative database and used to strengthen ties during follow-up calls.

4. COMMIT TO THE PROCESS.
Building relationships online is not something you can do all at once. Realize you may not see the payoff right away, and commit to three to six months before you evaluate your efforts.

5. COMMIT TO EVOLUTION.
Your team’s social-selling skills will need to evolve with the Web. Prepare to invest time and effort in updating your social- selling strategy, learning about new tools, and keeping skills sharp.

The preponderance of business and social data on customers poses both an opportunity and a challenge for today’s sales professionals.  Given changing customer behaviors and demands, engaging today’s socially-savvy customer – Customer 2.0 – requires a lot more than a grasp of the basic facts and figures about their companies.  It requires relevance at the time of engagement.  Reps need a 360 degree view into their prospects that incorporates recent business events, social conversations and social relationships.

Fortunately opportunities to gather both business and social data are abundant, and data consolidation certainly simplifies this process.  However, the challenge is extracting the salient points from such information for the purpose of increasing sales.  Sales reps need to be able to make sense out of this ubiquitous and sometimes conflicting mountain of data and turn it into actionable insights to engage the prospect.

Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn (as well as the entire blogosophere) are target-rich environments to find new opportunities and leads, and engage with prospects in a powerful and effectively intelligent new way. So what is holding companies back? Of the dozen or so objections I have heard, my conclusion is: FEAR. Fear that their sales team will not produce results, fear that the sales team will waste their time online and fear that their sales teams will do or say something online that will tarnish their brand and kill sales. The fact of the matter is, NOT letting sales professionals engage on social media is detrimental to the bottom line for the reasons below.

The sales productivity challenge can be addressed by putting in the right sales intelligence infrastructure in place to discover the relevant pieces of the prospect puzzle from all of these available sources, including social media.  A single “go-to” intelligence source helps sales professionals identify the most relevant, up-to-date and actionable insights about their prospects and customer with ease and efficiency -  driving sales productivity throughout the sales cycle.

Cases in point:

“Our decision to switch to InsideView was driven by our desire to consolidate multiple data sources into a single stream as well as improve the quality and relevance of the intelligence our business development team relies on daily to formulate target account strategy,” said James Warren, director, global business development at RightNow Technologies.

Let us know what you think about the video by leaving a comment here or on the InsideView YouTube page.

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

It used to be that companies controlled the flow of information to potential buyers and customers. The Internet has changed that paradigm completely. Today’s B2B sales teams need to know how to leverage social selling opportunities in order to create relationships and help their companies maintain a strong brand presence in the market.

Read this white paper and learn:

• Quantifiable benefits of adopting social business practices
• What it means to sell to “Customer 2.0″
• Actionable tips for launching a social selling initiative
• Which companies have used social selling to win more business

Social Selling Paper – Download

InsideView Launches Social Selling University to Provide Comprehensive Education for Sales Professionals, Driving Sales Productivity Through Social MediaWorld’s Top Sales Experts, Social Media Pundits Unite for Launch of First-of-Its-Kind Education Initiative

Today Social Selling University officially launches as the first program to educate sales professionals on how to leverage social media technologies and methodologies to increase sales productivity and drive revenue throughout the entire sales cycle. The first-of-its-kind program instructs sales organizations, consultants and in-house teams about selling to the modern and socially-connected customer — Customer 2.0 — and offers both an on-demand curriculum and live workshops. The program is open to all sales professionals starting today.

Social Selling University’s (SSU) actionable content and interactive learning modules have been developed by expert instructors, including experienced thought leaders, authors and analysts. Classes are designed for all levels of sales professionals, covering a broad range of topics including entry-level social media instruction on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, best practices for managing personal online brands and how to accelerate the sales cycle by leveraging recent business events, social conversations and social relationships (aka “social intelligence”). The program’s instructors will provide expert advice to sales management on how to best incorporate social selling into their organizations, and educate sales professionals on how to utilize social media platforms to drive greater sales productivity.

“Social media is fundamentally changing the way sales professionals navigate the sales cycle — what worked two years ago, doesn’t work anymore because socially savvy buyers know far more about products and companies than ever before,” said Barbara Giamanco, Talent Builders CEO. “Fortunately, SSU levels the playing field by teaching sales executives, managers and reps how to interact with and sell to the modern consumer. These social sales practices breed relationships and eliminate the need for cold calling.”

Who should attend SSU?
Any sales professional — from account rep to sales team leader, director or executive — who CANNOT answer the question: “What is social selling and why does it matter to my sales organization?”

Isn’t social media for marketers? Why does social media matter to sales people?

• Social media marketing grew 50% in 2010 to $1.2 billion, and analysts predict that 2011 is the “year of social integration” for businesses. Social CRM has crested as the new and understood platform for sales and customer service.

“Salespeople who fail to leverage social media do so at their own peril. The problem is, many don’t know how,” said Jill Konrath, best-selling author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies. “Thankfully, technologies exist to allow any sales professional to gather and share relevant buyer information and achieve greater sales success. Social Selling University is a great place to start and continue learning what’s possible in the new world of social selling.”

As part of the initiative, SSU will host a Webinar series, featuring a panel of industry thought leaders to answer questions about how to use social media for sales, including:

March 3: Barbara Giamanco, founder and CEO of Talent Builders, Inc
March 8: Koka Sexton, director of Social Selling University
March 10: Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
March 15: Patrick O’Malley, social media trainer and consultant
March 17: Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0
March 22: Pelin Thorogood, principal, Schulman + Thorogood Group.
March 24: Anneke Seley, CEO and founder of Phone Works and coauthor of Sales 2.0
March 29: Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Millennial Branding, LLC
March 31: Tibor Shanto, principal, Renbor Sales Solutions

On March 8, SSU will host a live, complimentary workshop following the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where industry thought leaders will discuss the best practices for leveraging social media to increase sales team performance. Visit SSU’s registration page for more information about the agenda, speakers or sign-up information.

“Social media has completely changed the world of selling, and if you and your organization want to stay relevant, then you need to learn how to use these tools before your competitors,” said Dan Schawbel, the author of the number one international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future. ”Social Selling University is the first program to teach salespeople how to use Facebook, Twitter and other social tools to generate ready-to-buy leads and build relationships with customers that result in long-term business growth.”

About Social Selling University
Social Selling University is the world’s first initiative dedicated to teaching the sales profession how to put social media to work within their sales processes and organizations for greater productivity and revenue, through online instruction and in-person workshops. SSU staff includes dozens of the leading experts in social media, sales and Social CRM, and provides courses made specifically for executives, managers and representatives. Founded in 2011 by InsideView, SSU is the leading source of education about using the social Web to increase sales productivity through social intelligence. For more information, visit www.socialsellingu.com.

Social media has become a defacto marketing tool for any organization, but it’s incredible how scared sales managers and teams still are of letting their sales reps join the sales 2.0 party. But the reality is, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself…oh, and not closing more and larger deals faster than ever before.

Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn (as well as the entire blogosophere) are target-rich environments to find new opportunities and leads, and engage with prospects in a powerful and effectively intelligent new way. So what is holding companies back? Of the dozen or so objections I have heard, my conclusion is: FEAR. Fear that their sales team will not produce results, fear that the sales team will waste their time online and fear that their sales teams will do or say something online that will tarnish their brand and kill sales. The fact of the matter is, NOT letting sales professionals engage on social media is detrimental to the bottom line for the reasons below.

In addition, it always surprises me when a company pushes off any new technology based on such fear, and masks it with an excuse. Businesses that embrace innovation and new tools have a great track record of becoming leaders in their spaces. Social media is no different as it applies to sales professionals. There are very simple reasons that all of these excuses should be thrown away and sales people given a green light to social media engagement with leads and prospects.

Fact: Social selling produces results

Sirius Decisions Inc. recently said in a webinar that in most sales cycles, customers are now in control. Customers are doing 70 percent of the research online that drives the buying decisions, and then contacting a specific vendor for the purchase. The old concept of customers calling into a company to be ‘sold’ something is quickly vanishing. Since more of the buying process is happening online in discussion groups and social networks, sales people that are paying attention and, in most cases, are already a member of these networks like Twitter, will capitalize on these conversations and identify new opportunities much earlier than those without such social involvement.

Myth: Social Selling is not a time-suck

If your sales team is wasting their time online or talking to friends on the phone most of the day, stop now and reevaluate your employees. If you have talented and hard working people on your sales team, then you shouldn’t expect them to behave any different with using social media throughout the sales cycle. If your sales team is already using Twitter or other networks for personal use, they will be able to adopt a sales methodology around the same tools to produce revenue.

Myth: ‘Social Selling’ is too risky

This is an objection that comes up more often than any other, and it’s a common misunderstanding that a business can be destroyed in the matter of one status update or blog post. But, I don’t agree with this any more than I would with the idea that a poorly sent email to a customer can do the same. There was a point in time where sales people didn’t have access to email for that exact reason, but can you imagine not having email as a tool? The same will be said about social media tools in 10 years – those who embrace it will be in the drivers seat, and ultimately win out.

It all comes down to “letting go” and enabling your sales teams to be more effective. Social Selling is not fit for every sales person, but I’d bet you have a strong percentage of your sales team that would welcome the opportunity to drive opportunities through social tools in addition to traditional phone and email tactics.

This post originally appeared on Sales2.com where InsideView has regular contributions. Sales 2.0 is a site dedicated to the improvement of sales results.

Provide access to sales intelligence directly at the “point of need”

Last week I kicked off a multi-post blog series on the top sales productivity tips I have assembled based on my ongoing conversations with dozens of InsideView customers.   My first tip was about the significant efficiencies that can be realized from consolidating disparate sales data sources into one.  Sales productivity gains that come from access to a single “go-to” source of complete, up-to-date and relevant prospect intelligence are real and immediate.  However, as I’ve heard time and time again – confirmed by pretty much everyone one I’ve talked to – where and how this intelligence is delivered is just as critically important to sales productivity.

Given most sales professionals are mandated to use SFA/CRM systems to manage their client interactions, it only makes sense to deliver sales intelligence directly within the CRM, integrated into the sales reps’ daily workflow, and right at the point of need.  This is confirmed by Peter Ostrow, research director for sales effectiveness at the “http://www.insideview.com/directory/aberdeen-group-inc”>Aberdeen Group, who states “Access to sales intelligence, especially when directly fed into CRM/SFA systems, is clearly one of the major enablers for the best-in-class companies in the [Inside Sales Enablement] study.”  Ostrow goes on to say “Sales teams who are deploying InsideView’s sales intelligence application are indeed achieving 32 percent better performance than non-customers, in terms of current lead conversion rates and hitting quota, and year-to-year growth in revenue and win/loss ratios.”  In addition to CRM integration, browser and mobile access also emerge as important productivity drivers, delivering easy access to intelligence when and where the sales reps need it …and thus enabling the reps to stay abreast of their prospects anytime/anywhere.

Cases in Point:

“The primary reason for our decision to switch to InsideView was its tight, easy-to-use integration with Salesforce.com.  The single point of access is a significant sales productivity enhancer, enabling fast and effective prospecting and account planning.” John Knotwell, senior director of sales operations at inContact

“The SalesView mash-up with Salesforce.com gives me great functionality and excellent usability – basically everything I need for boosting sales effectiveness– all in one place.  We have realized huge gains in productivity and the sales team is excited!” Tina Babbi, VP of Sales and Service Operations for TriNet. 

“SalesView significantly accelerates account research with one-stop-shop access to prospect data and enables more relevant customer engagement with alerts on compelling business events.” Michelle Coolican, Business Development Manager, Oracle Health Sciences Global Business Unit

Both data consolidation as well as its delivery at the point of need clearly improve sales efficiencies.  Next up, I will explore sales productivity drivers that go beyond efficiencies, and focus on sales effectiveness strategies that result in increased success with customer engagements.  In the meantime, I look forward to hearing about top contributors to sales efficiencies and sales effectiveness for your organization.

A recent report by eMarketer shows why social media networks like Facebook should be a focus for more sales and marketing alignment. The fact that companies are spending $3 billion on Facebook means that sales teams should be trained on the use of Facebook as a tool for lead conversion and prospect engagement. Most companies are giving a large amount of resources on building their professional Facebook page and following it up with additional dollars from their budgets to drive new customers to those pages. Sure many companies are spending money on Facebook ads to push people to other landing pages off the network but it’s been shown that developing a solid presence on Facebook and keeping people in the network converts higher and helps spread WOM marketing. The same strategy should be used in other networks.

”2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.” “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

Sales teams should be encouraged to interact with the company Facebook page, commenting on updates and sharing news from the company page. The community you build on your Facebook page is something both sales and marketing should be very conscious of and nurtured. Even though LinkedIn is a professional network and we pointed out LinkedIn is Facebook with a tie,  different departments should be engaged on Facebook. Marketing for the general awareness and branding of the company and sales teams for the engagement of  new prospects wanting to know more about their product/service. Company support and services should also play a part by answering questions and providing updates based on best practices.

This means that companies should give up some control and designate Facebook ambassadors to the pages from sales and support and give them Admin access to post under the company name. Here are 10 reasons for using Facebook for your business. Since building a community on Facebook around your company should be the goal, you need to seed the community with people from your company that can help people from all sides of the sales cycle. Very few companies have done this that I know of and with the proper training (Sales 2.0) a sales person can quickly identify potential prospects and then generate new leads. Though Facebook is the origin of some of these new prospects and you should continue engagement with them on the platform, knowing who the prospects are that interact with your Facebook page and then bringing them into your CRM will give you the metrics needed to show it’s success. The same goes for current customers, if it’s primarily answering questions or fostering a relationship for continued business, sales people should be taking more of a leadership role in how social networks are managed.

I ran across an interesting quote as I was working on the InsideView guide for Social Selling with LinkedIn. As soon as I heard it, an image popped into my head and I went to Photoshop to create it. The thought that LinkedIn is Facebook with a Tie is a great differentiation between the two platforms.

LinkedIn is a place for professional connections. Be it from coworkers, customers or even initial engagement with new prospects, LinkedIn is a social network every sales person needs to be actively involved with. Social Selling starts with having a professional platform to start with and you need to make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized and makes people want to engage with you.

Facebook is a place where you connect with friends and engage with brands. There are professional use cases of Facebook but by and large people are not ready to use their Facebook profiles for work unless they are interacting on a company fan page. There are several things a sales person could do to gain exposure and build relationships on Facebook that we will cover in Social Selling University but LinkedIn is the place to be on a purely business level.

Sales Intelligence and Social Selling Become The New Must-Haves
InsideView’s rapid growth in 2010 was driven by increasing numbers of large and medium enterprises that are adopting sales intelligence and social selling as core capabilities to improve their sales execution.

In 2010, sales organizations were looking to work smarter, not just harder. Gaining critical insights on not just who to call, but knowing when and why to call customers, sets apart top performing sales organizations from competitors. InsideView now boasts more than 60,000 end users. New customers include Avaya, AIG, Riverbed Technologies and Workday.

InsideView continued to invest substantially in R&D by doubling its development team in 2010. InsideView maintained its substantial lead in product innovation, with several new capabilities including:

• Social Profiles: View rich social profile information from dozens of social networks to gain unique insights into customers and prospects
• Social Search: Search for contacts on specific social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to better target prospects and engage via multiple channels
• Social Connections: Tap into existing relationships to leverage connections into a prospect or customer via the Facebook and LinkedIn APIs
• Social Mentions: Access a filtered, relevant stream of social media mentions to understand what is being said about customers and prospects
• Automated Watchlists: Automatically track and monitor key CRM accounts to ensure that potential opportunities and threats are never missed
• New User Interface: Access key insights with fewer clicks to streamline the most common B2B sales activities such as lead qualification and pre-call research

InsideView also won numerous awards for product innovation and market leadership:

• JMP Securities Hot 100 List of best privately held software companies for the second time in a row
• ZDNet CRM Watchlist for third year in a row
• The only sales intelligence and social selling vendor included in Gartner’s Social CRM Magic Quadrant

InsideView’s success was shared by its customers. InsideView customers, including Adobe Omniture Business Unit, Brainshark, Inc., BigMachines, Inc. and Unisfair, dominated 2010′s Sales and Marketing 2.0 Awards for innovative use of technologies to drive sales and marketing excellence.

Ecosystem Grows Substantially

InsideView’s ecosystem of partners grew exponentially in 2010 to more than 50 partners. This growth is a testament to more companies looking to get more out of their CRM investments, by investing in sales intelligence and social selling initiatives.

The top companies in Sales Effectiveness and CRM Implementation selected InsideView as their primary sales intelligence partner, recognizing the value InsideView provides in several key areas: increased sales productivity, higher lead conversion rates, higher opportunity win rates and rapid CRM adoption.

InsideView has also become the most popular and highest rated sales intelligence solution on all the leading CRM marketplaces and/or ecosystems, including:

• Most popular and highest rated Sales Intelligence application on the Salesforce AppExchange
• Most popular download on Salesforce ChatterExchange
• Most Valuable Bundle on NetSuite SuiteApp
• Most popular Sales Intelligence application on SugarCRM SugarExchange
• Only Sales Intelligence vendor in Oracle’s CRM On Demand Inner Circle
• Highest-rated app for Microsoft CRM 2011 on the Dynamics Marketplace

“InsideView’s growth in 2010 is a proof-point that enterprises of all sizes are increasingly looking to sales intelligence and social selling as must-haves, in order to compete and win,” said Umberto Milletti, founder and CEO of InsideView. “InsideView enables enterprises to quickly increase sales productivity and get measurable ROI. We are extremely proud of our success in 2010, and look forward to continuing our rapid growth in 2011.”

There is a shift being made in businesses regarding their approach to gaining new business and managing their customers. Social CRM is on the rise and this is more than a few bells and whistles being added into your contact database. With a large focus being made in the movement away from sales data and into sales intelligence, sales professionals will need to make a few adjustments on how they do everything from prospect, develop new opportunities and manage their existing accounts.

Customer 2.0 is not waiting around for a sales person to get back to them with information, they are online looking for answers from people outside of your company within their own social networks and generally searching for people they should be in contact with. The trick (if you want to call it that) is to make yourself as visible as possible so that this new breed of customer has no option but to come across your name or profile during these searches. This is why Sales 2.0 starts with YOU.

5 Steps a person should take to make themselves more sales 2.0 ready

1. Create or optimize you LinkedIn profile. I came across another company this week that only had 20% of their sales team on LinkedIn. At first the sales manager was resistant to the idea of their team using LinkedIn but after some discussion, I think they changed their mind. I guess we’ll see in a couple weeks when we check back in with them.

Sales people should look at their online presence as an extension of themselves. Sites like LinkedIn can become self service lead generators once you optimize your LinkedIn profile and start building a network.

2. Get over your fear and join Twitter now! Maybe it’s because I didn’t have many friends as a teenage kid but I have always found Twitter to be a useful tool to meet people interested in the same things as me and have small conversations. Once I realized that Twitter could be used in a sales environment, I started building a mini network of people that were already customers and looking for products that I sold. You might be amazed at the number of executives on Twitter or just other employees that you can build relationships with online. Remember people buy from people, the more you are seen as a person and not another sales person the better.

Use the search feature or get an application like HootSuite or TweetDeck to help you focus on specific geographies and keywords your company is associated with.

3. This should be #1 but for the sake of editing it’s not. Go over to GoDaddy or another domain name company and buy yourname.com. Google yourself and look at what the results are. Owning your own domain name and building a simple site or even pointing the domain to your LinkedIn profile will help you stand out from the crowd. Your prospects are looking at your online identity just as you are them. Make sure you are searchable and showing your customers/prospects that you are a professional.

4. Stop cold calling and start engaging in conversations. Now that you have a shiny LinkedIn profile start spending a little bit of time in groups and asking/answering questions. You will be amazed at the number of people that are willing to give free advice to you about how to make yourself better or how thankful some people are that you were able to help them out. These are all little building blocks to make you a sales 2.0 expert and bring more prospects to you.

5. Add your social profiles to everything you send to prospects. Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and company blog URLs to your email signature. This is a great way to get some exposure to your Sales 2.0 identity and will let people learn more about YOU and not the sales person contacting them.

These are some simple steps a sales person can take that will build their credibility online and make it near impossible for customer 2.0 not to notice. Would you like me to look at your LinkedIn profile and offer any suggestions? Leave me a comment with the link and I’ll check it out.

[Click image for the magic]

Social Selling Software – InsideView.com