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On January 26th, InsideView reached its 5,000th follower. Although some may not view this as an astronomical milestone in the metrics of social media, to us it is a huge accomplishment. We are not your typical company when it comes to social marketing, where the number of followers rule the measured success of our social engagement. Though more followers is always nice to have, we’ve held the position that its better to have 200 engaged members in our community than 10,000 people that don’t really care what we have to say and never interact with us. InsideView marks each follow as the establishment of a relationship geared towards benefiting all individuals throughout all cornerstone of business.
Congratulations to David Greenwald of PGi for being our 5000th follower! David has been using InsideView to make him more productive for years. It’s awesome to have customers like him making an impact by leveraging sales intelligence. PGi is a developer of video conferencing software that has a pretty slick interface. They were the first video conferencing platform I saw that integrated social networks into their product, and you all know how much of a fan I am when it comes to B2B use of social networks.
As a Global Sales Executive, David can really benefit following our tweets as we generally like to reach out to sales people around the world to better their skills and selling methods. Give him a follow @nexgentechsales. Thank you David!
We would like to take this opportunity for those who are reading this blog post and follow InsideView through any social media channel, to say thank you for all of the tweets and feedback you have given us over the years…You truly are our #1 fans.
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)
You’ve finished your leftover turkey and the Christmas lights are starting to come up (cue Jingle Bell Rock!)…time to relax and look forward to the holidays? Wrong. At least not totally wrong. With the beginning of the holidays comes the end of the 4th Quarter. Like any team in sports, you don’t want that 4th quarter, second half or 9th inning to come down to the wire because it will shave years off your life. Here are 10 great blog posts that will get you ahead of the curve for the end of the year, allowing you to drink that egg nog a little deeper.
- Converting B2B Sales Data into Social Intelligence – Social Media B2B
- Five Ways to Measure If Facebook “Likes” Work for Your Business – Selling Power
- Myth #1: More Data Is Better – DataMyth.com
- 3 Big Data Myths for Enterprises – Smart Data Collective
- CEOs on Sales – What Company Leaders Want from Sales Leaders – The Sales Operations Blog
- Salesperson: Hunter or Farmer? – The New Sales Coach
- Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed to Sell? – Partners in Excellence
- Social, Content & Selling – a Chief Revenue Officer’s Take – Inside Sales Expert Blog
- Four Keys to a Great 4th Quarter - Salesopedia
- Six Simple, yet Powerful Benioff-isms – The Sales 2.0 Advocate
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?
Your professional connections can create new opportunities.
To be an effective sales person, it’s best to know how connections you have can get you into new accounts. Instead of relying on more data and names of contacts to call, leveraging intelligence in your sales process can build your pipeline faster. We are expanding further on our lead of people insights of selling to people not contacts. Connection based prospecting is a enhanced way of identifying prospects that you have direct connections to through co-workers, past employers or reference accounts.
Leverage your existing connections for accelerated pipeline growth.
Having connections into a prospect company makes getting in contact with a decision maker much easier. If you foster your professional connections correctly, your network should be happy to introduce you to someone within their company and make a warm introduction. Maybe you are looking for new accounts to contact and you find out that 4 of your coworkers and 2 people you worked with in the past have direct connections to people in a large account you’d like to talk to. That would make getting a warm introduction easier than trying to figure out how to cold-calling into a prospect.
Instead of blindly targeting companies based on contact data focus on getting new customers based on the number of connections you have into the company. People you work with, reference accounts and past coworkers will add a layer of trust to your communication with a decision maker. Leverage those connections to get an opportunity.
We have several new enhancements in our application this month. You can see more about all of them in the InsideView Community.
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.”
InsideView is putting together our Insider Summit and everyone is invited. If you are a sales or marketing professional responsible for lead generation and revenue, this years Insider Summit is going to leave you with real examples and training on how to do your jobs better. InsideView is the standard in sales intelligence applications helping more than 100,000 sales professionals, and over 1,000 market-leading companies including Adobe, AIG, BMC, Cap Gemini, Experian, and SuccessFactors.
Block off these dates and register for the Insider Summit 2012.
Here’s just a peek at some of the great sessions we have already planned for the Insider Summit.
- Increasing Lead Quality and Conversion by Building a Sales Intelligence Culture
- 7 Ways Sale Intelligence Helps Manage Sales Operations
- Where is the ROI? Social Selling Metrics
- Turning Cold Calls into Warm Calls with Sales Intelligence
- 9 Social Selling Tools You Should Not Go Without
- How Sales Intelligence Can Make You a Better Sales Executive
- Keeping the Lead Engine Running Smoothly: Data Hygiene and CRM Integration
- How to Get in Front of those Elusive Executives
Panel Discussions with Industry Experts and Marketing & Sales Leaders Topics will include: Changing Buyer Dynamics, Social Selling, Managing Change, Staying Competitive, and others.
Since we are still in some of the planning phases, if there is a topic you feel would be informative to sales and marketing leaders, leave us a comment or jump over to our community to post it in our discussion group.
Yesterday Google announced the ability to create company pages on their Google+ social platform. Google+ hasn’t proven itself to be a primary social network yet but the integration possibilities and what it can do for search results has some potential. I poked around a bit looking in our industry and didn’t find a ton of Google+ pages in SaaS or sales applications. It’s fitting to be the first Google+ page on sales intelligence. Each of our blog posts has the ability to share via Twitter Facebook and also Google+. If you are a Google+ member, head over to our InsideView Google+ page and give us a +1.
Since this is a new social network, we’d like to hear from our community on how you would like us to use Google+. After adding InsideView to one of your circles post your suggestion on your wall and tag +insideview. We’d love to hear what you’d like us to share on our Google+ page.
Here’s a few suggestions that were thrown around here at InsideView HQ on ways to use the page.
- Industry news
- How to’s
- Partner news
- Curated content about sales and marketing
- Product releases
- Social Selling tips
Let us know what you think on the page.
A New Type of Connection
What are People Insights? Connections are more important than ever for reaching and engaging your prospects. More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails, while more than 80 percent do engage when referred by a connection – whether through a friend, colleague, customer or industry peer. Intelligent Connections grow your reach beyond social networking sites (your personal connections) to automatically leverages your extended business network of coworkers, executives and board members, previous employers, and customers (your corporate connections). Even young professionals, who often have a limited Rolodex and professional network, can now instantly leverage their company’s extended network of corporate relationships.
“The biggest business impact comes from knowing how best to connect to prospects, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone.”
Going beyond the business card
“There is little value in basic contact data – for example a phone number or email address – for today’s business professional,” says Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What’s important is cutting through the noise and getting the accurate information that matters about leads and prospect. The biggest business impact then comes from knowing how best to connect to them, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone. And for a busy sales or marketing pro, this kind of insight needs to be delivered directly where they are working most – email or CRM application.”
“There is no competitive advantage to be gained by using basic contact data. Everyone has access to phone numbers and email addresses, and response rates are abysmal,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What creates differentiation is cutting through the noise and engaging people. The biggest value of People Insights is knowing how best to connect to people, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when is the best time to reach out.”
With the launch of People Insights, sales and marketing organizations can now easily find the right person to contact, identify any mutual connections, get a complete picture via social media profiles, view recent news mentions, and be alerted about when to reach out. No other solution brings together such a comprehensive set of insights about people within a business context.
Sell to people, not contacts
Most good sales people know this already. This is supported by research by Marketing Experiments that dives event deeper. When engaging with new prospects look at them as people and learn about WHO they are not WHAT they are.
