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?

It all comes back to the phone book

Just when you would think the explanation of data vs. intelligence was a moot point, a customer brought us another little anecdote that drives the nail in even further to the coffin of big data providers. Most startups and even larger businesses have a need to deliver leads to the sales team. This can be done using a combination of many marketing campaigns and targeting people that can benefit from your product or service. One of the normal go-to methods for companies is to inject a bunch of names into their CRM in a form of list building that gives the sales people a starting point of people to contact. Companies buy these lists because it’s better than handing a sales team a stack of yellow pages and telling them to start at A and work through Z. But is it really any better?

The problem with data as a launching point

Companies need data. List building has a place in the process but if that’s what you are relying on to drive a large volume of revenue for your company, you are going to be very disappointed. Using data as a launching point for your inside sales team to start working through is almost as bad as handing them a copy of the Yellow Pages for their territory with the industries they should focus on. Where do they start? What companies should they call first? Even with a more focused set of targets, sales people still have the same problems. Without some context or sales intelligence around the company or contact, sales people are still walking blind. Sure they’ll call 50 people and get 3 people that might be interested for a follow up but again, it’s a VERY grassroots process that belongs only in the history books.

What happens when you add a layer of actionable intelligence to the data? All of a sudden sales people are getting alerted to sales opportunities, they get fed information that they can pass onto their prospects and customers about trends and issues facing their competitors and how the prospect can benefit more from the service they offer. Sales intelligence has an explosive impact on driving revenue for a company.

The solution that builds revenue faster

When you hand a sales person a lead, it’s in their DNA to follow up on it with a call, email or some other communication. It will be hit or miss using the phonebook approach and they will move onto the next name on the list. We’ve documented case studies where customers are getting upwards of 70 new opportunities a month, per rep and watched sales efficiency increase dramatically by eliminating a large chunk of research a sales person needs to do. This will never be done by the Big Data vendors as much as they want you to believe it. Sales intelligence is the only solution.

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.

The Cold Calling Debate

I’ve been a little rash when it comes to my thoughts on why cold calling is the bottom of the barrel. When I was in sales, I was measured by the number of calls I made in a day and if I didn’t hit the “magical” number of calls my professionalism was called into question. This post is the #4 most tweeted article from all of my posts on the blog. The comments from the post were insightful and come from some of the leaders in sales, training and services industries.

A few blog articles were made in response to the post from people with their own take on the idea that cold calling is dead. Ken Rouge wrote in Predictive Sales Intelligence Will Redefine CRM and the Sales Process that “InsideView proves that the value of social media increases exponentially when it can be applied directly to the sales/buying cycle. Marketing automation solutions like Eloqua manage opt-ins and content, all directly linked back to lead generation and sales acquisition costs. Dialer tools like the PowerDialer for Salesforce manage and predict call cycles for lead generation, pushing the highest-quality leads and data to the reps right when they need it.

All of this is designed for a single purpose–to close the gap from “old” sales to new. Getting attention through marketing channels is harder than ever. So when a company finally does “get some love” from a prospect, the tools have to be in place to make every opportunity count, to have the highest chance to contact and close the deal.

While I don’t totally agree with InsideView that cold calling is “bottom of the barrel,” the shifting sands of demand generation and sales intelligence in 2011 means that true “cold” calling will almost be misnomer in the future. Our ability to “predict” who and when to call, what to say when we do, and the value proposition a prospect will most readily respond to will ever increase as the sophistication of the tools we use increases with it.“

One of our great advocates Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group referenced our article in her post “It’s the ‘cold’ that’s dead, not the ‘calling‘“. Not a day goes by that I don’t see numerous bloggers, tweeters, etc. arguing passionately that cold calling is dead. The problem is that people are confusing cold calling with outbound calling. Picking up the phone still works as part of a Sales & Marketing approach that integrates inbound marketing, social media, great content, lead nurturing, etc.

Brian Berlin who is a good friend and past manager of mine is the owner of Straightline Strategies even found some data to back up the idea that cold calling is not as bad as we might think.

Ending the Debate on Cold Calling

As a social selling advocate and sales professional, I would never stand on a soap box and say that using the phone to contact prospects is a bad idea. I can’t say that because I still make daily calls on my Plantronics headset too. The difference is that I don’t blindly call people that I have to convince that it would be in their best interest to spend a few more minutes with me to hear a sales pitch. Times have changed and sales processes must change to keep up. Should sales people blog? I have my opinions on that. I have more thoughts on why sales teams are not leveraging social media and it boils down to FEAR.

I agree with Trish, most people confuse cold calling with making outbound calls. Calling names based on a prospecting list generated by marketing with contact data is not needed in the age of sales intelligence applications.

“There’s the old adage that 90 percent of people hate cold-calling and the other 10 percent are lying,” says Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch Inc., and author of the book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.

However, even in today’s business world, picking up the phone remains one of the best ways to reach an organization’s senior executives. A 2007 survey by MarketingSherpa, a research firm that tracks what works in the marketing profession, found that only 11 to 17 percent of business prospects were annoyed by getting an unsolicited cold call. On the other hand, 45 to 53 percent of the executives interviewed said that a cold call they received had helped vendors leapfrog onto the consideration shortlist for purchases. – INC.com

Adding a layer of intelligence to your sales process will dramatically increase sales productivity and increase your opportunity win rates. Does social media answer all the needs of every sales organization? No. But it adds an additional layer that gives sales people an edge when identifying new prospects and making that first phone call less awkward. Even marketing automation companies like Marketo see the value in leveraging social media for sales.

Making a global shift from the ‘cold calling’ mentality will take time but the shift is happening. Much faster than most companies can adjust.

Sales Teams Need Social Media

What is rarely talked about it the need for sales teams to be active on Twitter and other social networks like LinkedIn. On a base level, sales people need to be aware that social media and social selling can have a measurable impact on their win rates. CSO Insights recently published a paper called “The Sales Intelligence Challenge” that addressed this. InsideView was involved in a Webinar with CSO Insights on this topic also. It was found in their research that B2B Sales win rates were highest when sales people used sales intelligence tools like InsideView.

Social Media is the Key

There is too much information available online these days that a sales person is walking blind if they are not using it in some way. Sales prospecting lists for contact data is fine but it’s not very effective on a large scale. Gathering contact information is only the first step in an effective sales process. The real intelligence comes from contact data and the relevant information about that contact.

Most times this means that sales people are opening up several tabs in their browser to run searches in LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs and Google to see what they can find on their contact so a phone call or other engagement can seem timely and be well received from the prospect. Knowing more about your prospect, their company and industry is NOT provided by contact data or prospect lists.

The best sales professionals are gathering recent news and relevant information about prospects and companies by looking at social media  for the sales intelligence needed to drive the conversation.

Why is this?

There has been a shift in the sales process and specifically in the customer buying process. People are being alot more careful about how they spend their money and what vendors they work with. Since customers are now in control more than they were 5 years ago, sales teams are having to adust their behavoirs and activities to customize more of their offerings to each potential customer. B2B companies have to keep pace with Customer 2.0. Companies are now in the solutions game and selling a solution is a much longer process than having a CD in a box and selling it off a shelf. Customers demand more engagement by sales people and more customized applications to solve their issues.

This data tell us that in complex sales, selling is about more than being a persuasive presenter: it’s about the hard work that happens before and after that presentation, from researching customers to pulling together internal stakeholders to planning how to grow the account over time.

Pre-call planning by sales teams has increased 15% to meet the demands of customers. Sales people may only have one chance to talk with the C-Suite and the cookie cutter presentations that worked years ago will result in a glazed over look and forgotten about before you walk out of the room. Deal complexity has increased as customers want the customized solutions that affect their business process. The increase in panning also is attributed to the lack of resources available to a sales team now versus a few years ago.

With more emphasis in pre-call planning there is a much greater need by companies to be invested with sales intelligence solutions that can cut down research time and give a sales person an advantage. Some of this information will come from conversations with the customer but decision makers are busy and discovery calls are few and far between. Using Sales 2.0 tools and harnessing aggregated news and social streams from individuals and companies can fill in much of the information gap.

It was also interesting that the report showed that post-sales activities by sales teams increased 15%. This means that sales people are not focusing on bringing in new business and working with existing business. Companies that have this issue should look into investing more sales support and relieve the burden on revenue producers.

READ The Entire report on Sales Process Trends

If you are an Inside Sales professional or a sales leader, you should already know about the AA-ISP Inside Sales Leadership Summit 2011. This event will feature over 30 of the nation’s leading Inside Sales experts who will deliver presentations and discussions focused on the issues most critical to today’s Inside Sales Leaders and Managers.

As the only conference dedicated exclusively to the “front lines” of Inside Sales, this event will bring together Inside Sales Professionals to learn, share, and network. Inside Sales 2011 will deliver informative, thought-provoking presentations designed to help Inside Sales individuals, teams, and organizations.

This one day conference will include a variety of general sessions, interactive break-out sessions, and lively panel discussions featuring some of the nation’s leading Inside Sales experts. Focus will be on addressing issues critical to the success of today’s Inside Sales Professionals while providing key sales tactics and techniques. In addition, the Solution Provider Exhibit will offer attendees the opportunity to meet with leading inside sales vendors.

The conference will be packed full of innovative, practical ideas and best practices. Inside Sales Professionals will leave exhilarated, enthused, and armed with new knowledge, techniques, and tools designed to improve and enhance sales performance.

Umberto Milletti will be a Featured Speaker at the event along with some other great speakers like Tom Scontras of Glance Networks, Steve Richards of Vorsight Sales Training and many, many more.

Increase Inside Sales Productivity with Social Intelligence

Cold calling is changing to warm calling, as prospects are demanding more relevance from sales reps.    Find out how to harness social intelligence to increase your sales productivity and accelerate sales cycles.  Learn how to bring social selling into your sales organization to improve prospecting effectiveness and close rates.

Time: Thursday, February 10 
from 4;15 p.m – 4:45 p.m

The AA-ISP Inside Sales Leadership Summit 2011 is less than  two weeks away and it’s not too late to register. InsideView will also have a booth at the event and we look forward to talking with you about our product or ways that we have maximized our sales productivity internally to double our revenue in a record breaking year.

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.

Nobody will tell you that being in sales an easy gig. Only the top performers get recognized and the people who under-perform are typically passed over for promotions or asked to leave. There are actions every sales person can take that will increase their chances at success and outside of “Sales 101″ they should be investing in learning about and using every effective tool online and off to succeed. Social Selling in a B2B environment does work and there are some basic rules of social engagement every sales 2.0 leader should know and follow.

Aim before you shoot, the spray and pray method with calls and email blasts doesn’t work. Sales people need to be smarter about who they are contacting and when they contact them. Using a sales intelligence tool and including social engagement will increase your sales performance based on a recent Aberdeen study.

Break the rules before they break you. Inside sales people should not live in a box. There are so many new tools available and sales teams should not be limited to only a phone and email as communication tools. Not using new media to connect with prospects is hurting your business.

Have a character but don’t be a character. Sales people should use social networks in a professional manner. This doesn’t mean that you need to come across as a robot, have some fun.

Lead from the front. Using social media for sales let’s you find and connect with more relevant people than any prospect list will allow. Connecting with people in the networks that they are already active in will get you more exposure and leave more lasting impressions.

Don’t confuse planning with training or talking with selling. Starting off with using social media for sales takes some planning and it has a learning curve. If you start off with just using LinkedIn and perfecting the process you will begin to understand how much of an impact social media can have on lead generation and identifying new opportunities. Don’t focus on the number of people you are connecting with, having a large network doesn’t mean anything if it’s not translating into new business.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The path to success is littered with failures. The most important skill any sales person can learn is that not every deal will be won. Getting up and working on the next opportunity is the name of the game and sales members need to learn from the mistakes they make. “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

Take risks and then more risks. The safe and easy route is a quick way to nowhere. Sales people that are strategic in thought and can execute effectively will have to assume extra risks. Maybe your plan was flawed or you zigged when you should have zagged with that new opportunity, regardless of what the situation is, you took a risk and you should own it. Continuing to take risks will force you to be smarter about your sales tactics and have the most impact on your career.

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 an interesting and very relevant diagram in the book UnMarketing that talks about the Hierarchy of Buying. Read the book, do some other research and it should be confirmed that cold calling is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to finding new customers. The book is positioned towards social media marketing but the lessons still apply to sales leaders trying to stay on the cutting edge. In the age of Customer 2.0 you should have people coming to you in some form or another. Maybe its all word of mouth, lead generation or other avenues. If people are not talking about your company you have bigger fish to fry. Outbound calling to a person that has never heard of you or your product is just about as likely to buy your widget as they are the Brooklyn Bridge. You have to build trust.

Current customers are key

Getting business from current customers is usually the easiest since they already use your product. Unless you have done a poor job with the account or have not been able to keep up with their needs, you are generally in a good place with them. Current customers are a great place for referrals and can and should be leveraged to bring in new business.  At the top of the pyramid is where B2B sales teams should be focusing their efforts but it seems like they are aiming much lower on the scale.

This is why companies spend so much time making sure they have great reviews and working with customers to write these reviews.

Why are you still cold calling?

90% of consumers trust peers based on a Nielsen poll, and less than 10% trust an unknown source. Cold calling is perceived a lot like phone spam. If customers want information they will search you out or at least leave digital breadcrumbs of questions or conversations that you can find and then engage.  As I said in the Sales Predictions for 2011, sales teams that are not already focusing on social media will, social selling training and tools will be a focus.

Selling is based on trust and you can spend the time (a lot of it) building it with people that have never heard from you or you can move further up to leads and prospects that you have some trust with.  This is why sales people have been hearing so much about the value in nurturing campaigns and social media marketing, but little of it seems to apply to anything a sales person can influence. That’s why Sales 2.0 is growing in popularity, sales people can have more relevant intelligence on prospects and become great resources to their customers by using social media and sales leaders see this as a priority.

Some of the best businesses in the world were built from cold calling and that was because they found a way to exploit a technology (phones) using a team of people to saturate a market of people that loved to talk to other people. That hasn’t changed a whole lot in the past few years other than the fact that the phone is no longer the best technology to use because decision makers have less time. Sales 2.0 savvy teams will be the next wave of revenue generators for companies, starting in the technology space and moving like a wave through different industries. Social selling will hit  resistance and may not apply at all to some companies (I can’t imagine which ones but I’m sure they exist).

Have you started using social media tools in your sales teams?

There are many predictions being made about whats going to happen in 2011. Social Media Today has posted the B2B Marketing Predictions of 2011, Social Media B2B has even given their predictions on B2B Social Media in 2011. There is even a prediction on the End of B2B Sales & Marketing as We Know It. With all of these predictions focused on the marketing side of B2B we wanted to go over some predictions about the changes to be found in 2011 in a B2B sales environment.

Recently Greg Brush, InsideView’s Vice President of  Sales spoke on a webinar with the TAS Group. You should listen to the entire webinar for some great insights of how sales cycles have changed over the past couple of years and how to adjust for them.

One of the trends we see growing quickly is the desire for using social media during the sales process. 68% of the companies that attended this webinar said that their social media approach for sales needed a lot of work. There is a fundamental shift taking place in the sales world in the context of customer 2.0.

This is very compelling since we already know that customers are not going to their vendors for information as much as in years past. Social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and others have given the power to the customer to have conversations with peers and other customers about what products work and which ones fall short.

Social media will be a tool used by more sales teams in 2011

It’s more important than ever to have a sales team using technology to identify new opportunities and get involved in conversations that can turn questions into customers. LinkedIn is a tool most sales people are already using in some capacity but their profiles are rusty and they are not engaging people who are asking for advice. Sales teams that make an effort to use LinkedIn as a tool to find and help new prospects will see a much greater return than 100 phone calls becuase all of these conversations are visible to hundreds of thousands of people that may need the same advice.

Social media training will grow in 2011

After years of social media training being thrown around marketing departments with new experts being created daily it seems, very little has been done to bring this to sales teams. There are some great thought leaders out there that have been talking about Social Selling for a while and its about to be their time to shine. Sales managers are looking at their training budgets and prioritizing for more education on using social media. We will see more sales people engaging on LinkedIn, creating Twitter profiles and producing web videos in some cases. This is evident internally as well as with conversations with our customers that have approached us.

Sales Intelligence will be a focus of more sales teams

Data is becoming a commodity. Between Jigsaw, email lists and other providers, contact data is something that most companies now have relatively easy access to. A few years ago this was more than enough to throw a few sales people at and start having conversations. Times have changed and sales people are not having the same success with cold calling and email campaigns. Sales intelligence is the difference between being just another sales person or being the person contacting a prospect to solve a problem they are already having. Sales people will know who is having what problems based on the intelligence gathered from the thousands of news sources, blogs and social networks connected with that company or employee. Hear Umberto Milletti talk about this at a VIP event.

We see most of this already happening especially in the technology sector. There will obviously be laggards in certain industries that don’t implement a social selling strategy and unless their markets don’t use computers, they will be feeling the financial belt tighten as sales screech to a halt in the not to distant future.

Are you already using social media for sales? Tell us about it or ask some questions in the comments below.

Social Media Facts and Figures for B2B Sales

Social Media Spending

Sales Productivity Lost During the World Cup

Building a Company with Social Media

A Day in the Internet

Women In Social Media

Social Media In Business

Who Participates Online

Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

Twitter Territory

The World Of Facebook

The Story (so far) of Twitter

The Social Media Effect

The Rise Of The Social Networking Ad Spending

The Rise of Facebook Mobile: 2010

The Social Media Effect

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

The Journey of a Tweet

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

The Evolution of Twitter: 2010

The Biggest Shift

Social Media Statistics

Social Media Addiction

Social Marketing Compass

Social Landscape

Profiles of a Twitter User

Popular Site Demographics

More Truth About Twitter

Make Social Media Work For Your Company

How The World Spends Its Time Online

How People Share Content on the Web

How Companies are Leveraging Social Media

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media

Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites

Facebook was a Country

Facebook Vs Twitter

Facebook Facts and Figures 2010

Conversation Prism

Breakdown of the Blogosphere

Balance Your Media Diet

Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

One of the things that sets InsideView for Sales apart from other applications out there is that we can run specific searches for executive contacts with social media profiles. This is a letter from one of our customers that gives an explanation of this functionality and how he uses it. How do you use InsideView?

I’m in the lead generation business. My clients are resource-constrained firms that are trying to cover gaps in their go-to-market plans. They hire my company to get them in front of qualified prospects. I use independent teleprospecting contractors to make the calls, and to make sure they’re productive, I have to provide them with good contact data.

I use InsideView almost exclusively for building contact lists. There are 3 key search features in InsideView that set it apart from all other sales intelligence tools:

Social networks. InsideView allows me to include contacts that appear on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. LinkedIn profiles are important because it suggests that the person is currently in the position. I’ve done InsideView searches where the LinkedIn profile was more current than the contact profile. That’s okay–it helps us validate the contact another way. If the contact Tweets, they are a thought promoter and open to engaging in a business conversation. A Facebook profile demonstrates an active social networker.

Smart Agents. These are news filters that are built in to InsideView, and scour the Internet for business environmental occurrences, like missed quarters, new hires, product launches and expanding operations. Most of my clients are strictly B2B, so I’ll run searches first on public companies because they post a lot of information on the internet, which InsideView is collecting constantly. Plus, public companies are always going to be of a certain size range, so it’s not always necessary to further filter on employee count and revenues. That said, Smart Agents work for any size company as long as they’re in the news.

Current titles. Since 2000 and the dotcom implosion, people change jobs frequently. I have to find contacts that are as current as possible. I’ve used other sales intelligence products that really miss on this key filter. Not long ago I ran a prospecting campaign for a client using one of the “other guys” and my callers were frustrated and wasted a lot of time trying to reach people that had moved on.

Thought I’d share this with you. Thanks.

This comes from Brian Berlin, President and Founder of  Straightline Strategies, an outsourced sales, marketing and business development firm committed to helping our clients close gaps in their go-to-market plans.

1. Built-In CRM Reports Vs. the Data You Really Need – CRM Software Blog
2. Don’t Fear the Influencer (Now with More Cowbell) – CRM Outsider
3. What Can You Do For Me (Right Now)? – B2B Buzz
4. How does Sales 2.0 Help your Customers? – Anneke Seley
   
5. Too Shy to Network? – Dig It!
6. 5 Mental Attitudes of Winners – Eyes on Sales
7. Displaying Facebook Profile Images with the Facebook Toolkit – Developerforce
8. Thanks to Microsoft, the Cloud Meets The Onion – Gigaom
9. Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy – Eloqua
10. What’s Holding Your Prospecting Back? By Kendra Lee – Jonathan Farrington
11. Your Customer’s Twitter Account Can Build or Kill Your Brand – Kyle Lacy
12. You’re Allowed To Walk Away You Know! – Paul Castain
13. Convince The Boss Your B2B Company Should Use Social Media – Social Media B2B
14. The Guy in the Glass – Its The Identity Inside You – Chris Voss
15. Plans and Next Steps – Renbor

This post originally appeared on the Focus.com Group, where InsideView regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology for sales organizations.

Lets face it, sometimes the hardest thing to do is “get in the door” with a new lead. There have been hundreds of books written about it, countless podcasts and even entire sales enablement companies built around helping sales teams learn new tactics and strategies on making the first contact. With a lifetime of content available to a sales person, I don’t think that there is any one answer that cracks the code. That being said, it is much easier now than it was 3 years ago.

The perfect lead

The idea of the perfect lead could span all the colors of a double rainbow. Every company will have a different definition but they all boil down to a few key points. Someone has a pain, you have a product or service that can help and the clincher is that they have a budget that will cover the costs. Within that you can classify or rank your leads a thousand different ways to identify an even more specific list of the perfect lead. As a sales person you can only do so much so make sure that you are contacting the people that will have the quickest and easiest sales cycle possible. Even if the average sales cycle for your product is 6-9 months you want to keep that as close to the 6 month mark as possible right?

First impressions matter most

What you do with your leads is your business but there have been some horror stories told over the years about a shiny new lead that matched all of the criteria of the “perfect lead” just to be destroyed by first contact. If you typically send out an email first then make sure these are not some form letter sent to everyone. Since these leads are special make sure you add some great content into the email that grabs their attention and starts building the relationship that you want. Ask a question, attach a piece of  key content that is tailored to their issue and give them multiple ways to contact you with any questions.

Laurie Lynard of Telemasters offered some great advice that has worked for her.

First, I am always prepared. If they were a referral, I craft a message like “John Smith referred me to you as having a potential need for X to streamline your process and reduce your costs”. If they were a web lead or an inquiry, I will remind them that they expressed interest in XYZ.

Next, I script a value proposition that will resonate with my prospect: “At ABC Company we specialize in provide solutions that shorten time to market and reduce R&D costs”.

(Note: These two steps also prepare me to convince the gatekeeper to put me through to the decision-maker when she asks “What is this call regarding?”)

Lastly, I script a clear and compelling call purpose with a benefit to set the stage for a “discovery” conversation to understand their current process or system to determine whether it would be of benefit to partner. I also determine which question I will ask to begin the qualifying conversation.

By following this process, when I actually make the call, I am prepared to talk to:

A. The Gatekeeper
B. The Decision-Maker
C. The Decision-Maker’s Voice Mail (Different approaches need to be used in each subsequent voice mail or email)

When approaching the perfect lead you want to come across sincere and professional. They are a perfect lead for a reason and you need to make sure you can articulate that to them especially if they aren’t convinced yet. If you can position yourself as an advisor or an expert in a certain area then that can go along way.

On top of all of this, it adds another layer on the relationship if you take an interest in the people you are dealing with. Using common social selling tips will keep you ‘in the know’ about your leads and the companies they work for. Set up a new watchlist and add some value to questions they ask online. This will set you apart from being just another sales person.

I have had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds in sales 2.0 and sales effectiveness since joining InsideView and one of the topics that came up 90% of the time was that even though social selling and sales 2.0 are messages that sales people are adopting, there hasn’t been a real focus on how an individual sales person specifically can adopt social media to drive more opportunities. Until now.

InsideView has put together a Social Selling Primer that will be our launching pad for all of the future content on helping sales teams maximize their efforts online in social networks. Sign up for this webinar today before all of our WebEx seats are filled.

Thursday, November 18, 2010 : 11am PT / 2pm ET

When sales organizations try to leverage social media into their sales processes, they are often overwhelmed by too much information and underwhelmed by its impact on productivity.

At InsideView, we help hundreds of organizations to increase sales productivity and get substantial returns on their investments, using social media.

Besides all of the great keynotes by Marc Benioff, Bill Clinton and the music by Stevie Wonder, people come to Dreamforce to party. Sure we all want to learn more, meet new people and hang out with people we haven’t seen since the last event so why not hang out with them at a party where all you have to do is show up and put a drink in your hand.

InsideView is sponsoring a couple parties this year and the first to be announced is our Dreamforce Party with ExactTarget. I can’t let out all of the details but I will say that racing for your chance to attend the party should be one of your top priorities. You can register on the Eventbrite Dreamforce Party listing.

Wait, that’s not it. Sure you want to make sure you register for the party and get your invitation confirmed early but we want to go the extra mile for our friends, fans and followers. In the next couple of weeks InsideView is going to offer some great prizes leading up to Dreamforce and you will need to connect with us on Linkedin or Facebook to be eligible.

Special prizes for LinkedIn fans

Head over to LinkedIn and RSVP to the event and I will be posting an update later this week.

http://events.linkedin.com/Dreamforce-2010-Party-ExactTarget/pub/486160

Follow the party on Facebook.

If you are a fan of InsideView on Facebook, be sure to RSVP on the event page for the Dreamforce Party.

1. Is 2.3% Growth Enough For You? - The Pipeline
2. Focus Funnel Expert: Mike Damphousse of Green Leads – The Funnelholic
   
3. Enterprise 2.0: CIOs Used to Ask ‘Why,’ Now They Demand to Know ‘When’ – FASTforward blog
4. Get your paws out of my sales funnel! – TeleSmart Communications
5. The Powerpoint Tune Up! – Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook
6. The Social Integration of Twitter – Kyle Lacy
7. ABC is now ABH by Nancy Nardin – Jonathan Farrington’s Blog
8. Rise of Social CRM – CustomerThink
9. 10 Ways to Use Google to Find New Sales Ideas – Sales 2.0
10. Sales Reps vs. Sales Pros – EyesOnSales
11. Assume At Your Own Risk – Dig It !
12. How a Good Sales Mind Effortlessly Sell More – A-Z Group Solutions
13. Sales Influence Moment #22 – Selling to the Right Decision Maker – Sales Influence
14. 7 Suggested Steps for Dealing With Objections – Jonathan Farrington
15. What to Do When Prospects Make You Feel Like a Doormat – Selling to Big Companies
    
16. Welcome to Web 3.0: You Are the Sales Solution – Joanne Black
17. Sales and Marketing Progress Begins by Asking Better Questions – Selling Power
18. Send your customer away, it’s for the good of all! – Joseph Michelli
19. Buyers have always been in control – Sharon Drew Morgen
20. Why Prospects Hate to Deal with You. (an edgy conversation) – CustomerThink