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Closing out the year we wanted to look over the content that you have found most interesting and shared most often. 2011 was a big year for sales intelligence and the use of technology by sales teams to be more effective in finding new opportunities and closing more deals.
This is the list of the top 25 sales intelligence posts that people read during 2011
- 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
- How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
- Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
- 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
- Gamification of the Sales Process
- 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
- 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
- The History of Apple CEOs
- Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
- Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
- Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
- 10 of the Best Sales Sites
- The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
- 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
- Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
- Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
- 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
- 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
- The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
- Should Sales People Be Blogging?
- The Problem with Big Data
- The Future of Social CRM
- Do You Listen to Your Customers?
- 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1
- A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence
This is the final post in a study we created along with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
Cultivate your own personal brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and beyond.
“The one thing I learned early in sales is that the most unique thing you are selling is not always the company or the product, but it is always you. Social media provides you a unique opportunity to build your brand — as well as endless opportunities to ruin your brand. The first thing anyone does before meeting with someone is to check their LinkedIn profile. Successful social salespeople carefully and thoroughly complete their LinkedIn profile, including a picture. All their social bios (Twitter, etc.) are meaningful, unique and memorable. Limit access to your Facebook if it has any offensive or borderline offensive photos.” (Rosenberg)
“Many sales managers dont think Twitter is a place for sales people. I disagree. With social media exploding as a form of communication, there are going to be more and more people leveraging the channel for business conversations. Not just brands but real people that want to solve business problems by asking others online. Learning how to listen and track people on Twitter will be a goldmine of information in some cases for salespeople.” (Sexton)
“Social media provides platforms for the individual sales rep to stand out from the crowd like never before. To be the one who is providing the most helpful information, the best references, and what is going on in that industry/market. I recommend that sales open their consideration more broadly than just the big three of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Each has its place and purpose in an overall social strategy that must be in place prior to any active social media use for a company or an individual producer. How about a personal landing page for you as an individual where prospects/customers can go to learn more about you? Take a look at creating an http://about.me page, and then highlight all of your other online activities with links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even your company website for example.” (Austin)
Establish your expertise by contributing to conversations — without selling.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand how the science of sales intelligence has an effect on driving revenue. In addition to knowing more about yur industry and prospects than your competition, you will be able to lock yourself in as an expert of your market. By not just being a salesperson, you will open more lines of communication that will lead to more opportunities.
“Step 1: Figure out where your buyers are. Step 2: Be there Step 3: Contribute without intruding on the safe social environment people are interacting in. You hear a lot of stories of vendors finding leads in social platforms, but a lot of salespeople are just ‘there’ — contributing and building both trust and reputation. This approach serves them well. Many people are not just turned off by sales in general, but are absolutely repulsed by salespeople invading their online conversation to sell them something. My advice to salespeople is to get ‘in the mix,’ but don’t sell. Join the community and have conversations with industry leaders, peers and end users. There are salespeople who have built their online presence to the point where prospects have reached out to them for advice. That’s a big win.” (Rosenberg)
“Directly share information, become an expert, and generate a following. You are an expert. You understand your market, your customer’s problems, and the information they need to be more successful. You read the trade publications and regularly (possibly daily) find articles that your prospects and customers should read.” (Heinz)
“If our customers are already there (as research would indicate), then we as salespeople can’t afford not to be there and participating. Initially, salespeople should use social media (blogs, discussion forums, websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) primarily for listening and learning—what are the customers saying/asking, what is competition doing, etc. They should be engaging customers there, as well as using traditional channels. They need to be taking part in social conversations, they need to be representing their products and solutions in those conversations.” (Brock)
“With all the talk in the market about the importance of customer/buyer engagement, it is vital that today’s B2B rep use social as a means to dialogue with their buyers and customers. As reps thought the dialogue must change from one of pure sales to one of helping shape the discussion and to establish themselves as thought leaders and knowledgeable about their market, their buyers’ challenges and seen as a resource for answers. The best way to do this is via social, and the more reps understand that their involvement in this medium and having an active part in the discussion is key to the buying decision, the more they will begin to engage.” (Hidalgo)
“Become an industry source of knowledge by using one or more of the many curation tools that are now available, many at no cost.” (Austin)
This is part two in a study we created along with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
Sales Intelligence drives revenue.
“Based on the 12 ways sales people leverage the internet it is clear that B2B sales teams spend a lot of time researching prospects and customers on the web and social networks. It’s no longer an issue of not having any information ahead of time, the issue is that there is an overwhelming amount of personal insights available. Sifting through it to find the relevant information you can act on today appears to be the challenge at hand. Sales intelligence drives revenue by feeding sales people trigger events and insights within a company or contact.” (Koka Sexton)
Make the most of a B2B Social Networks more advanced features and functionalities.
“On the B2B side of the house, LinkedIn is the networking tool in the US with some 130 million members of the 100 million-plus community. Many people know how to invite people to their network, but they usually do not know what to do after that.”
Here are a few of the ways that savvy B2B salespeople will leverage B2B social networks:
- Advanced people search: Create prospecting lists based on the criteria of your ideal buyers. Save the list, and LinkedIn dynamically updates and alerts you weekly to the new people matching your criteria who have joined the network. Each week, you can then plan your strategy with respect to how you’ll approach the initial interaction.
- Applications: Use the applications to add video, compelling presentations, white papers and case studies or sync your blog posts to your profile. Keep your content fresh and people pay attention. In the past eight weeks, I’ve secured four paid gigs and in every single case, I was told it was because my profile stood out from the rest and because they liked the video. It is all about engaging people and enticing them to want to know more.
- Polls: Create a poll to gather real-time trending information that you can share with your prospective buyers.
- Status updates: Ongoing status updates that are ‘relevant’ and provide value to others keep salespeople visible; because at the end of the day, it is all about visibility.
- Groups: Leveraging groups (the right groups!) gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate credibility, but not selling!
- Use the Answers section to listen and respond to the questions that people are asking. Every single day people ask what products to buy and from whom.
- Events: Hosting an educational session for potential clients? Use the events functionality and use it to share with your network.” (Giamanco)
Monitor prospect discussion and social data for buying signals.
“Prospect research has changed forever. In no other time in my life have we seen prospects update their own information and update you on what they are doing in their personal and professional lives! Today’s modern social salesperson is exceptionally prepared for their sales calls. One tip: Company data is interesting (e.g., … [alerts] about your sales prospect’s company: ‘New product launch!’), but prospect social data is even more interesting, because it will tell you what the person really cares about (‘Just got back from sales training in Florida, learned a ton!’).” (Rosenberg)
“Leveraging twitter for sales is very effective. Once you know how to use Twitter as a sales tool, you can get insights into people and companies in realtime.” (Sexton)
“Watch for buying signals across the social Web. One of the greatest opportunities for salespeople via social media is to see into the buying cycle far earlier than we’ve typically had access to. Before social media, we could deepen our understanding of the buyer and use outbound marketing to connect with a particular need, try and find resonance with a buying signal, etc. But that, at best, was a fishing expedition most of the time. Now, if you know the buying signals and pain/problem keywords your prospects typically exhibit before they’re ready to buy, you can watch for those discussions and keywords across the social Web. Do a couple keyword searches on Twitter, for example, and you’ll be surprised how many people, in real-time, are talking about their existing challenges, their frustrations with competitive products and more.” (Heinz)
“Social media is a great tool for salespeople, but for not for the reasons that some people believe. Social media isn’t a replacement for the prospecting activities that success in sales requires, as some seem to suggest. It is a simply a set of tools that allow the execution of some of those activities. There is way too much focus on using social media tools for inbound marketing, and way too little on leveraging the tools to better enable the execution of the fundamental roles of salespeople: opening new opportunities. Opening new opportunities isn’t a passive activity, and salespeople who wait for their prospects to find them aren’t successful by any of the measures we use in sales. The salespeople who are successfully using social media are using the tools to identify and open communication with their dream client contacts. They are using tools like LinkedIn to identify the people who they can most easily create value for within their target accounts. More still, they are researching their prospects, discovering what they are reading, what they are writing about, and where their interests lie. Social media better enables salespeople to know who to call and how they might best create value for those people.” (Iannarino)
We partnered with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
The first step and one that was consistent across 100% of the successful salespeople was to get connected.
Use your existing connections and networks to actively pursue new introductions. 
“It’s so easy, on sites from LinkedIn to Facebook and more, to see who your existing ‘friends’ and connections already know. On LinkedIn, for example, you can quickly search for contacts you want to meet based on which of them are already connected to people in your existing network. This is one of the best ways to get referrals and introductions, not by asking your network to ‘keep you in mind’ but, instead, periodically asking for specific introductions. By getting specific, your conversion rate goes up and you’re talking to the people you specifically want to meet and sell to. In your existing organization, there is the sales team, but I’m thinking the rest of the company is a gold mine of potential introductions — especially founders, longtime employees and others who have spent a long time in your industry. They know people, people know them, and they’re more likely to help you make connections and new introductions.” (Heinz)
“Every time they receive a referral, email or leadership content, salespeople can highlight names mentioned in document, then research mentioned leaders, clients and customers — even competition — and send a note or invitation asking to join their conversations via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. By connecting with each other, you then can offer assistance or referrals and also build a trusted network of individuals to help build your referral base. Most people are thrilled you took the time to reach out to them when reading their books, viewing their videos, etc.” (Bieler)
“Successful salespeople are also using social media to identify the relationships that their prospective clients have to other people they already know. Successful salespeople aren’t afraid to leverage their relationships, to ask for introductions, and to rely on the people they know and what they know to open these relationships. Because these social media connections exist, what was once invisible is now visible; it’s easy to identify relationships and leverage them to find a way in. But it’s important to remember that your prospective clients are also using the tools to learn about you. Recently, I called on a major prospective client. After our meeting, he searched for my name on the Internet and found that we had a common connection on Facebook (his best friend from high school). He called his friend to get a reference on me before deciding whether or not to move forward. Fortunately, his friend recommended my work. Social media is no longer something salespeople can opt out of. It reminds me of what President Richard Nixon used to say about foreign affairs: ‘You might not be interested in the world, but it’s interested in you.’ ” (Iannarino)
Use Twitter and other social channels to build deeper, early relationships with new prospects.
“Here’s exactly how you do it (at least with Twitter, but other social channels can likely be done in a similar fashion). Build a list of the prospects in your territory or market. With the help of an admin or an outsourcing service like eLance, go and collect the Twitter handles of each company and as many of the individuals as you can find. Using your own Twitter account, follow those companies and individuals. Then, using a tool such as HootSuite, set up a separate column where you can specifically watch activity from those prospects. This makes it easier and faster to engage with them on a regular basis. Answer their questions. Share a resource. Retweet their articles. In other words, use their attention to this social channel to build value by interacting where they are already spending their time and looking for information.” (Heinz)
LinkedIn has quickly become one of the most effective and business-savvy social networking sites. Sales professionals are able to take advantage of valuable insight about prospects and peers, in turn developing a strong network that translates into increased productivity through resources, tips, advice and much more. By joining these groups, you will gain some incredible knowledge in the world of sales as well as discovering some of the top leaders in the industry.
To help those in the sales industry, the following groups and channels are among the most influential and valuable on LinkedIn.
Description: Social Selling University is not like social media courses which are typically designed only for marketing departments. This is how to use social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter for sales people. Join this group to find out how and pass this group along to anyone you know in sales.
Owner: Koka Sexton | 632 members
This group allows Inside Sales practitioners to share ideas and information, and provides networking opportunities for global professionals from a variety of industries to connect with their peers.
Owner: Trish Bertuzzi | 11,521 members
Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Owner: Doyle Slayton | 36,356 members
Description: The Sales Association is the premier association for sales & business development professionals. We provide members a powerful means to connect at events and online. Topics: sales, marketing, sales jobs, convention, conventions, jobs, trade show, trade shows, conference, conferences, CRM and careers.
Owner: Troy Davis | 26,483 members
Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Owner: Paul Castain | 25,110 members
Description: This group is for: sales people, sales managers and business owners who want to: 1. Exchange information about the emerging discipline of Sales 2.0 2. Partner up to help each other sell more, penetrate accounts and exchange leads.
Owner: Nigel Edelshain 4,160 members
Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators
Description: Innovate with innovative marketing, public relations, promotions sales and selling professionals skilled at using creative marketing methods. Join thousands of members to learn & share best practices & advice. LinkedIn’s largest Marketing & PR Innovation Group.
Owner: Gerald “Solutionman” Haman | 148,010 members
Description: The Sales Management Association (www.salesmanagement.org) is a global, cross-industry professional association for sales managers, sales executives, sales operations, sales trainers, sales enablement practitioners, and thought-leaders engaged in supporting or leading the sales organization.
Owner: Bob Kelly | 15,274 members
Description: Sales Gravy helps Sales Professionals, Sales Leaders, and Sales Recruiters gain the winning edge. We discuss sales techniques, sales training, sales jobs, sales careers, sales tips, sales recruiting, sales process. www.SalesGravy.com is the most visited sales content website on the internet.
Owner: Jeb Blount | 15,274 members
Description: Have you some Sales or Marketing skills? Let’s share our experiences: Sales development, marketing, CRM, productivity and trade performance, team management and more.
Owner: Laurent J.V. Dubois | 82,904 members
In a recent report by the Altimeter group they identified that many companies have formalized their social media efforts for customer facing employees. I expected Marketing to be the top of the list but was surprised to see Sales so far behind with only 11% of the companies having a formal approach for engagement through social media. With recent studies showing that 61% of LinkedIn members use the site for Networking, Sales is a prime group to be engaging with prospects and customers in social media. Whats even more surprising is that 31% of companies still block social media from all employees.
If marketing is the focal point of social media engagement, sales NEEDS to be brought into the loop. Training sales teams to use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs can have a huge impact on building pipeline and driving awareness of your company. Customer centric marketing brings a 1:1 relationship with prospects and customers that can be transitioned and managed by sales teams.
Leveraging social media and online communities to drive revenue works. You may remember the post Should Sales people be Blogging where we explained how IBM is leveraging social selling. In the Social Selling University we have had great speakers like Jill Konrath, Anneke Seley, Joanne Black and others that have given Enterprise Social Selling tips and strategies to members of the community. Umberto Millet our CEO has written a number of articles around the revolution of social selling in B2B.
Enterprise social selling is growing up. With the growing desire for Social CRM within companies, collecting social conversations for analysis was only scratching the service. What the social enterprise does with those conversations is where the rubber meets the road. Social media is more than a tool for marketing people and it’s being well established that every department across the enterprise can leverage social media for everything from prospecting, opportunity management and customer retention.
Adds Intelligence to the Social Enterprise with Launch of CRM+
Beyond Data: InsideView Brings Intelligence to Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations
By going beyond mere business data to provide complete customer intelligence, Our latest product CRM+ revolutionizes the way all CRM end users – from sales, marketing and service, to operations and partner channels – know their contacts and prospects, build trust, execute productive one-to-one relationships and, ultimately, drive more revenue. With today’s launch, we set a new standard in bringing holistic and social intelligence to the fingertips of all B2B CRM users.
“We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others – and intelligence is a key reason for this.” – Aberdeen Group
“What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels: the intelligence needed for meaningful one-to-one relationships.,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “For example, just as sales has used intelligence to increase conversion rates, marketing uses contact intelligence to hone their campaigns, account management uses current news to time renewal offers, and professionals such as business development use intelligence to open new relationships.”
“Overwhelming ‘big’ data falls short in providing the intelligence needed for one-to-one business in marketing, service, sales and operations. For example, it’s a no-brainer to have current contact information on a prospect, but what about a holistic view of how you’re connected through former reference customers? Or a news article showing the company just made an acquisition? What about their latest tweets? It’s time for forward-looking intelligence in CRM to correct the ‘rear-view mirror’ approach currently provided by data companies,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO and founder of InsideView.
What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels” Umberto Milletti
CRM+ is for any company looking to empower all external-facing employees with real-time intelligence on prospects and customers, suppliers and partners. InsideView’s CRM+ provides just that to ensure all users are looking at the same information, improve KPI, and create more meaningful one-to-one relationships. InsideView CRM+ does this within workers’ process flow within their existing CRM platform.
Independent research firm Aberdeen Group has already shown the benefits of InsideView’s intelligence on sales results: At least a 10 percent increase in top-line revenue and more than 10 percent increase in quota attainment, to name a few. When intelligence is applied to additional areas – such as marketing and customer service – the impact is even greater.
“Providing intelligence to not just sales but to other parts of the organization including marketing, customer service, and operations makes a big difference in terms of overall organizational performance,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research. “We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others – and intelligence is a key reason for this.”
“As companies continue to embrace social CRM, they need intelligence – not data – to manage the rapidly changing landscape of customer relationships,” Milletti added. “We are excited to launch this next big step in providing this meaningful, actionable and results-driving intelligence to the entire social enterprise.”
On top of all the work to continue optimizing the application for our growing list of customers, we wanted to highlight some enhancements to the application that all of you should be seeing with the latest release.
Updated Connection Summary: You are now able to get a snapshot of any personal & professional connections from any company. This was a request brought to us by a few customers that wanted a snapshot in the record so they could see who they were connected to and how they were connected.
We now identify for you if you are connected through a coworker, a reference account or through previous coworkers.
The result is that you can now look at the snapshot and have more intelligence about who you want to drill into further to help make the introduction or use as leverage to connect with your target.
The new Connection Dashboard gives you a list of connections that you have access through using our Smart Connections. These are not direct connections that can be found using networks like LinkedIn but more implied connections that look at my past employers and other information from my profile to identify ways I can be connected to my target.
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
It was a busy month and I’m catching up on some announcements. After the announcement of our prize at Dreamforce, a major announcement with our partner SugarCRM, a new product release with some amazing enhancements, I had some other social projects to work on. One of those projects was a redesign of Social Selling University. SSU was created early this year with a focus in social selling for the enterprise. After a great series of webinars and speaking events, it was clear to everyone that Social Selling University was something we needed to invest more resources into. That started with a better looking website.
New Social Selling University Website
Social Selling by definition is the use of sales 2.0 tools to identify and engage prospects to create new opportunities and drive revenue. The biggest obstacles I encounter when talking to sales teams is that even though they are familiar with social media on a personal level, they don’t know where to start when it comes to applying these tools to their professional life.
Social Selling University is broken into 4 main parts that are designed to offer education and resources to sales people that want to know more about leveraging social media for sales.
The amount of content is growing and we are just about to roll out our next series of webinars featuring sales experts and training on ways to make the most out of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social tools that can get you more connected with your prospects.
