It can be a pain in the rump trying to find a couple of blog posts worth spending your morning reading and jump-starting the week. Literally hundreds and thousands of sales blogs with self-proclaimed “best sales solutions” trying to cram their way into your Twitter feed, Google search results and your existence. Fret no more as I have done the searching for you and found what I deem some great sales blog posts. Take a look and have a phenomenal week.

1. The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study – CRM Outsiders
2. 5 Steps to Create a Killer Google+ Business Page – BrainSell Blog
3. Are You Lost In a B2B Sales Lead Paradox? – Marketo Blog
4. New Study Says Customers Think Companies Don’t Give a Damn ABout Their Time…Just Their Money – Brent’s Social CRM Blog
5. Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business - Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog
6. Eight Business Apps That Will Change the Way You Work - Emergence Capital Partners
7. How Much Will You Sell in 2012 With Social Media? - Selling Power
8. Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make – Selling to Big Companies
9. Data Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data – DataMyth
10. Three Steps to Develop Yourself – S. Anthony Iannarino; the Sales Blog

Meanwhile, at InsideView we have continued to invest in our products and our people, growing our business at over 100% year-over-year.  To keep up with our rapid growth, we need to find the most passionate, competent and innovative employees.  I believe that many of you fit that bill, and I’m writing this open letter to invite you to join InsideView. You will find a fun, vibrant environment with very bright people, and an open culture that fosters collaboration and innovation.

We are passionate about our products and our customers.  Last month’s data.com announcement made it clear to me that D&B has given up on Hoover’s in the critically important sales & marketing ecosystem, and that customers will need to look elsewhere to find sophisticated sales intelligence. I believe most of them will decide that InsideView is their best path to productivity, joining scores of Hoover’s customers that have already chosen to switch to InsideView.

We are looking for talent in every part of our business and in several locations.  The positions include Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Content. Locations are in the field, at our San Francisco headquarters, and for our soon-to-be-opened Austin office (I love Austin’s entrepreneurial culture, and I see the opportunity for Austin to become a main hub for InsideView).

If you have a passion for innovation, customer success and are looking for a vibrant work environment, please email us at beyondhoovers@insideview.com for a confidential conversation. We’d also be glad to have you talk to any of the ex-Hoover’s employees who now work at InsideView, where they have found new opportunities to grow and delight customers.

We have just begun in delivering our vision, one where customer intelligence makes all customer-facing employees dramatically more productive. If you share my passion, we’d love to talk to you.

Umberto Milletti @umbertom

CEO & Founder, InsideView

Originally posted on Umberto’s blog.

You go to college, get accepted into a MBA program and take all the core courses designed to introduce you to the various areas of business such as accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, operations management, etc. But where does social media fit into this? That was a question on the minds of a large group of professors that attended the recent Summer Marketing Educators’ Conference 2011 hosted by the American Marketing Association.

Social Marketing Meets Sales: The Role of Social Media in Professional Selling

That was the title of the session being run by Robert Peterson Ph.D, Professor in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University and Michael Mallin Ph.D. Professor of Marketing and Sales at the University of Toledo. The epic resumes of these two people is just too much to list. They have both been involved in shaping business minds for a long time and have contributed research that has made an impact on not just the universities they work for but the students that have passed through their classes.

Social media trends and how social plays a part in the sales process was a special request by the organization that these two took on to put together. They were referred to me by the sales methodology company Miller Heiman (thanks!) as the expert in social selling and it only took me two emails to fill a panel of 4 other experts in the field. Anneke Seley, Craig Rosenberg, Maria Pergolino and Adam Metz were great enough to take time on a Sunday afternoon to discuss and answer questions from people with degrees that were almost intimidating. (for me anyway)

Social Media in the Classroom

Teaching social media does not come easily to academics, especially when it comes to specifically teaching social media for sales. The attending professors heard the panel discuss why social selling is important, what’s been working, and how to either develop courses around the subject matter of leveraging social media for sales or incorporate social media into the courses they are already teaching.

In the discussions the professors all agreed that Social Selling in the Enterprise was a key topic being raised by their students. Understanding what social networks, sales 2.0 tools were available and more importantly how to use them was a focus for the coming school year. I believe everyone on the panel delivered. It was exciting to see professors taking notes and raising their hands to get more education on this growing field of study so they could pass it along to their students.

Social Selling 101

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.

• Resources
• Webinars
• Blog
• Forum

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.

SugarCon ’11, SugarCRM’s fifth annual user & customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and experts from around the world. Packed with two days of business, technical and product presentations, SugarCon provides practical knowledge that you can apply to improve your company’s performance.

InsideView has the good fortune to have multiple sessions at SugarCon 2011 where we will have the opportunity to cover a great deal of content. Starting off with a Keynote address from Umberto Milletti and then two separate breakout sessions with Inbound Marketing Manager and Social Selling Director Koka Sexton along with the VP of Marketing Ralf VonSosen.

Big Data and the Emergence of Social Selling with Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO, InsideView

Room: Ballroom

Keynotes | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 1:15  – 2:00

As more businesses transact online and millions of users including executives and consumers use social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, there’s an overwhelming amount of data, also known as “Big Data”, on companies and contacts online.

This data deluge presents new challenges as well as big opportunities, especially for sales organizations, to distill actionable insights about prospects and transform selling from an art to science. Harnessing business and social intelligence about prospects will no longer be optional, but essential for increasing sales productivity and win rates.

Learn about why Big Data matters and how it can help you change the game of selling.

Session #1

Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton

Track 4: The Sugar Exchange | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 2:00  – 2:40

Today’s customers are not very responsive to traditional sales and marketing tactics such as email blasts, cold-calls, and canned pitches. Using social media, customers are researching products and solutions, and talking to their peers for recommendations instead of listening to vendor pitches. Over 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before it gets to sales.

Most sales reps and sales organizations are overwhelmed by too much data and frustrated by the loss of productivity as they seek actionable sales intelligence about their prospects!  Harnessing business and social insights about prospects from online data can be a game-changer and a productivity booster for sales teams.

Come to this session to learn about how you make your selling more of a competitive advantage, what you need to have in place, and how you can get started.

Session #2

5 Must-Haves For Boosting Sales With Social Media with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton

Track 6: Social Business | Wednesday, April 6^th | 11:30am – 12:10pm
Your customers have changed. How you find them and engage with them has changed too. It’s more important than ever for sales organizations to recognize this opportunity to build relationships and generate new leads using social media. The problem is what tools to use, metrics to track and how to train them.

In this session, you will learn about the 5 easy steps you should take, that will empower a sales team to engage with customers in social networks. You will also learn what tools work best and how to measure the results.

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

Read this white paper and learn:

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

Social Selling Paper – Download

With a successful launch and great response to the Social Selling University, we are hosting a Social Selling Workshop to help educate and enable sales professionals to the impact that can be made by incorporating the use of social media to the sales process.

InsideView is a sponsor of the Sales 2.0 Conference and it makes sense that we bring our expertise of social media for sales teams to this audience. The Social Selling Workshop with be a combination of speakers talking about social media in B2B sales environments and a panel of experts that will discuss social media strategies and trends being found in companies adopting social selling techniques.

Workshop Agenda

4:00pm – 4:30pm: Welcome and Intro
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power

4:30pm – 5:00pm: Social Selling Primer
Koka Sexton, InsideView

5:00pm – 5:30pm: Social Media in B2B Sales
Jacob Morgan, Chess Media Group

5:30pm – 5:45pm: Break

5:45pm – 6:15pm: Panel Discussion
Moderator: Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power
Anneke Seley, Phone Works
Pelin Wood Thorogood, Schulman + Thorogood Group
6:15pm – 7:00pm: Cocktails and Raffle

The Social Selling Workshop is not limited to attendees of the Sales 2.0 conference. Anyone in the area that is interested in learning more about social media for sales can attend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adding Anyone and Everyone to LinkedIn

One school of thought is that LinkedIn is a social network that people should be very open with. There are groups of LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networker) that have collected upwards of 30,000 connections on this professional social network. If you get a connection request from someone, blindly add them into the fold and continue doing this and watch you numbers of connections skyrocket. There are actual websites that get you added to lists (for a fee) to increase your LinkedIn connections. An unofficial site known as the TopLinked.com tracks the connection counts of many LIONs.

Outside of an organized group of LinkedIn connection collectors, there is some value in regular people trying to build a large network in LinkedIn. As members we are only able to see certain information on other members based on our level of separation from them. The larger the connections you have, the higher chance you will be more closely associated with other people and see more details in their profile.

When I was starting off in sales, I had the idea that the more connections in LinkedIn I could collect would somehow equal more leads and opportunities. Since then I have learned that this is actually very counter productive. There is no way to manage let alone network with 2000+ people on a realistic level. I had to make the tough decision to ignore many of the requests for connecting that I was getting on a regular basis, mostly from sales trainers and SEO marketers. As many of the comments in the groups suggest, there has to be some sort of perceived value in the connection other than just adding a number.

Paul Castain has a large following especially in his LinkedIn group. He joined the conversation and added this:

I speak to lots of people each week about their social networking efforts and I can tell you that this pretty much never comes up.

What does come up are their perceptions of online idiots, combative people in the groups, people who are takers in their network, people who pop up out of nowhere and want an instant favor and by far the most popular are people who connect and immediate try to sell something.

Only Add People You Know

The flip side of the coin is only adding connections that you actually know. These are people you have done business with or have met or had conversations with in the past. Obviously this is a much smaller group of connections and can only be leveraged in limited ways.

Alan Prefer • …I dont believe that LinkedIn is a place for strangers, I dont have a contact on my list that i dont know…what would be the benefit be?

Limiting the number of connections you have to ONLY people you know seems a little counter productive also. If you already know the person then why would you need to add them to LinkedIn? Alan (comment above) followed up his statement by saying that he uses his connections in a very selective refferal network. In this case I can see why it would make sense to have a very select number of connections but that’s not how I think most people use LinkedIn.

Connecting with the Right People in the Right Way

Since LinkedIn doesn’t have the functionality to “follow” people outside of groups, the only way to keep up to date with some people is through an official connection with them. If there is a contact in LinkedIn that you want to connect with, the best thing to do is send them a request. If you are going to send a request to a stranger on LinkedIn, take the time to add a personal note, and by personal, I do not mean the template provided.

In the end it comes down to you personal preference. Your profile on LinkedIn is yours to control and the size of your network is something you should be aware of.

What are your personal rules for adding connections in LinkedIn? Let’s discuss it below.

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.”

Last weekend, I returned home to find my mother brimming with excitement over a Christmas gift for my sister. She didn’t even stop to point out her new Santa collection (of which, I later learned, she is immoderately proud) before rushing me to her wrapping workshop where she had prominently displayed a Flip video camera in the center of the room. My mom is not the most tech savvy woman in the world, so I admit I was a little surprised at her enthusiasm for a video recorder. But it wasn’t just any Flip camera. Printed across the back was a ridiculous picture of my three siblings and I goofing off. I suddenly understood what my mom’s hype had been all about. It was so much better than a boring white or black video camera: it was customized.

This year, Flip video cameras aren’t the only personalized holiday gifts that have popped up. You can customize everything from yoga mats to M&Ms, and according to Gwendolyn Bounds of The Wall Street Journal, “Holiday Me-tailers” are on the rise. In a recent article for WSJ, Bounds expands on the trend towards customizable holiday gifts, concluding that it’s our vanity that drives us to give and desire “me-centric” gifts. But is it such a bad thing to want to tailor everything that can be tailored? At InsideView, we deliver the promise of customizable sales experiences, and it hardly seems vain to call a customer with a personal message instead of a generic one. Is there some comfort in knowing that everyone else has the same version? Or is it some sort of badge of honor to know you’re the only one in the world with your child’s chromosomes enlarged and framed on the mantle?

In her article, Bounds speculates that social media may play a role in our enthusiasm to customize everything: “Social-networking … has helped break down inhibitions about sharing our private lives.” Social media is also the hottest trend in the business world, and as more companies leverage social media in their business models, more professionals are growing comfortable with the idea of exposing aspects of their personal lives to their social business networks. When you allow people to access information about you, you don’t have to waste time deleting useless sales emails and standard marketing automation emails because people can find out whether or not you’re a good prospect before they reach out to you. If you’re in the market for a gift or a product, you can use blogs, customer forums, Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, etc., to zero in on exactly what you want. Social media allows businesses to micro-target their audiences, so shoppers today get hyper-personalized shopping experiences – both as individual consumers, and as professional representatives of their companies. But is there a difference between “customizable” in our personal lives and “customizable” in our professional lives?

Technology has come a long way since the first days of online shopping, and it also plays a huge role in the custom gifting trend. Nike will design a pair of shoes based on the terrain and weather conditions with which you’re accustomed to training. You can customize a shoe without spending and arm and a leg in the same way that cloud computing technologies such as InsideView allow you to tailor your sales experience. Perhaps we can attribute the rise of the customized sales experience to consumers who identify with unique items in their personal lives and expect the same when they go to work.

For now, I plan to keep watch on the custom trend. I have a suspicion that our consumer experiences are closely tied to our professional experiences. As communications in the B2B world become more like interactions between businesses and consumers, I think we will see more and more B2B companies developing customizable products and services. So whether or not you’re going to give M&Ms with your cat’s face printed on them as hostess gifts, it seems that this year, many will have a customizable holiday.

Dreamforce is T-Minus 5 days 00 hours 44 minutes and 40 seconds as I write this post. The InsideView office has all hands on deck getting the last minute details worked out and preparing for the orchestrated chaos that is about to unfold. Every department has a role to play in the largest event we attend every year. Sales is polishing the presentations and following up with customers that will be attending, Marketing created some great graphics all around our theme of “See your leads in 3D“, created the microsite Dreamforce in 3D, and just received our shipment of the largest TV in the world that will be given away to a Dreamforce attendee.

As much fun as I know Dreamforce will be, it isn’t without a small level of stress that I’m sure every vendor has wrapped around worrying about all of the little things that could go wrong. Luckily I haven’t had any nightmares about the event but I would be lying if I said I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night from some lucid dream about the show and making a note about things I need to be sure to follow up on.

GlanceNetworks must be going through the same stuff since they posted this picture on there Twitter profile showing their Dreamforce final checklist.

Tradeshows especially the ones as massive as Dreamforce require a lot of planning and even more faith once it comes to execution. I started this week searching the intertoobs for blog posts about Dreamforce and trying to see what everyone else was writing about the event that could help Dreamforce veterans as well as the newbies of the show.

Dreamforce 2010 Resources

14 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Dreamforce by our friends at Marketo gives a great overview of what to expect at Dreamforce and even offered to give away a VIP prize to one of their fans by paying for their trip.

InsideView created an online paper all about Dreamforce that shows some of the best news on Twitter about the event and highlights some of the most interesting posts by Dreamforce fans.

CRMFYI aka. Jeff Grosse has a collection of blog posts around Dreamforce that go back a few years that are still relevant.

Arkus has a great post about the Top 10 reasons to go to Dreamforce. Although I think that #2 should be replaced by InsideView will be there, the #1 reason is spot on with education and going to this event expecting to learn more about the cloud and how Salesforce will impact your business in a wonderful way.

Dreamforce on Facebook:

Dreamforce: Tips for First Year Attendees was written by Force Monkey and has some excellent tips for people new to the Dreamforec experience.

7.) If you know certain people are going to be at Dreamforce, and you really want to meet them — make arrangements in advance! With Chatter, there’s no excuse to not reach out and make those connections now! Ask if they can get together with you for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks.

I just happened to stumble upon an #awesome collection of blog posts by Paul Young that feature an Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce. He covers everything from food, dealing with the over-stimuli of the show and even touches on the bathroom issues.

• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 1
• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 2
• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 3

Let’s not forget about the Dreamforce parties! After running around the event, collecting SWAG and listening to some of the best thought leaders in CRM, you get a chance to unwind and have a few drinks courtesy of some of the Dreamforce sponsors. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you look at the Dreamforce Party Directory.

Dreamforce Foursquare

For all of you geolocation addicts like me, you will probably be checking into Dreamforce from your phones. There are more venues being created daily it seems but there is only 1 Dreamforce 2010 – Moscone Center.

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

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.

B2B marketing organizations are frequently unable to get results with traditional tactics for lead generation — oftentimes poor data quality and lack of richness impacts both purchased and house lists.

To improve performance, marketing organizations are looking to the Internet as well as social media, but finding relevant insights from the mountains of information now available online is overwhelming. By tapping into business and social intelligence, leading organizations are dramatically transforming their marketing performance in terms of key metrics such as lead volume, lead conversions, and revenue impact.

Join this FREE live Webinar to learn:

• What is Intelligent Marketing?
• How to improve B2B marketing performance using social media
• Best practices and case studies for Intelligent Marketing

Speakers:

Aaron Kahlow, CEO, Online Marketing Connect

Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO, InsideView

Jason Jue, VP Marketing, Rackspace Hosting

Jennifer Smith, Moderator, American Marketing Association

Follow the link below to join the discussion of  how social intelligence can help drive lead generation and conversion.

Smiling and dialing died about five years ago.

I should know. I was one of those smile-and-dial corporate B2B sales reps, from 1999, until 2002. I left that world when I was 24. And I have no regrets about being one of those guys. I learned how to get past the gatekeeper. I learned how to sell explicit benefits over features and advantages. I got to work under Steve Winandy, one of the best damn sales managers in the world, at CDW Computer Centers, way back in the day.

So, my business partner Jacob and I have a big call to do, tomorrow, with the President of a really big hotel. So, here’s how we prep for selling to the social customer (who, if you read on, turns out is not-so-social, himself), Ms. Vice-President-Of-A-Big-Hotel. This is an important economic decision-maker, and this is how we socialize the sale, step-by-step.

1. We met the prospect, who we’ll call Jane, at a conference a few weeks ago. Connect to Jenny across all key social channels that she uses (LinkedIn, her Twitter, her company’s Twitter). Subscribe to all key social channels related to the hotel (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

2. Enter all of this data in our Social CRM, Salesforce, and dump down all social information, manually, into it.

3. Do first call with Jane, using our social sales data that InsideView pumps into Salesforce, along with the social data we’ve already garnered. (The first call went really well, by the way.)

4. Send Jane a copy of my first book, There Is No Secret Sauce, as well as my partner Jacob’s book, Twittfaced. Begin researching everything on Jane’s boss, the economic-decision-maker, using InsideView. Scraped data from PR Newswire and a number of other sources, since InsideView/Jigsaw didn’t actually have any data on this prospect. Added all bio information we could find to the opportunity in Salesforce, read the key company emails that were voluntarily forwarded over by our prospect, Jane.

5. Prep for our second call with the hotel, and Jane and the economic decision maker, with all of our social data, including a few last-minute changes. We know that the prospect has a financial background, we know where she’s worked for the last 10 years, we know where she went to school, and we know, as best as we can, what his direct reports think are the 2011 company priorities. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we could have gotten by smiling and dialing.

You can call this good prospecting, or you can call it good research, but this is just another day in the life of a social sales professional. Nothing fancy, nothing new. Feel free to leave any questions on this post, and I’ll answer them. Always happy to help with the block-and-tackle.

Brief history of the CRM

Customer Relationship Managers or CRM applications are a staple in most companies. It’s the central repository of data related to your customers, prospects and contacts. CRMs shifted the business model for companies that only focused on collecting information about their contacts and turning that data into information that they could build from outside of typical database marketing. In the 1990’s the concept of managing customer loyalty and rewarding them based on their purchases was a game changer for companies grabbing for market share. This was how frequent flier miles were invented and still managed today.

Customers are using social media

Social media is changing everything for companies. You can’t ignore platforms like Twitter, Blogs, TripIt or Facebook anymore when it comes to your customers. To do so will cost your company in more ways than just lost revenue. Social media is driving brand awareness and sales in more ways than typical media channels like TV and radio. I was recently at an event where the keynote speaker made the statement that “Facebook is the new cigarette break” and it is one of the most visited sites at the workplace. That and the recent announcement that if Facebook where a country it would be the 3^rd largest in the world makes the importance of being engaged in social media even more important.

What’s defining customer 2.0?

Customers are busy and don’t want to spend hours a day talking to sales people. In many cases the customer can find out more about your company in 10 minutes than some of the sales people working at the company. Between review sites, blogs and even asking for recommendations on sites like LinkedIn, customers are making buying decisions before ever crossing the virtual doorstep of the vendor. These customers need and demand to be treated differently than customers from even as short as 2 years ago. They don’t want a lot of marketing fluff of buzz words thrown at them. Customer 2.0 has a need and they just want the vendor to cut to the point and tell them if they can do X, Y or Z to get the job done.

Welcome to Social CRM

Since companies are realizing that maintaining their CRM isn’t enough since customers are now getting so much more of their information online, sales people, marketers and even support specialists need to have applications available to them that l them see the social streams of their customers and accounts. Oracle Open World had full sessions over the course of the event on Social CRM. The key is that you have to enable your sales people to know more about the accounts and customers they are talking to in order to gain their trust and be seen as a leader in your space. If you don’t, your competitor will and I see it happening on a daily basis.

Social CRM is more than a buzz word, it’s shaping business models to adapt to a new type of customer. A quick analysis of the search term “Social CRM” shows that over the course of 2 years the requests for information regarding Social CRM has increased exponentially and doesn’t show any indication of slipping. From the data going back to 2008, it looks like Social CRM is just becoming more of a hot topic.

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• 9 Helpful Tips To Deal With Negative People – The Chris Voss Show
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• How to Improve Your B2B Sales Workflow with Social Media – Social Media B2B
• Salesforce.com’s Benioff unplugged: Supervendors suck, Oracle, Zuckerberg as Gates – Saleforce.com
• 8 Ways To Reduce Sales With Twitter – Sales Operations Blog
• An Opportunity For “Wow”! – Paul Castain
• You failed at Customer Service, so now try Social Processes. – Micahel Moaz
• 25 Case Studies Using Twitter to Increase Business and Sales – Kyle Lacy

• Why Should I Network on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn etc? – Jonathan Farrington
• 7 Trends Leading to the Growth of Marketing Automation – Eloqua Blog
• Sales 2.0 Conference – Collaboration That Delivers – InsideCRM
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• What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans. – GigaOM
• Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM, Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together – Entperprise 2.0
• CRM: More Relevant Than Ever – DestinationCRM
• CRM Is Only Half of the Story – CustomerThink
• A Sneak Peek at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - CRM Software Review
• Should we stop marketing to the CIO? – Chris Koch
• Kickstarting your Social CRM Initiative: 5 Fundamentals and 5 Immediate Opportunities – Brian Vellmure
• Who Are Our Customers ?! – B2B Buzz
• The 15 Minute Prospecting Workout – Sales 2.0