From Ireland to the United Kingdom, sales people just gained more intelligence as InsideView announced the general availability of InsideView UK & Ireland edition. Working with eight of the leading integrators and resellers in the region we are already making an impact for over fifty businesses since we announced our move into Ireland and the UK.

InsideView gathers tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence on UK and Ireland businesses directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions. But what will the UK and Ireland Edition offer?

UK and Ireland Edition capabilities include:

• UK and Ireland territory maps for list building and prospecting
• Turnover displayed in GBP (£) or Euros (€)
• Individual profile setting for country-specific display of currency
• Expanded content coverage for companies, executives, public sector and government entities

What will the UK and Ireland Edition Offer?

With the UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView comes new Channel Partners. Together, InsideView and these partners are bringing actionable sales insights to teams of sales professionals in enterprises across the region. CGE Software, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a distributor of add-on CRM enhancements, highlighted the advantages that InsideView brings to its customers.

Content Sources – UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView

In response to the huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland businesses, InsideView is continuing its global expansion by bringing the industry’s leading sales intelligence solution to the UK and Ireland. We pull content from over 7,000 UK specific sources, the top 8 can be found here.

“InsideView is a powerful application that gives marketing and sales people great insights into the prospects and customers they target,” said Mike Spink, sales director of CGE Software Limited. “The most significant aspect of InsideView, is its ability to identify key people in millions of companies throughout the UK and the world — and deliver rich social profiles and connection paths to them. Of all the solutions I have seen, InsideView is the absolute best.”

Audra Oliver, head of marketing communications for King Worldwide and InsideView customer offered: “We are thrilled to have InsideView not only for the company information, but for the contact details, news, smart connection feature, and financials. We sell everything from investor relations services to high-level crisis management consulting and being able to get relevant company information at the click of a button is very valuable to us. Moreover the InsideView team is helpful, responsive, and made getting started virtually effortless. I would highly recommend it.”

InsideView is also teaming with business information providers and gathering data from all major news, social, and company sources that are specific to the U.K. and Ireland. This information improves the effectiveness of sales professionals that serve these markets where more than forty-five percent of the population is active in social media.

Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView, commented, “As more businesses understand that they can get an inside edge by leveraging social, news, company and professional information, they are turning to InsideView. The delivery of InsideView for the U.K. and Ireland is an indication that we can rapidly respond to the growing demand for sales intelligence around the globe.”

After tremendous growth in the US, InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, announced today the beginning of its global expansion beginning with its InsideView UK and Ireland Edition. Thousands of US companies now deploy InsideView’s award-winning company and people intelligence to increase the productivity of their customer-facing employees, improving metrics across the customer cycle, including lead conversion, win rates and customer retention and expansion.

With the UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView takes this competitive advantage worldwide, providing professionals with effective intelligence that helps them be more targeted, relevant and timely in their sales and customer management efforts. The UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView will be generally available in Q1, as a stand-alone application as well as a mash-up within market-leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.

 “There is a worldwide demand for more intelligent ways of doing business, nowhere is this more true than in marketing, sales, and service. Our expansion today is part of our commitment to bring professionals around the globe the kind of intelligence that drives productivity, relevance and revenue.” – Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView.

Global Demand for InsideView’s Sales Intelligence

InsideView is seeing huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland-based businesses, where over 45% of the population is active on social media including Facebook and LinkedIn, making it the second largest market in the world for new solutions that can drive ROI from social media.

Sales Intelligence has become an imperative as the deluge of data, the changing buying process, and new social media dynamics have surfaced in customer processes. InsideView provides professionals with the most relevant information about customers and prospects, and alerts them on the best time for outreach. This intelligence results in highly effective, productive and lucrative customer-facing employees: In fact, companies that employ InsideView’s style of intelligence see a ten percent improvement in top-line revenue.

Sales Intelligence Tailor Made for the UK and Ireland

Thousands of users are already using InsideView for targeting UK and Ireland, and with this launch they and other customers will have access to deeper and tailor-made sales intelligence . InsideView gathers and analyzes tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions, resulting in more effective sales and even improved CRM engagement.

For its UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView is partnering with top global and local providers of business information, as well as gathering and analyzing information from all major online news publications, user-generated, and social media sources specific to UK and Ireland.

InsideView is also teaming with leading CRM system integrators including Outsourcery, Ciber, Alfapeople, ConsultCRM, The CRM Business and No Blue to bring its intelligence to relevant CRM platforms in the UK and Ireland. ConsultCRM, one of the UK’s leading Microsoft Gold Partners specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is delighted to be partnering with InsideView in its go-to-market expansion.

“Our clients are constantly under pressure to maximize the value from their Microsoft CRM deployment. InsideView adds immediate value because it offers ready-integrated real-time company intelligence, contact data, news, tailored alerts and even social media,” said John Pearson, Sales Director at ConsultCRM. “We are excited to be working with an offering that truly answers the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question for CRM users in sales and account management.”

Summer of Sales Intelligence: InsideView Sees Huge Gains in Customers and Major CRM Platforms, Delivers 8 Million Sales Triggers in Recent Quarter

Ten times more companies started using intelligence to sell better in 2011′s Q3 than any other quarter. That’s according to the latest numbers from InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence for the enterprise. The company also revealed it delivered more than 8 million unique new opportunity sales triggers to its customers during the same period.

Intelligence Over Data: Quality and Quantity in Harmony
InsideView’s sales intelligence provides something data simply can’t: a competitive advantage. Anyone can provide a current title, phone number or email address on a lead. Only InsideView can provide this basic information, but more. For example, a business event — like an acquisition or merger — that warrants sales outreach, or news event like a product launch, that matters to the ongoing sales conversation.

“While other companies are betting their business on providing more and more data, we’re finding accelerating demand for higher quality sales intelligence, not just more data,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “Sales intelligence is the combination of not only business data, but social context, how you’re connected to a lead or prospect, valuable news insight, and real-time triggers that inform you when to take action. In fact, we’re delivering 35 million unique news trigger events to our users a year to help them sell better and generate more revenue.”

Independent research firm Aberdeen Research has found that InsideView’s style of sales intelligence increases several key areas for sales success, including sales quota attainment, customer retention and overall revenue growth.

“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,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research.

Big Growth and Launch of CRM+
InsideView’s own growth saw almost 10,000 new professionals using its free product, and over 250 enterprises signing on to its award-winning paid version, since July. In August, the company launched CRM+, which brought its intelligence technology to a broader business sector including marketing, service, human resources and more.

“InsideView gives businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients,” noted TechCrunch in coverage of InsideView’s CRM+ launch. “CRM+ now brings social data to all CRM users (marketing, operations, customer service, etc.), not just sales.”

InsideView was also the only provider of sales intelligence included in August’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social CRM.

Success On All CRM Solutions
InsideView’s leadership continues across all major CRM platforms:

• Salesforce.com: InsideView continues to be the all-time most popular sales app on the salesforce.com AppExchange.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: In July, the company was selected as a 2011 Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year.
• SAP: Earlier in the summer, InsideView gained the prestigious “Powered by SAP NetWeaver®” certification status.
• SugarCRM: In June, InsideView and SugarCRM combined forces to bring InsideView standard and out-of-the-box.
• Oracle CRM OnDemand: InsideView is part of the Inner Circle program.
• NetSuite: Collaboration through the Preferred Partner Program.

To learn more about InsideView, please visit www.insideview.com.

InsideView and CoreMotives increase adoption and value for Dynamics CRM users by combining sales intelligence and web intelligence. “Reaching the right person at the right time with the right message is the key to successful sales,” says Heidi Tucker, VP of Global Alliances at InsideView. “CRM users today need their CRM to do more than track their sales pipeline; they want integrated solutions that deliver the knowledge they need to engage customers.” When used together within Dynamics CRM, CoreMotives and InsideView give customers the power to win more deals more quickly, without resorting to cold calls using low hit prospect lists.

Companies spend thousands of dollars buying general prospect lists when they could simply tap into the visitors on their website that are already interested in their product or service. The problem is that many of those visitors are anonymous.

With CoreMotives and InsideView, the anonymous visitor is identified within seconds of hitting the website, a lead is automatically created in CRM, and InsideView Sales intelligence enriches the lead in real time with demographic information, social profiles, news and more, so that the sales rep can reach out to that prospect immediately with a relevant conversation starter.

“It’s about increasing your market share,” says Rhett Thompson, Cofounder of CoreMotives, “and solutions that enable you to do it faster than your competition put you ahead – this is the value CoreMotives and InsideView bring to organizations.” Simply put, CoreMotives lets you know who views your site, and InsideView tells you about that prospect and gives you an inside contact; this partnership brings social discovery to a whole new level.

Companies will save money by eliminating lead enrichment and data append services, and will dramatically increase opportunities and win rates by identifying many new leads and reducing the time from lead to contact. Working a lead while it is hot – and before the competition gets to it – is the difference between winning and losing.

When you combine the right information with the right leads, you’ve got an unstoppable marketing and sales process. “InsideView and CoreMotives are both gaining momentum in the Microsoft CRM marketplace, and we are honored to further each other’s success with this partnership,” says Rhett Thompson. As part of the partnership, CoreMotives will now include InsideView with every installation.

About CoreMotives

CoreMotives is the number one marketing automation vendor in the Dynamics CRM space, with over 500 clients in 30 countries.  Offering email marketing, lead scoring, web visitor tracking, nurture marketing, web forms, surveys, and alert notifications all embedded within CRM, CoreMotives enables clients to detect, track and target prospects interacting with their website or other marketing assets.  CoreMotives is Marketing power for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For more information visit, www.coremotives.com.

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?

V64 release features:

• Text-only alerts for Blackberry users
• Enhanced partner contact search
• Improved Twitter profile search
• Salesforce – Multiple contact sync
• Salesforce – Self-service field mapping for CRM administrators

V63 release features:
• Add a company on-demand
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook – Data Sync & Export
• NetSuite CRM – Partner intelligence
• Salesforce – Easy watchlist set-up

Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are your V61 March release highlights:

• New Company Detail View
• Company List Sorting
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users – Seamless Export & Sync

New, Streamlined Company Detail View

Quickly find and leverage the most actionable insights. Starting at the top you will see a nice clean layout that allows you to easily scan basic sales data (such as industry, revenue, employees, address, etc) so that you can quickly qualify a new lead or get up to speed on an existing account. More importantly, we’re drawing your attention to actionable sales intelligence with a new navigation for the Smart Agent results (a.k.a. selling triggers). We’re also doing a better job of summarizing the number of contacts available at company and how you connect to them (including our Smart Connections, your LinkedIn connections, or your Facebook friends.) Think of it as a dashboard for prospecting, qualifying, and your engaging customers.

Company List Sorting

Prioritize prospect lists by revenue, employees, location, etc.  With the introduction of company list sorting you can easily prioritize your prospects before exporting them to CSV or XLS.  When you generate a company list the default sorting will be by name but you’ll notice that the columns allow you to sort by business type, industry, revenue, or employees.  Target the right companies at the right time with on-the-fly prioritization.

Seamless Data Export for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Enable CRM users to sync and export data with a single click.  This new facility allows you to set up proxy / delegate user authentication for your Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance. What that means is that all of your users can sync and export data from InsideView without being prompted for CRM login information. Make it easy for users to keep your CRM updated with the most accurate business information, contact details and social intelligence.

We appreciate your business and the great product feedback you continue to provide. Please share with us by submitting your ideas (and voting up other users’ suggestions) on the InsideView Community. If you have any additional questions or would like to schedule a follow-up training for your sales team, please contact us at support@insideview.com. Thanks again!

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.

InsideView, the social selling and sales intelligence leader, today announced that Ralf VonSosen has been named vice president of marketing to drive InsideView’s expansion and growth, and to bring InsideView’s sales intelligence to the more than ten million B2B sales professionals across the globe. VonSosen’s responsibilities include branding, corporate communications, demand generation, product marketing strategies, and marketing operations.

The news comes on the heels of InsideView’s $12 million Series C funding round and next stage of acceleration of worldwide distribution, as well as the recent launch of Social Selling University. Social Selling University educates sales professionals on how to leverage social media technologies and methodologies to increase sales productivity and drive revenue throughout the entire sales cycle.

“As a seasoned CRM and technology executive, Ralf brings valuable insight to InsideView’s product and brand positioning. He is an integral part of our leadership team,” said InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti. “Ralf will help us take our company and product from its current place as a visionary go-to leader to our next chapter as a ubiquitous sales productivity tool among the millions of sales professionals looking to incorporate social selling and sales intelligence into their work.”

VonSosen brings nearly two decades of CRM and Cloud technology marketing, strategy and corporate development expertise to InsideView. He most recently spent five years as VP of marketing — leading fast-growing eCommerce start-up marketing strategies – most recently at MarketLive and previously Infopia, where he helped build each company’s brand, develop their partner ecosystems, expand revenue generation and drive product innovations. Prior to that, he played a fundamental role in launching the first SAP CRM on-demand solution as VP of solutions marketing at SAP. In the late nineties, VonSosen built Siebel’s communications and energy CRM industry solutions as director of product marketing.

“In our current world’s mandate of working smarter and faster with real-time data, InsideView is leading the charge in a market thirsty for innovation: sales and CRM,” said VonSosen. “InsideView is the only company in the market that provides a solution to the overwhelming amount of data available about prospects and customers. I’m excited to be a part of a team that’s changing an entire industry by allowing professionals to spend more time selling, and less time dealing with the burden of information overload.”

Connect with VonSosen and follow the InsideView marketing story on LinkedIn.

Social Selling University has continued to grow in numbers. After a great launch of the program at the beginning of this month with an All-Star series of webinars focused on leveraging social media for sales. We have also started building a community of sales 2.0 professionals interested in learning more about building a pipeline of new opportunities through social networks.

With an increased focus on enablement through sales intelligence, we are planning on more product enhancements and training. We are leading the conversation for sales people or why social media is important to the sales process.

Recent Social Selling Webinars

Social Calling – Integrating the Who, What & When of Prospecting <~~ WebEx Link

Is your calendar chock-full of meetings with well-qualified prospects? Is cold calling working great for you? Are you having a ball making cold calls? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you may want to attend this webinar.

You’re now dealing with a super-frazzled and super-distracted “Customer 2.0″. The volume cold call is as “dead as a dodo” when dealing with “Customer 2.0”. But smart prospecting is very much alive.

What you will learn

• Why the cold call is dead if it means “smiling and dialing”
• How to use the Who, What & When of prospecting to maximize your chances of getting into your prospect’s office
• How you can use Sales 2.0 tools and techniques to increase your cold calling results dramatically, causing an approximately an 8 x improvement.
• Some of the key Sales 2.0 tools for prospecting and how to use them.

Driving Sales Productivity with Social Intelligence <~~ WebEx Link

Engaging today’s socially-savvy customer requires a lot more than a grasp of the basic facts and figures about their companies. It requires relevance at the time of engagement. Sales reps need a 360 degree view into their prospects that incorporates recent business events, social conversations and social relationships – in other words social intelligence.
In this webinar, you will learn:

• What exactly is social intelligence
• Why social intelligence trumps sales data in driving sales productivity
• How to leverage social intelligence to engage the right prospects at the right time with the right message
• Why leveraging social intelligence is absolutely critical to your sales success today

Social Selling for Executives: What the Management Team Needs to Know to Succeed with Today’s Customers <~~ WebEx Link

Are you a top executive in sales and marketing wondering how a social media strategy fits in your business? Or are you a sales or marketing professional who wants to discuss the benefits of social selling with your manager, an executive team or board of directors? Listen in as Anneke Seley presents data, metrics and customer case stories to illustrate:

• Why and when you should include social media in your selling strategy
• How companies large and small are using social selling
• How you can get started with social selling

Convergence is the premier Microsoft Dynamics event where you can experience first-hand how you can optimize your business and improve your bottom line. This event serves as the meeting point for the Microsoft Dynamics Customer and Partner business community.

Top Five Reasons to Attend Convergence 2011 Atlanta:

1. Learn how you can get the most out of your Microsoft Dynamics solution to drive sales productivity.
2. Network and collaborate with your peers and the product experts from InsideView and Microsoft.
3. Experience the latest solution innovations, new products and technologies InsideView offers to Dynamics users.
4. The event is cost effective, convenient, and organized to meet your needs.
5. Get insights into InsideView’s corporate direction for sales intelligence and understand future plans for your Microsoft Dynamics solution.

The best reason to attend Convergence 2011 is to be in the Geekiest party of the year

Closing more opportunities is the goal of any B2B sales organization. Fill the funnel and work the leads through a cycle that ultimately brings in revenue. None of this is possible in B2B sales without having conversations with the prospects and other stake holders.

The challenge that most sales people are having is that decision makers are crazy busy and even though they decide to download you application or grab a paper of your website, this doesn’t do much more than fill the top of the funnel with a ton of people that you can email or call to follow up with. Data from a new lead does very little to provide insights on what the person or company they represent is currently facing that could open up a conversation. This is why sales intelligence is so valuable.

What’s holding sales people back?

When it comes to doing pre-call research and getting some background on a prospect or company you are calling into, there is a lot of information gathered by just doing a Google search. The problem with this is there is very little context around the results. You can spend an hour digging through search results and other resources to get an idea of who the person is and what challenges their company is facing but you’re busy too and can’t justify a large amount of time to research to make a call that may only take 10-15 minutes. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, in a video interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner. “The gap is that people can’t find it.”

Sales Intelligence Drives the Conversation

Having relevant information fed to a sales team on their prospects has proven to increase sales win rates.

As a sales person, there is no excuse any more for not knowing more about your prospects and the company you are calling into. Sales Intelligence tools enable you to have relevant information at your virtual fingertips that can be used to know in many cases exactly how to position your product or service. There are even free sales intelligence tools available that can help.

Sales people need intelligence to close more deals. Making that intelligence available in a way that sales can capture quickly and easy to find is a necessity. In an Accenture study of more than 1,000 managers in the United States and the United Kingdom, nearly 60 percent have to go to numerous sources to compile the information they need to do their jobs well. About the same number reported that information as poorly distributed across the organization.

Building your sales pipeline and increasing win rates is not magic. There is no secret code that needs to be cracked for success. All you need is more information and a better way of identifying what matters when you start making connections.

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.

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.

Salespeople who understand how to use social media and sales intelligence to quickly build trust and credibility with prospects are more successful than those who do not. InsideView is the only application that combines millions of company and decision-maker contact records with actionable sales triggers, rich social profiles, relevant news alerts and major social networks into one simple user interface.

Within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, account and contact records, InsideView delivers an all-in-one sales intelligence source. Salespeople save time and trump their competitors with real-time insights that get them into more deals at the right time, with the right decision-maker and with a relevant, meaningful message.

Are you seeking improvement in sales forecasting?

Would you like to see a reduction in your sales cycle and cost?

Do you want a holistic tracking solution and dashboard inside a familiar interface?

Are you interested in reducing overhead by moving to the cloud?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is designed to help.  Be one of the first to hear how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can help you boost sales, improve marketing, enrich customer service interactions, and accelerate line of business application development through xRM.

This in-person Microsoft event is geared towards a select group of business and technical professionals—allowing you to network with Microsoft partners and other customers in your area, and learn how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is being used by both public sector and commercial organizations.

Tuesday, February 08	Hyatt Regency Irvine 17900 Jamboree Rd Irvine California 92614

Seamless CRM Integration
InsideView integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a native mash-up in existing workflows. Deliver relevant intelligence directly into your CRM Accounts, Contacts, and Leads.

One-Click Import & CRM Enrichment
InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows your sales & marketing team to add new prospects and update existing Accounts, Contacts, and Leads with a single click.

Drives Sales Productivity
InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM makes sales teams more productive by reducing research time, increasing lead conversion and win rates.

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.

InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence, today announced that its award-winning sales intelligence application is now available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customers. InsideView is one of the first companies to earn the elite Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) status. InsideView is also a National sponsor of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2011 launch tour in Canada and several cities in the U.S.

Salespeople who understand how to use social media and sales intelligence to quickly build trust and credibility with prospects are more successful than those who do not. InsideView is the only application that combines millions of company and decision-maker contact records with actionable sales triggers, rich social profiles, relevant news alerts and major social networks into one simple user interface. Within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, account and contact records, InsideView delivers an all-in-one sales intelligence source. Salespeople save time and trump their competitors with real-time insights that get them into more deals at the right time, with the right decision-maker and with a relevant, meaningful message.

Using InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, salespeople can increase their sales productivity — as measured by lead generation volumes, lead conversion rates and opportunity win rates. InsideView drives higher CRM adoption and ROI.

“We look forward to helping Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customers and partners increase their sales productivity and achieve measurable ROI,” said Umberto Milletti, founder and CEO of InsideView. “We are pleased to be one of the most popular Dynamics’ applications and an elite Certified for Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner.”

As a CfMD partner, InsideView is now recognized with the highest distinction available for Dynamics partners, reflecting outstanding customer ratings, stringent product certification and support requirements. InsideView is the only CfMD application to incorporate thousands of sources of traditional business insight and new social media/social networking fully integrated inside Dynamics CRM.

InsideView is a free application that installs in minutes directly from the newly live Dynamics Marketplace, where it is already the most popular (and five-star rated) application. It’s available for CRM 2011 and CRM 4.0 online and on-premises, and is also available in subscriber version with millions of contact records (including email addresses and phone numbers), and more. InsideView has a robust partner program with social selling training, special offers and generous commissions for Microsoft CRM partners. Contact partners@insideview.com for details.

As part of the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, InsideView is also sponsoring the launch tour in the U.S. and Canada at the following locations:

• San Francisco, February 3^rd
• Irvine, February 8^th
• Chicago, March 8^th
• New York, March 10^th
• Montreal, March 21^st
• Toronto, March 29^th
• Vancouver, April 19^th

To easily get started with InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and increase your sales productivity through unparalleled sales intelligence, please visit www.insideview.com/microsoft.