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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.
On top of all the work to continue optimizing the application for our growing list of customers, we wanted to highlight some enhancements to the application that all of you should be seeing with the latest release.
Updated Connection Summary: You are now able to get a snapshot of any personal & professional connections from any company. This was a request brought to us by a few customers that wanted a snapshot in the record so they could see who they were connected to and how they were connected.
We now identify for you if you are connected through a coworker, a reference account or through previous coworkers.
The result is that you can now look at the snapshot and have more intelligence about who you want to drill into further to help make the introduction or use as leverage to connect with your target.
The new Connection Dashboard gives you a list of connections that you have access through using our Smart Connections. These are not direct connections that can be found using networks like LinkedIn but more implied connections that look at my past employers and other information from my profile to identify ways I can be connected to my target.
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
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?
We are happy to announce that our July 2011 (v64) release is now live.
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.
Veteran CRM and Cloud Technology Executive Joins to Expand Sales Intelligence Leadership and Growth
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
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.
Companies across the world are agreeing that social media is changing the landscape of how customers interact with brands. Airlines use social media tools like Twitter to stay on top of customer service needs, companies use social media as a marketing tool to stay engaged with customers. The growing popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become a breeding ground for conversations.
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.
