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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Increase Inside Sales Productivity with Social Intelligence

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

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

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

Social media has become a defacto marketing tool for any organization, but it’s incredible how scared sales managers and teams still are of letting their sales reps join the sales 2.0 party. But the reality is, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself…oh, and not closing more and larger deals faster than ever before.

Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn (as well as the entire blogosophere) are target-rich environments to find new opportunities and leads, and engage with prospects in a powerful and effectively intelligent new way. So what is holding companies back? Of the dozen or so objections I have heard, my conclusion is: FEAR. Fear that their sales team will not produce results, fear that the sales team will waste their time online and fear that their sales teams will do or say something online that will tarnish their brand and kill sales. The fact of the matter is, NOT letting sales professionals engage on social media is detrimental to the bottom line for the reasons below.

In addition, it always surprises me when a company pushes off any new technology based on such fear, and masks it with an excuse. Businesses that embrace innovation and new tools have a great track record of becoming leaders in their spaces. Social media is no different as it applies to sales professionals. There are very simple reasons that all of these excuses should be thrown away and sales people given a green light to social media engagement with leads and prospects.

Fact: Social selling produces results

Sirius Decisions Inc. recently said in a webinar that in most sales cycles, customers are now in control. Customers are doing 70 percent of the research online that drives the buying decisions, and then contacting a specific vendor for the purchase. The old concept of customers calling into a company to be ‘sold’ something is quickly vanishing. Since more of the buying process is happening online in discussion groups and social networks, sales people that are paying attention and, in most cases, are already a member of these networks like Twitter, will capitalize on these conversations and identify new opportunities much earlier than those without such social involvement.

Myth: Social Selling is not a time-suck

If your sales team is wasting their time online or talking to friends on the phone most of the day, stop now and reevaluate your employees. If you have talented and hard working people on your sales team, then you shouldn’t expect them to behave any different with using social media throughout the sales cycle. If your sales team is already using Twitter or other networks for personal use, they will be able to adopt a sales methodology around the same tools to produce revenue.

Myth: ‘Social Selling’ is too risky

This is an objection that comes up more often than any other, and it’s a common misunderstanding that a business can be destroyed in the matter of one status update or blog post. But, I don’t agree with this any more than I would with the idea that a poorly sent email to a customer can do the same. There was a point in time where sales people didn’t have access to email for that exact reason, but can you imagine not having email as a tool? The same will be said about social media tools in 10 years – those who embrace it will be in the drivers seat, and ultimately win out.

It all comes down to “letting go” and enabling your sales teams to be more effective. Social Selling is not fit for every sales person, but I’d bet you have a strong percentage of your sales team that would welcome the opportunity to drive opportunities through social tools in addition to traditional phone and email tactics.

This post originally appeared on Sales2.com where InsideView has regular contributions. Sales 2.0 is a site dedicated to the improvement of sales results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sales people blogging comes up when talking to companies about ways to involve more sales and marketing alignment programs. I was reading Dave Brock’s recent post on the same subject and he explains that companies are “dead wrong” from a business point of view if they have sales bloggers. There could be some healthy discussion around this being a valuable use of time for short term gains but it’s getting much more clear as time goes on that content is king. Having a social and transparent company drives customer loyalty and generates new business. I think that companies that empower their sales people to use social media tools like blogs can exponentially increase awareness and drive lead generation and revenue for a company. I’m not the only one that thinks this. IBM has the same idea.

How successful can a B2B business be using social media? Fairly successful, at least in the case of IBM. We recently chatted with Ed Linde II, whose team is responsible for building Web assets to support the IBM.com sales channel and organic Web visitors, about IBM’s social media efforts and successes. He spoke about their Listening for Leads program, which he says has “uncovered millions of dollars worth of sales leads” so far, and is expected grow even more. Here’s a clip from the full interview available on eMarketer Total Access.

Mr. Linde II: Within IBM we have a number of people in the brand areas who are blogging and doing things in the social media space relative to topics like cloud computing.

In B2B we have a number of Websites that we built for our sales reps where we’ve enabled the reps to have a blog with RSS feeds that are connected to LinkedIn and Twitter. Their customers can follow them where they have an individual relationship.

Some of our reps have Facebook pages also. We also have a program called Listening for Leads, where we have people we call “seekers” who on a voluntary basis go to particular social media sites where they listen to conversations and determine whether there’s a potential sales opportunity.

eMarketer: How is IBM using Twitter?

Mr. Linde II: We promote our customer events on Twitter. When I say customer events, they could be Webinars, podcasts, virtual trade shows or physical trade shows. We advertise some of our promotions via Twitter. And our individual reps use Twitter to keep their customers updated about interesting news, events and things of that nature. Each rep has their own Twitter account. We also have the handle @IBMpcs because we sell refurbished PCs .

eMarketer: How are you tracking and measuring your social initiatives? You mentioned that you’ve identified millions of sales leads.

Mr. Linde II: We measure against number of sales leads identified. And we rate the lead value from those leads. Then the win revenue and win rate. So there are four key metrics—number of leads created, lead value, win revenue and win rate.

The purpose of the blog is to drive sales. Giving sales people a resource like their own blog or the ability to create content for the company blog is a valuable asset that businesses should not overlook. Marketing shouldn’t control the blog with an iron fist, most marketing people I know are constantly looking for new content to drive traffic and leads so it just makes sense to use internal talent to make this happen.

Take a look at your sales team, find out which of them can write well and articulate the sales landscape they are working in. With a little sales 2.0 training, they should be able to dedicate a couple hours a week to writing a post for the company. One blog post can go a long way, we are still getting leads from blog posts from almost a year ago written by members of our sales and support teams.

A recent report by eMarketer shows why social media networks like Facebook should be a focus for more sales and marketing alignment. The fact that companies are spending $3 billion on Facebook means that sales teams should be trained on the use of Facebook as a tool for lead conversion and prospect engagement. Most companies are giving a large amount of resources on building their professional Facebook page and following it up with additional dollars from their budgets to drive new customers to those pages. Sure many companies are spending money on Facebook ads to push people to other landing pages off the network but it’s been shown that developing a solid presence on Facebook and keeping people in the network converts higher and helps spread WOM marketing. The same strategy should be used in other networks.

”2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.” “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

Sales teams should be encouraged to interact with the company Facebook page, commenting on updates and sharing news from the company page. The community you build on your Facebook page is something both sales and marketing should be very conscious of and nurtured. Even though LinkedIn is a professional network and we pointed out LinkedIn is Facebook with a tie,  different departments should be engaged on Facebook. Marketing for the general awareness and branding of the company and sales teams for the engagement of  new prospects wanting to know more about their product/service. Company support and services should also play a part by answering questions and providing updates based on best practices.

This means that companies should give up some control and designate Facebook ambassadors to the pages from sales and support and give them Admin access to post under the company name. Here are 10 reasons for using Facebook for your business. Since building a community on Facebook around your company should be the goal, you need to seed the community with people from your company that can help people from all sides of the sales cycle. Very few companies have done this that I know of and with the proper training (Sales 2.0) a sales person can quickly identify potential prospects and then generate new leads. Though Facebook is the origin of some of these new prospects and you should continue engagement with them on the platform, knowing who the prospects are that interact with your Facebook page and then bringing them into your CRM will give you the metrics needed to show it’s success. The same goes for current customers, if it’s primarily answering questions or fostering a relationship for continued business, sales people should be taking more of a leadership role in how social networks are managed.

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.”

What will the software industry look like in 3, 5, even 10 years from now?

Cloud computing and social media are the two very significant trends that will shape the future of the software industry for years to come. Core cloud applications (email, CRM, ERP, etc.) will become an “operating system” that nearly all companies will have in place. These business applications focus on workflow automation – bringing in process efficiencies – and are sufficient to run a manufacturing or process business. However, businesses are increasingly delivering services, where employee knowledge and intelligence are the keys to success. This is where social media, business intelligence and collaboration technology becomes relevant, and crucial. It is designed to make employees smarter and more effective, not just to automate their jobs.

The big challenge with social media & collaboration is that it creates very, very large quantities of information. If you include systems-generated streams, the amount of information and data quickly becomes overwhelming. Software companies need to effectively tap into this growing source of “social intelligence,” developing technologies capable of monitoring the information stream for important and relevant intelligence. For example, a social conversations about their brands, products and people that might give users new insights and detail otherwise not available through traditional news sources. Software companies then must tackle the quantity-versus-quality problem by effectively filtering and analyzing the large quantities of available information. Lastly, they need to deliver the most relevant and useful intelligence to end-users in the easiest-to-consume manner: directly within the workflow of the business applications they enrich.

Of course, end-user technologies have to be just as easy to deploy as they are to use, both for the end-users and IT decision-makers. The days of hard to use, difficult to implement software, will quickly fade. A new, two-pronged software distribution model is emerging to improve adoption: first, make the application as widely available as possible, promoting ‘bottom-up’ adoption, which in turn drives ‘top-down’ implementation. As an example, at InsideView, we created a free version of our sales intelligence application to facilitate broader adoption and distribution. I believe the “Freemium model” will become more and more prevalent in the software industry. But even without the universal availability of an app, the single-most important principle is making it easy for a decision maker to deploy with little effort across the target user base – and making it seamless, customizable and most applicable to the organization.

And what customer demands and business trends will drive changes in software products, how they’re developed, and the industry that provides them?

Social media is driving significant change in software, which is only going to accelerate over the next decade. Let’s start with the buyer. We are now selling to a new breed of prospect that I call Customer 2.0. These are socially engaged and well-informed buyers. They have abundant visibility into the companies they consider doing business with (products/services, pricing, competitive strengths and weaknesses, customer satisfaction, etc.). They’ve done their homework. And not surprisingly, this new breed of buyer expects vendors to be more educated about their business, too. They want to be engaged in targeted and relevant conversations about how to solve specific business challenges and urgent needs, not just receive a generic pitch. Social media changes the dynamics with prospective employees, business partners and vendors, enabling significantly greater visibility into business and personal aspects that can shape relationships and drive business decisions.

By listening to social media, companies have the opportunity to learn what is being said about and by their various stakeholders and audiences. This provides unique insights that aren’t available through more traditional sources. Of course, it’s a huge task to monitor the social conversation, filter out the noise to hone in what’s relevant. That’s why I believe any “external-facing” business application that targets customers, partners, vendors or employees will have to incorporate social intelligence directly into its workflow.

Unfortunately, many of these solutions have remained mostly in the ranks of workflow automation. This makes them useful for automating structured processes and reports for management, but not for enabling effective relationship building and engagement with their intended audiences. I strongly believe that the next-generation of software applications will have to tap into social intelligence within application workflow to bring in a new level of engagement and authenticity into the relationships these applications are intended to manage – and in the process improve business productivity. Next generation apps will also need to associate these new social insights with what we already know about our customers, prospects, vendors and employees to create a 360-degree view of these relationships.

This need for greater intelligence is a key tenet upon which to build any successful business application for sales, marketing, customer service, finance or human resources. All these professionals need to “get smarter” in their interactions with their constituents. Put simply, integrated social intelligence becomes an essential enabler for successful businesses engagements as we enter the new era of social media.

Original post made on the SIIA blog written by Nate Phillips. The Software & Information Industry Association is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries. SIIA provides global services in government relations, business development, corporate education and intellectual property protection to the leading companies that are setting the pace for the digital age.

Overall the numbers look great, there is still about 18 days to respond but with 1535 votes, this is an impressive number of people. CRM applications are what drives a company, customer engagement and pipeline in a way that helps executives and sales people keep track of what really matters and not focus on deals that are stalled and have a low chance of closing. Salesforce, Microsoft CRM and Oracle were the targeted choices with the option for people to choose “other” as well. Since there are probably a hundred other CRM applications that a company could use, these are the big 3 because of their enterprise adoption.

No CRM?

What surprised me in this this poll was that the creator added in a “None” option to the list. Makes sense but the number of people responding to the LinkedIn poll with this as an answer was concerning.

Of all of the responses, the largest number of “Managers” indicated that they do not use any CRM. None…zero. Though the poll is impressive for other reasons, I’d be interested in doing a follow up poll with this subgroup just to understand how they are managing their business.

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

Current customers are key

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

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

Why are you still cold calling?

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

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

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

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