Sales 2.0 is the bread and butter of what we do here at InsideView. Essentially, we want salespeople to incorporate sales intelligence into the new generation of sales where social selling comes into play. Unfortunately, this methodology of sales 2.0 is skewed in various definitions and discussions of its effectiveness. As a result, I have had the privlidge of gathering 15 great sales 2.0 posts that provide some solid definitions, rich in content.

1. Sales Tip: The Social Graph is Your Friend – Nigel Edelshain
2. 37 Character Tweet Led to Huge Sales Opportunity – Anneke Seley
3. 5 Essential Books to Understand B2B Sales 2.0 – Katie Byrnes
4. 7 Forward Thinking Presentations You May Have Missed – Chad Levitt
5. Sales Success Strategies for a Social World – Gerhard Gschwandtner
6. What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care) – Pamela Seiple
7. 40 Great Social Media Infographics for B2B - Koka Sexton
8. Sales 2.0: Is Hunter vs. Farmer Theory Outdated? – Claire Moore
9. How to Shorten Your Revenue Cycle – Andrew Hunt
10. 10 fresh Ideas on Sales 2.0 And Sales Process – Marci Reynolds
11. Productivity on Steroids (Podcast) – John Cousineau
12. Lead Scoring is 878% More Effective Than Cold Calling – Paul Rafferty
13. What is Sales 2.0 (And Why You Should Care) – Padalog
14. Statistics Show the Business Case for Sales Enablement - Paul Krajewski
15. Sales 2.0 The Impact on Selling and Sales Process – Tony Cole

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

We’ve had the opportunity to introduce our vision of Social Selling to customers, sales professionals and our visitors at Dreamforce. InsideView has been defining the use of social media for sales people for years and now we want to raise the bar. InsideView has created a Social Selling University to educate sales people on the benefits of social media and the best practices to using social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs. Customer 2.0 is not just a buzzword, people are no longer going directly to the companies asking questions. Customers are looking in their social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter asking questions and getting advice from other customers and friends on what to buy. If sales people are not engaged with these conversations they are missing out on an excellent opportunity to connect with people in the earliest stages of the buying cycle.

As InsideView continues to develop real strategies around social media for sales people, we will enable entire sales teams to listen, connect and engage with people that will develop new opportunities and create better relationships with current customers.

There were many requests to have this presentation available for people to watch and save as a reference. We have added the introduction to Social Selling on our YouTube page for people to watch. There is more content being edited for this YouTube channel so make sure you click the subscribe button on the page.

Social Selling University

After a little wait and some help by people voting up the topic, InsideView was accepted as a speaker at the 2011 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin TX. We believe we have some very compelling content based around the subject of social selling and how to take the creepy factor out of using social media to engage with customers. Here is the synopsis of the topic.

Social Espionage and Selling to Customer 2.0

Monitoring. Listening. Tracking. Measuring. No, this isn’t a covert CIA operation: It’s the way brands and businesses are marketing…and selling…to YOU, Customer 2.0. Is it creepy? Regardless, it’s also a reality, and it’s working tremendously, as well as being adopted at a rapid rate by everyone from your local coffee shop to Best Buy to enterprises like Adobe. From social CRM to mobile-social tech to community management, 2011 is the year of full-blown execution after, well, two years of panels discussing ‘the future of social business.’ Come hear about the truly effective processes and best practices around social customer relationship management and intelligence, and walk away with an actual plan for your business in social marketing and selling.

Questions Answered

1. What are the BEST PRACTICES of social CRM that matter today?
2. What are the SUCCESSES and FAILURES companies have experiences in the past two years?
3. If you could employ just THREE social CRM tactics at your company, what should they be?
4. Where should you NOT put your money and time when it comes to social CRM?
5. How can you really get your teams to ADOPT any social CRM tools and processes?

Are you attending SXSW 2011?

Microsoft is allocating a lot of resources into their cloud based software offering. We recently had a team of Microsoft CRM specialists in our office discussing the product and how it has been drastically improved over the previous version. They have also had a large marketing push with commercials trying to solidify their position in the space. Some of the commercials miss their mark but they are moving in the right direction.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison as well as Mark Hurd made the list. They are the only company that that had two executives listed.

Netsuite also made the list with Zach Nelson the President and CEO.

Of course this list wouldn’t be complete without Marc Benioff of Salesforce being listed.

Brief history of the CRM

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

Customers are using social media

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

What’s defining customer 2.0?

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

Welcome to Social CRM

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

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

Sales professionals rely on many things to be successful, primarily the internal motivation to move a lead through the sales cycle using every available resource in order to provide value and close the deal. Technology plays a big part in that and it was an interesting string of responses to the question that brought this to my attention and create a post about this.

by photographer padawan

Not all CRM applications are equal

One of the first things an inside sales team needs to be more effective in sales is a first class CRM in order to manage leads, contacts and accounts in a way that can be measured and can integrate with other divisions of the company like support and marketing. Salesforce.com is the CRM solution of choice for many companies but there are other solutions out there that can be customized in many of the same ways like Netsuite, SugarCRM and others. Before investing in any CRM solution you need to have a good idea of what you want the CRM to do. Because no company uses (or should use) the out of the box CRM configuration, you need to make sure that you know what data besides name, address, company name and other basic information that you want to collect. Spending the money and time to customize your CRM will pay big rewards as your company grows and in some cases will be the reason many companies are able to grow quickly.

This data will be used by your inside sales team to know as much as possible about the lead, contact or account they are working on. Salesforce.com also has a very extensive Appexchange marketplace where you can get additional functionality for your Salesforce CRM around everything from Sales Intelligence (where SalesView can be found), Project Management and Finance Administration where our friends from BigMachines has an application to configure, quote and generate proposals. Netsuite has a marketplace for these extended applications as well called SuiteApp.

You should take the time to evaluate your CRM options and make sure you find one that can be used with your existing business process or enhance it. I am a huge proponent of dashboards to get a view of revenue, pipeline and other sales related activities. I could write an entire post on the best practices for this but you need to make sure that your CRM solution can create these dashboards so you can see your company from a high level and be able to drill into details and deals.

Inside Sales Needs to Send Email

I’m not talking about Outlook but that will play a part in this. Your inside sales teams should be given some access to a marketing tool that they can use that sends customized communications to their leads and contacts. I highlight “customized“ because there is nothing a customer or prospect will hate more than getting an email from a sales rep that looks generic and not positioned to them as an individual. Make sure you can create a series of templates that can be customized for the sales team so they are not having to write the exact same email 50 times a day with minor variations. With most CRM solutions this is an option but again, this is something you should look into as you consider a new technology for your inside sales team.

Online Meeting Software

Another must have for sales people is the ability to fire up a online meeting space. Sure there is more of a marketing and support need for these tools but I believe that sales people need this ability also. There are a few vendors out there like WebEx, Fuze Meeting and GoToMeeting that can give your inside sales people the ability to host a meeting and share their desktop with prospects and customers.

Enable Your Sales Team to be Successful

A company spends a lot of energy recruiting and building an inside sales team and as important as it is to hire effective sales people, you should invest in the best technology to make their jobs easier. This will give them the tools to engage with people on a more advanced level and also give management the ability to track the results of the sales team and make the process adjustments needed to drive even more revenue.

Leave a comment and let us know what other technologies you think an inside sales team should have at their disposal?

If you have been following trends in sales, you would know the entire paradigm of buyers and sellers has been shifting. You should give up on the cold calling techniques that were used for the past few decades and start focusing your energy on building social selling strategies for your product or service. Customers Want Your Sales Efforts to Go Social.

One of the best known ways to spread information about your company is through word of mouth and it’s more important today than it was 10 years ago. If your customers aren’t talking about your company then you might as well close up shop. You should read 5 Ways That Sales People Can Benefit From Using Social Media.

When hiring sales people, part of the experience you should be looking for in them is that are in tune with social networking and already know how to use social media. Even if it’s only on a personal level, the business translations of social media and sales run parallel.  I am a firm believer that Social Media Can Provide a Push in a B2B Sales Environment.

In addition to asking great questions to move a prospect forward, sales leaders should care if their sales team is using social media and encourage them to use it in ways that can help them individually as well as drive additional revenue for the company. There are many resources available that can give you a heads up on who is on what social media sites like this infographic.

“In just a few weeks of using SalesView, our lead generation reps went from generating 20 appointments a month to generating 70″ – Experian

Outside of making this a blog post about how much InsideView can help make your sales teams more effective and drive real, actionable intelligence into the CRM, I want sales leaders to stand up and look at their sales team. If it’s 4 sales people or 400, the reality is that if they are not conscious of the differences between sales data and sales intelligence in order to know more about their prospects and customers then you are going to lose deals to your competition.

Your sales people should be almost fanatical about your products and should be more than willing to dive into social media to connect with people that your company could help. Even if it’s just swimming in the LinkedIn pool and getting involved with a few groups, your sales people should be connecting with people on a deeper level than just treating them like a name and phone number from their CRM or Outlook contacts. As a sales person you should be working with marketing to identify where you need to be located online for these conversations. Brian Solis @briansolis wrote the 10 stages of integrating social media into a business and has a quote that I’ll have to paraphrase here “If someone says something about your company online and no one hears it, did it really happen?” The answer “Yes” and that should concern you also. Your sales people need to get more active in social media and learn to manage their territories in this new world or they will find themselves out of work.

What do you think?

Social CRM is growing up but still in its toddler phase. Being molded as a process to monitor, engage and manage social conversations or relationships with existing customers or prospective customers. The Social CRM can be a stand alone application or integrated within your existing CRM solution like Salesforce.com. The concept of tracking online conversations and news in order to identify and somewhat predict business trigger events is going to continue to be a game changer for companies in the coming years.

Benefits of using a Social CRM

Companies are still trying to adopt the best ways to use social media in their business processes but some of the key benefits are becoming more structured and showing real results in driving revenue and customer loyalty.

Sales teams that have a Social CRM application at their fingertips now have significantly more relevant information available to them about their customers ranging from general company news to the specific Twitter feeds of the employees. (Sales 2.0 can be scary huh?) The truth is that using a good application gives a sales person a court side seat for a lot of intelligence they typically would have missed or would have spent hours searching for online. Social CRM brings information to the sales teams and that has been prove to build a substantial pipeline and turn into larger deals being closed.

For customer service groups the Social CRM has just as many benefits if not more. It’s all basically the same story of visibility but they are now able to have conversations with customers across different mediums other than just a chat room or phone call. I remember the first time I vented my frustrations about my cable company on Twitter and got a reply within 3 minutes from a support person asking me how they could help. After a few quick tweets back and forth and a couple emails from different support people the situation was resolved and I was content. My frustrations with the cable company still come up from time to time but the fact that I can dictate the platform to communicate on and that they were as responsive as they were made a lasting impression on my mind.

Social CRM Clairvoyance

The future of Social CRM seems to be solidifying and expanding at the same time. Let’s face it, the definition of Social CRM will be slightly different from one company to another. It really all depends on how they use their CRM. Sales people use their data different than the accounting dept and the reality is that the monitoring of social triggers is just as important to each group.

The questions are now being answered about “how” to best implement the solutions and what information needs to be delivered to different groups within a company. Just as there is no cookie cutter CRM solution, meaning that there is always some form of customization required, Social CRM will be delivered the same way. Stakeholders across the organization from Sales, Marketing, Accounting and Support should all have a voice in how to use the application and get a better understanding of the impact it can have.

Gartner predicts over 80% of growth in enterprise use of social networking tools will be driven by customer engagement projects, analyst forecasts – Information Age

We are far from hitting critical mass for the adoption of Social CRM but the trends are showing that we are going to be there soon. Interest has exploded in using social software for marketing, customer service and sales departments. Requests for Social CRM software has spiked well over 50% in the past 12 months according to Gartner.

We have seen a great response to a series of posts by Umberto Milletti the CEO of InsideView. Starting with a post from September where he discussed the difference between sales data and sales intelligence. He explained that Customer 2.0 is much more internet savvy than most companies want to believe and therefore companies need to rethink the way they attract and nurture new prospects. Sales people that used to rely only on data (company name, revenue, size…) are falling behind companies that have learned how to harness this data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

In a recent post on Social Media B2B by Umberto following along this topic he goes one step further to explain how a companies CRM should be playing a larger role in sales enablement. A companies entire sales methodology needs to make a shift to include intelligence from social media into driving more revenue.