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.

Paul Greenberg published an article on ZDNet called “Looking Back at 2010 – In 2010” and he gave a great explanation of his methodically scientific approach to forecasting. Covering the increased priority of mobile CRM social marketing, and the growing need for companies especially y in the support function deploying social CRM to work with customers.

When it came to integration with traditional CRMs Paul had some great things to say about InsideView.

InsideView continued its relentless drive to integrate with everything including the basil plants that are growing inside varying foodies homes – and they’ve been a happy success accordingly with integrations to most of the CRM standards out there.

You can read the entire article on ZDNet here.

I have had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds in sales 2.0 and sales effectiveness since joining InsideView and one of the topics that came up 90% of the time was that even though social selling and sales 2.0 are messages that sales people are adopting, there hasn’t been a real focus on how an individual sales person specifically can adopt social media to drive more opportunities. Until now.

InsideView has put together a Social Selling Primer that will be our launching pad for all of the future content on helping sales teams maximize their efforts online in social networks. Sign up for this webinar today before all of our WebEx seats are filled.

Thursday, November 18, 2010 : 11am PT / 2pm ET

When sales organizations try to leverage social media into their sales processes, they are often overwhelmed by too much information and underwhelmed by its impact on productivity.

At InsideView, we help hundreds of organizations to increase sales productivity and get substantial returns on their investments, using social media.

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.

As evidenced by this discussion, there is a lot going on now in the field of sCRM, but it is also an industry that will continue to grow and mature. Russ Mayfield recently noted on the Socialtext blog “When it comes to sCRM, we have only discovered the tip of the iceberg.” In this post, Russ also gives a very interesting overview of Web 2.0′s evolution, which has driven much of the sCRM movement. He references Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy who was quoted as saying that the State Department had shifted from a  “need to know” to a “need to share” culture”, and thus had created a Wiki community post-911. In many ways this quote also sums up how people at large have begun to approach information sharing differently with the advent of Web 2.0 technology.

While our culture has become increasingly driven to share information on the Web, the result is more organized and unorganized data being available to us than ever before. The core issue is how does one efficiently find the information that they need? That challenge is what we are focused on. No matter what industry term our technology falls under, at the end of the day we want our users to remember us as giving them the ‘right’ up-to-date information at the ‘right’ time.

One of Paul’s central arguments here is that Twitter is not (and should not become) an application, but rather remain “just” a channel / medium (albeit it a powerful, extremely trendy, and perhaps transformation one.)  Most of the reader comments agreed (no shocker there… Paul has a pretty loyal following, and he has a nasty habit of being right most of the time.)

One particular blog comment from “kotharia” struck a chord.  The gist was that while leveraging Twitter as a listening & communication channel is a good start, “these emerging channels have a potential to generate a huge volume of conversations (unstructured data) which cannot be harnessed easily.”  Hmm, this problem sounds familiar.  They went on to suggest that “One would need effective tools to harness & synthesize the data to enable better decision making.”

BINGO!  One thing is guaranteed… just like all other media, traditional and social, Twitter will exacerbate information overload. We happen to focus on solving this problem specifically for sales & marketing professionals but really the principles are applicable across all knowledge workers.  You need a layer of intelligence / analytics operating on top of Twitter (along with all other potentially useful data sets and information sources) if you want to make it relevant and actionable.  SalesView is focused on doing just that for sales/marketing/support professionals, WITHIN their CRM.  Call it social CRM, CRM 2.0, socialprise, or just plain cool… the bottom line is that it has a huge impact on sales productivity.

Twitter ups the ante in terms of volume and frequency, but the challenge is not a new one. Before our current love affair with Twitter, most organizations had not yet figured out how to filter & analyze the thousands of online news sources, much less the hundreds of thousands of business blogs out there. So we can’t assume that Twitter is “noisier” (as measured by signal to noise ratio, not volume) than any previously available media. It’s just a bigger fire hose!

Here’s the approach we’ve taken to date with the InsideView Smart Cloud platform.

Basically we look at channels / media / content as plug & play. Blogs come along, plug it in. Twitter comes along, plug it in. Rest assured that in the next 6-12 months, some OTHER shiny new thing will capture the hearts & imagination of sales & marketing so what then?  Just plug it in. After all, the next-next-big-thing promises to accelerate the commoditization of content and worsen information overload. Unless, that is, you have tools that can filter & analyze data in the cloud to identify only the relevant & actionable information.

That’s where we think things are going. What do you think? Reply here or Tweet us at http://twitter.com/insideview.

Paul does conceed though that Twitter can be used as “a channel for finding the customers to engage with and to get data from” and a means for developing “richer customer insights.” How does he differentiate this from Social CRM? We recommend reading the article.

‘Social CRM’ relates to the ability of CRM technology to monitor, engage, and interact, on a social-Web level — essentially, to do its job in a social-Web context. This technology is evolving, from mash-ups to becoming part of CRM offerings out of the gate. The idea that CRM is getting social is hardly new, but it is exciting to see the ways that it keeps getting social. Twitter is latest ingredient in a cornucopia of information that the social Web offers up and we are curious to see what role it can play in the future of sales intelligence. One can observe the limitations that the service currently has for sales prospecting, but as Twitter evolves, we may be singing a different tune.

Update April 8th:  The Twitter + Social CRM discussion continues on ZDNet –  and there’s promising talk of collaboration between industry pundits Paul Greenberg and Brian Solis.  Check out the full discussion thread here:

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-17933-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=62379

First, we’ve teamed up with CRM expert Paul Greenberg, enterprise technology analyst Alex Jefferies and Sales 2.0 author Anneke Seley to produce a series of Sales 2.0 Webinars. The Sales 2.0 Executive Series will begin on March 19, and will explore the latest productivity-enhancing sales strategies in an economic climate where the number of legitimate sales opportunities appears to be shrinking. The sessions will reveal tangible methods for achieving significant efficiencies in sales organizations by empowering them with the information and the tools they need to be successful.  Be sure to join us for a set of informative sessions with some of the best minds in sales and CRM today!

Second, we’re excited to announce that Cast Iron Systems, a leading SaaS integration company and former OneSource customer, has adopted SalesView. The decision for the Cast Iron folks to sign on with SalesView came from the advantage that Sales 2.0 technologies brings over traditional business information services.  Says Cast Iron sales head George Gallegos, “The completeness of the prospect data and the relevance of the alerts, coupled with its powerful CRM mash-up make SalesView a highly effective sales productivity enhancer. The insights we gain from SalesView are key to qualifying opportunities early in the sales cycle so that we focus our efforts only on those prospects who fit squarely into our sweet spot.”

That sweet spot is exactly what we’re going for as innovators in sales technologies, and we hope to continue bringing it to more companies as Sales 2.0 keeps growing.