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Are you headed to DreamForce next week? The InsideView team will be there, demoing, speaking, and most importantly helping attendees learn more about using social data to drive ROI in their businesses. The show this year is packed with interesting companies, sessions and even fun contests. If you’re interested in the confluence of social media and the enterprise and how it all mashes together at Dreamforce, we’ve gone ahead and picked some of the more interesting ways to fill your Dreamforce dance card.
- Sales 2.0 Night – Get cocktails and network with Sales 2.0 leaders Thursday, November 19th, 6pm – 8pm at the Sculpturesite Gallery – RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/y8nfbec
- Attend InsideView’s panel “How to Tap into Social Media to Drive Sales Results” Wednesday, Nov 18th @ 3:30 PM, at West Mezzanine 254
- Follow the #DF09 hashtag on Twitter
- Check out some of these cool vendors’ booths: Genius, Xactly, BlueWolf
- Party in the Cloud Tuesday 8-10pm at Two Bar. RSVP here: http://bit.ly/2pCMjV
- Get on the Napa Valley Wine Train: Dreamforce attendees get a special deal
- Enter our contest to win an Aston Martin for the weekend: Register here
- Join the mosh pit at the Black Crowes concert
- Share InsideView’s James Bond-themed Dreamforce video:
We’re here at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago for the Sales 2.0 Conference and just listened to the ‘Sales Lead Management 2.0 – Best Practices for a Profitable Lead Pipeline’ session. Panelist David Fitzgerald, executive vice president of sales, marketing and services for Brainshark, gave an engaging presentation on Brainshark’s very successful performance last quarter and savvy use of Sales 2.0 technologies, such as SalesView.
Some of the business challenges that Fitzgerald noted that Brainshark had been experiencing prior to their accelerated sales growth included:
- Increasing Sales Productivity – how to achieve more effective sales prospecting.
- Increasing Marketing Campaign effectiveness
- Improving the quality of the data in SFDC
- Named Account Management – Brainshark had a need for hierarchy information, access to named account information and demographics for territory account assignments
Brainshark made the decision in February 2009 to begin using InsideView as their sales intelligence provider and during its first six months of SalesView deployment they have achieved more than a 320% return on investment (ROI) and a 12% increase in their pipeline! Some of the specific reasons that he attributed SalesView helping to increase Brainshark’s sales productivity included its easy-to-use integration with SFDC, as well as the quick access the application provides to high level contacts, social media buzz, competitive news and account hierarchies. He also noted that SalesView increased their marketing campaign effectiveness through the improved quality and quantity of leads and demographic data it provided.
To illustrate the success that Brainshark has experienced with InsideView, David gave the example of a significant deal that one of his reps used to close a deal with Wolters Kluwer, a five billion dollar information and business intelligence company. Tim McDonough, strategic account manager at Brainshark, recorded a 2-3 minute testimonial (using the Brainshark technology of course, very cool idea). In it he highlights how SalesView helped him quickly find key executives’ contact information and build a customized executive presentation based on intelligence found by SalesView Smart Agents and the new ‘Buzz’ tab. Throughout the 10 week sales cycle, Brainshark also continued to receive automated alerts via SalesView, keeping him informed about any key events at the company.
InsideView testimonial by Brainshark strategic account manager Tim McDonough
Brainshark’s success with SalesView is reflective of the type of sales productivity and performance gains that we are seeing across InsideView’s client base. We are very excited to see our clients utilizing SalesView in such effective ways and turning the potential of Sales 2.0 technology like ours into solid success metrics.
A few weeks ago we had the chance to talk with Adam Needles, a writer, marketing veteran and academic who focuses on the ways in which brand strategy meets technology and innovation. He’s currently working on his MBA, but keeps a regular and in-depth blog with snippets of his forthcoming thesis and book.
His most recent post, “Online Compiled Lead Sourcing Providers: Assessing Their Value and Understanding Their Evolution,” explores the history and current state of the lead cycle, and the changes that have taken place in the process. Among the points made is the recognition that sales and marketing are becoming increasingly aligned.
The rapid ‘death’ of the consultative sale means that marketing organizations increasingly are playing a more-pervasive role in the lifecycle of leads – blurring the traditional lines between marketing and sales organizations.
This “blurring” – or alignment – is a major tenet of Sales 2.0, and it’s great to see folks like Adam making it part of their repertoire of discussion. We were able to speak to this particular evolution, and he explains how InsideView adds value to the lead and deal-closing process:
Why rely purely on public records or traditional address lists when the Web freely offers a wealth of information about prospects, often self-updated – particularly via social media? Moreover, what more can you learn about leads that takes your insights from pure demographic information to more-contextual ethnographic and behavioral insights? That is, in part, the concept behind InsideView, which is…focused on improving the conversion of leads via online compiled lead sourcing providers – a push toward improving the ‘relative truth’ of lead information.
That last point is spot-on, and lead information is constantly being informed by new information and social Web data – the latest being Twitter, which has the potential to give short and constant insight into any given lead. It’s exciting to be a part of bettering the sales process through working towards complete lead sourcing.
Or as Adam puts it: the truth.
One of the most exciting things about being a part of the Sales 2.0 space is working with companies to actually help answer their questions and to get an implementation plan in place. The technologies are upon us, but there are still a myriad of questions folks have about how to carry it all out, what it can really do for them, and why it’s so important.
Tomorrow, April 21, will be the second of a free, four-part educational Webinar series all about sales intelligence. The session, titled “Prospecting 2.0 – The Cold Call is Dead,” features Sales 2.0 author Anneke Seley, as well as Jellyvision Labs VP of Business Development Josh Braun and Marketbright VP of Sales Mike Pilcher. They’ll discuss and help answer any questions you have about effective prospecting and lead/opportunity generation.
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Update: The Prospecting 2.0 webinar was a huge hit. Thank you to all those that attended. And a big thank you to our moderator, inside sales goddess Anneke Seely and to our panelists, fearless Sales 2.0 experimenters Mike Pilcher and Josh Braun.
A recording of the webinar is now available at http://www.insideview.com/WEBINAR/
Do sales professionals leverage consumer tools enough to generate business? What is the one thing that separates the good sales VPs from the great ones?
Those were just a few of the questions that Sales 2.0 expert Scott Schnaars asked our own CEO, Umberto Milletti, in today’s video interview on his blog Beyond Snake Oil. It was great to sit down with Scott – a Sales 2.0 leader in his own right – and talk about the ways Sales 2.0 tools and technologies continue to drive enterprise solutions. Check it out!
