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How are successful salespeople leveraging social media for selling? Intelligence Drives Revenue

December 22, 2011 in Prospecting, Sales 2.0, Sales Intelligence, Social Media for Sales, Social Selling by Koka Sexton | 1 comment

This is part two in a study we created along with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“

Sales Intelligence drives revenue.

InsideView social intelligence“Based on the 12 ways sales people leverage the internet it is clear that B2B sales teams spend a lot of time researching prospects and customers on the web and social networks. It’s no longer an issue of not having any information ahead of time, the issue is that there is an overwhelming amount of personal insights available. Sifting through it to find the relevant information you can act on today appears to be the challenge at hand. Sales intelligence drives revenue by feeding sales people trigger events and insights within a company or contact.” (Koka Sexton)

Make the most of a B2B Social Networks more advanced features and functionalities.

“On the B2B side of the house, LinkedIn is the networking tool in the US with some 130 million members of the 100 million-plus community. Many people know how to invite people to their network, but they usually do not know what to do after that.”

InsideView social sellingHere are a few of the ways that savvy B2B salespeople will leverage B2B social networks:

  • Advanced people search: Create prospecting lists based on the criteria of your ideal buyers. Save the list, and LinkedIn dynamically updates and alerts you weekly to the new people matching your criteria who have joined the network. Each week, you can then plan your strategy with respect to how you’ll approach the initial interaction.
  • Applications: Use the applications to add video, compelling presentations, white papers and case studies or sync your blog posts to your profile. Keep your content fresh and people pay attention. In the past eight weeks, I’ve secured four paid gigs and in every single case, I was told it was because my profile stood out from the rest and because they liked the video. It is all about engaging people and enticing them to want to know more.
  • Polls: Create a poll to gather real-time trending information that you can share with your prospective buyers.
  • Status updates: Ongoing status updates that are ‘relevant’ and provide value to others keep salespeople visible; because at the end of the day, it is all about visibility.
  • Groups: Leveraging groups (the right groups!) gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate credibility, but not selling!
  • Use the Answers section to listen and respond to the questions that people are asking. Every single day people ask what products to buy and from whom.
  • Events: Hosting an educational session for potential clients? Use the events functionality and use it to share with your network.” (Giamanco)

Monitor prospect discussion and social data for buying signals.

InsideView - Business Intelligence“Prospect research has changed forever. In no other time in my life have we seen prospects update their own information and update you on what they are doing in their personal and professional lives! Today’s modern social salesperson is exceptionally prepared for their sales calls. One tip: Company data is interesting (e.g., … [alerts] about your sales prospect’s company: ‘New product launch!’), but prospect social data is even more interesting, because it will tell you what the person really cares about (‘Just got back from sales training in Florida, learned a ton!’).” (Rosenberg)

“Leveraging twitter for sales is very effective. Once you know how to use Twitter as a sales tool, you can get insights into people and companies in realtime.” (Sexton)

“Watch for buying signals across the social Web. One of the greatest opportunities for salespeople via social media is to see into the buying cycle far earlier than we’ve typically had access to. Before social media, we could deepen our understanding of the buyer and use outbound marketing to connect with a particular need, try and find resonance with a buying signal, etc. But that, at best, was a fishing expedition most of the time. Now, if you know the buying signals and pain/problem keywords your prospects typically exhibit before they’re ready to buy, you can watch for those discussions and keywords across the social Web. Do a couple keyword searches on Twitter, for example, and you’ll be surprised how many people, in real-time, are talking about their existing challenges, their frustrations with competitive products and more.” (Heinz)

“Social media is a great tool for salespeople, but for not for the reasons that some people believe. Social media isn’t a replacement for the prospecting activities that success in sales requires, as some seem to suggest. It is a simply a set of tools that allow the execution of some of those activities. There is way too much focus on using social media tools for inbound marketing, and way too little on leveraging the tools to better enable the execution of the fundamental roles of salespeople: opening new opportunities. Opening new opportunities isn’t a passive activity, and salespeople who wait for their prospects to find them aren’t successful by any of the measures we use in sales. The salespeople who are successfully using social media are using the tools to identify and open communication with their dream client contacts. They are using tools like LinkedIn to identify the people who they can most easily create value for within their target accounts. More still, they are researching their prospects, discovering what they are reading, what they are writing about, and where their interests lie. Social media better enables salespeople to know who to call and how they might best create value for those people.” (Iannarino)

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5 Ways Sales Intelligence can Increase Revenue

December 13, 2011 in Sales 2.0, Sales Data, Sales Intelligence, Technology by Koka Sexton | 7 comments

In the last post we explained that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that slow down the process of finding new prospects and getting them into the sales funnel. Knowledge about your customers, finding new prospects and having a sales process that takes too long is a common pain point for businesses.

  • 42% have insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospects
  • 40% do not have the ability to identify the most likely buyers of their product
  • 34% complain of having a sales process that is too long
  • 21% See an increased customer churn forcing them to focus on filling the funnel

I predict in 2012 that these numbers will not change too dramatically but the results from companies that are actively leveraging technology and sales intelligence as a method of combating them will. Sales managers should be constantly on the lookout for ways to solve these business pressures and based on research by the Aberdeen Group, the top performing sales organizations have built strategies that can drive measurable results in building a sales pipeline and increasing the quality of leads.

Sales Intelligence Research

  • 59% of the best in class companies have leveraged sales intelligence tools to identify or disqualify prospects with more accuracy
  • 53% of companies have been able to identify existing customers that have upsell/cross sell opportunities
  • 48% of companies have increased the quality of leads intheir pipelines
  • 28% use technology to capture and share sales knowledge internally.
  • 21% of companies reduce the amount of time doing sales research

This research is important because it’s showing that companies that are having the problems listed above are able to continue achieving results by leveraging sales intelligence in traditional and non-conventional ways. Top performers in lead qualification teams understand that moving less qualified prospects out of their view has more value than dumping a volume of under vetted opportunities on the sales team. By not relying on data but the contextual news and social profiles of the companies and people you are contacting, better decisions can be made on which prospects to pursue and which leads to abandon.

The research study on the science of sales intelligence goes a long way in showing that companies that want to increase revenue quickly with your existing sales team can do so by leveraging technology to speed up the sales process. A strategy around using sales 2.0 applications to identify strong/weak prospects should be a key focus for your 2012 sales plan.

Just a quick poll: Are the issues described above the same as for your company?

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Sales Intelligence at the Speed of Light

December 12, 2011 in Prospecting, Sales Intelligence, Technology by Koka Sexton | 3 comments

Sales Intelligence at the Speed of Light

The best way to increase sales effectiveness is to speed up the research process and then get regular updates on your prospects and the companies they work for. In an article, Forbes spoke with some leaders in sales and got insights on the sales process and what steps sales managers should take to increase their effectiveness on finding more deals and closing them faster.

The overwhelming observations and advice from Wendy Weiss and Paul Castain pointed to finding the right prospects, being more prepared for the call, having intelligence around the prospects, and leveraging non-traditional communications channels to reach prospects.

Paul Castain,Vice President of Jedi Mastery at Castain Training Systems, says a lot of salespeople research a prospect only once during the process. “Business is moving at the speed of light, and things change constantly,” he says. “When you gather information, review it over and over again before you reach out to the client.”

Finding the right prospects to contact shouldn’t be a painful process. Sales intelligence can give you a fresh group of prospects based on sales trigger events in the industry specifically in your territory. These trigger events give you accurate and relevant news about the company or person you are calling. Since we know that most executives will not respond to a cold call, using connections to get introduced is important. If you can’t locate a professional connection to your prospect, use the intelligence you gather through news sources and social media to understand your prospect and make the connection.

Top sales tips to follow

  • Approach them before they are in buying mode
  • Focus on finding the best prospects
  • Stop calling prospects if they are not responsive. Get creative in communications
  • Sales people are expected to know about their prospects before the call
  • Only talk 20% of the time and listen the other 80%
  • Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions
  • Turn rejection into a learning experience
  • Never stop learning how to be more effective

Surprisingly there are still a large number of companies that do not leverage sales intelligence. The Aberdeen study on the Science of Sales Intelligence shows that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that sales intelligence can help with.

  • 42% have insufficient knowledge of the business needs of prospects
  • 40% do not have the ability to identify the most likely buyers of their product
  • 34% complain of having a sales process that is too long
  • 21% See an increased customer churn forcing them to focus on filling the funnel

All of these point to companies needing to be more nimble and enabling their sales teams to move faster with more targeted information. What are you going to different in 2012 to address these business issues?

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Top 12 Ways Sales Leverages the Internet

November 28, 2011 in Prospecting, Sales 2.0, Sales Intelligence, Technology by Koka Sexton | 4 comments

It’s near impossible to be effective in sales without the use of the internet these days. In the 2011 Sales Performance Study by CSO Insights, they researched how sales people were leveraging the internet to get their jobs done.

On average sales reps will spend 24.1% of their time each week on research and lead generation activities. It’s no wonder why sales people go to the internet for help when almost 10 hours a week is spent researching contacts and companies.

Top 12 Ways Sales Leverages the Internet - CSO Insights

The important task of sales research.

The study found that sales research is still the most important activity of how sales people leverage the internet. This is a positive sign in the case that sales people are now at a tipping point when it comes to understanding that it’s more important to sell to people and not contacts. 77.2% of the sales people must be onto something that makes them better at selling.

Now look at the number of people leveraging the internet to actually move people through a sales cycle.

  • 56% conduct webinars
  • 48% of their time is in web based meetings
  • 46% are giving online demos

Sales leaders should be looking for ways to increase these numbers. The best way to do this is to help your sales team on how to be more effective in sales research and decrease the amount of time they spend in that area.

Two flavors of internet research

Companies fall into one of two buckets when it comes to enabling sales people with sales intelligence. Companies either empower their sales people with technology to aid in this effort or they expect a sales person to do all of this on their own. You can imagine what will have a better impact on a sales teams ability to generate more opportunities and increase revenue. The best in class companies which made up 61% of the businesses surveyed leveraged technology to conduct searches for sales reps while 37% left the work up to the individual sales rep.

Spending 10 hours a week on research obviously takes a toll on winning more deals. Though research is important, companies should be looking at ways to increase the amount of time sales people are actually selling.

 

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Connection based prospecting

November 21, 2011 in Product Updates, Prospecting, Sales 2.0, Sales Intelligence by Koka Sexton | 4 comments

Your professional connections can create new opportunities.

To be an effective sales person, it’s best to know how connections you have can get you into new accounts. Instead of relying on more data and names of contacts to call, leveraging intelligence in your sales process can build your pipeline faster. We are expanding further on our lead of people insights of selling to people not contacts. Connection based prospecting is a enhanced way of identifying prospects that you have direct connections to through co-workers, past employers or reference accounts.

InsideView Connection Based Prospecting

Leverage your existing connections for accelerated pipeline growth.

Having connections into a prospect company makes getting in contact with a decision maker much easier. If you foster your professional connections correctly, your network should be happy to introduce you to someone within their company and make a warm introduction. Maybe you are looking for new accounts to contact and you find out that 4 of your coworkers and 2 people you worked with in the past have direct connections to people in a large account you’d like to talk to. That would make getting a warm introduction easier than trying to figure out how to cold-calling into a prospect.

Instead of blindly targeting companies based on contact data focus on getting new customers based on the number of connections you have into the company. People you work with, reference accounts and past coworkers will add a layer of trust to your communication with a decision maker. Leverage those connections to get an opportunity.

We have several new enhancements in our application this month. You can see more about all of them in the InsideView Community.

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