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I responded to a poll on LinkedIn asking “What is your primary Client Relationship Management (CRM) software that you use?” and then took a peek at the results. I’ve been focusing a bit more on LinkedIn for sales people lately since it is the primary social network for companies and professionals. I thought the the information from a poll like this would be perfect for deeper analysis. Even though many of the answers were what I expected, I was caught off guard by one of the results.
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.
Looks like voting is complete for the Top Sales Awards. The award show is being held on 12/16 but with the polls closed we feel comfortable announcing the win. InsideView was nominated in the category of “Top Sales 2.0 Solution” along with some other good companies. We would like to thank the 50,000 sales professionals that use our product and all of you that took the time out of your hectic schedules to vote for us. Thank you!!
editor note: I was notified via Twitter that the number of votes does not indicate who wins. Sounds like the judges make the final call. Either way, we appreciate everyone that voted for us and gave us the highest number of votes by a whopping 53%. Read the rest of this entry »
The time for Dreamforce has finally arrived. It was exciting to see all of the Tweets and Facebook updates from people as the arrived. Within hours great pictures started getting posted online for Dreamforce. Here are some of my favorites.
Dreamforce is the LARGEST event Salesforce hosts every year. People come from all over the US and even other countries to attend the Dreamforce 2010 event in San Francisco. This year will be no different with special guests like Bill Clinton and music by Stevie Wonder. Other than going to the keynotes, special sessions and booths, the Dreamforce parties are always a huge attraction.
InsideView is hosting and sponsoring a couple parties at Dreamforce all around our theme of seeing your leads in 3D. Our booth will be broken up into two parts. Half the booth will be in a theater set up with a massive 3D TV (we are giving this away at the end of the show) where we will have guest speakers talking about Sales 2.0 and Social Selling.
The big question is where are all of the Dreamforce parties? I was asking around and started collecting some places then I figured I would go to LinkedIn and and ask the question in the Dreamforce Group to see if there was already a list compiled. Sure enough, not only was a list made but it was also included with a map of the locations. I guess I could have recreated this with the information I already had but this is just too good of a resource. Click on the map for a full list of parties. Thank you Cindy Montgomery for posting this in the Dreamforce Chatter group!
Make sure you sign up for the InsideView 3D Party.
Last year at Dreamforce, InsideView showed the power of Smart Agents and how it developed typical data into sales intelligence. This year InsideView is going a few steps forward to show companies how to get a 3D view of your customers and prospects to increase revenue. DreamforceIn3D.com
See Your Leads in 3D
Sales people are always looking for an edge. Looking for any piece of information that they can use to identify an opportunity or build stronger relationships through social media. With Twitter on its way to hitting 200 Million registered users, 80 Million professionals on LinkedIn and 500 Million on Facebook, sales people should be looking at this as an opportunity to drive opportunities through the roof.
InsideView recently kicked off the Social Selling University and the entire campaign is designed around showing sales people how to use social media in a way that builds their networks and generates new opportunities.
Dreamforce Resources
Dreamforce is only a couple weeks away and fans of the cloud are going to be looking for online resources that can keep them up to date with Dreamforce news.
InsideView has a few resources for our Dreamforce readers. The InsideView Facebook page will have a lot of information but we have segmented a few other Dreamforce Facebook places for you. The Dreamforce Event page already has over 850 people saying they will attend.
Dreamforce Parties
I’ve been trying to find a list of all the parties that people will be hosting during Salesforce but there has not been much posted on them. Maybe InsideView is ahead of the curve with our announcement of our joint party with ExactTarget on Wednesday at the Metreon and InsideView is hosting a party on Monday that will be sure to welcome all of our friends and customers coming in from all over the US.
InsideView will be at Booth # 924 in Dreamforce and you will want to come by early and get entered to win our event prize, a 50″ 63″ Samsung 3D ready TV.
We will also be breaking our booth into two parts. one or general foot traffic a demonstrations of the application and the other half will be used as a theater to where w will have guest speakers (to be announced) and more Social Selling University content.
In the age of social selling LinkedIn is the B2B sales network of choice. There are many blogs and sites that cater to the B2B sales professional but LinkedIn is by far the place most sales people flock to when trying to find out more information about who they should be talking with. The only limitation is that a normal LinkedIn account limits some of the information you can view, messages or InMails you can send and doesn’t let you connect with people that you do not have a direct relationship with.
Connect with more people on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is more than a place to keep your work history up to date and can be used for more communication than to just keep in contact with past colleagues. I have used LinkedIn for years as a way to contact and communicate with customers and new prospects and now I want to extend that opportunity to all of you. By upgrading your Linked account you get added to the OpenLink Network.
The OpenLink Network lets LinkedIn users find and contact other professionals who are interested in meeting new people. The OpenLink Network is available exclusively to premium account holders.
What a Paid Account Includes:
Social networking service LinkedIn is free, but if you choose to upgrade to a paid account, you have access to additional features. What are the four top advantages in updating your account?
1. Send messages directly, without waiting for an introduction from one of your contacts (called “InMails”), which the site says get a 30 percent response rate;
2. Access the Profile Organizer that allows you to track important profiles in a dedicated workspace, organize profiles into folders and add details to contacts such as notes and contact information;
3. View more profiles when you perform an advanced search (free accounts limit you to 100 search results); and
4. Access more specifics on who’s viewed your profile.
There are three types of paid accounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro. The Business account costs $24.95 per month and allows you three InMails per month, 300 profiles per search and five folders in the Profile Organizer. Business Plus costs $49.95 and allows you 10 InMails per month, 500 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer. The Pro account costs $499.95 per month, allows you 50 InMails per month, 700 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer.
More information on the specifics of paid accounts can be found here.
Let InsideView upgrade you to a Premium Business Account.
We are giving away a free 6 month Business Account to one of our friends. All you need to do is go over to the InsideView page on LinkedIn and leave us a recommendation. While you’re there you might as well follow us on LinkedIn also so you can keep up to date on other promotions and business news we share. We will choose a winner of the 6 month Business account on Dec. 15th and we will contact the winner through LinkedIn.
Leave InsideView a recommendation and you could receive a 6 month paid LinkedIn Business Account upgrade. $150 value
Infographic by our friends at HubSpot.
Do you really want an upgraded LinkedIn account, leave us a comment telling us what you would use it for.
What better way to kick off November by having a reading list o the best social selling articles fro the past week. Here are the posts I thought would be the most interesting to you. Thanks to all of you that sent in requests for new blog’s I should follow after last weeks top 20 social selling articles. Feel free to leave a comment or tweet @insideview with any new suggestions. I love reading new blogs and I get some of my best suggestions from you, the readers.
- Always Be Closing?!? – The Pipeline
- Focus Funnel Expert: Barbra Gago of Cloud9 Analytics – The Funnelholic
- E2.0 Thinking: Steve Jobs – The FastForward Blog
- Myopia and Entropy – IT’s Great Escape – The Cloud Blog
- 9 Helpful Tips To Deal With Negative People – The Chris Voss Show
- Mom, what’s a phone booth? – TeleSmart Communications
- How to Improve Your B2B Sales Workflow with Social Media – Social Media B2B
- Salesforce.com’s Benioff unplugged: Supervendors suck, Oracle, Zuckerberg as Gates – Saleforce.com
- 8 Ways To Reduce Sales With Twitter – Sales Operations Blog
- An Opportunity For “Wow”! – Paul Castain
- You failed at Customer Service, so now try Social Processes. – Micahel Moaz
- 25 Case Studies Using Twitter to Increase Business and Sales – Kyle Lacy
- Why Should I Network on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn etc? – Jonathan Farrington
- 7 Trends Leading to the Growth of Marketing Automation – Eloqua Blog
- Sales 2.0 Conference – Collaboration That Delivers – InsideCRM
- 8 Ways to Not Get ReTweeted – HubSpot
- What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans. – GigaOM
- Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM, Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together – Entperprise 2.0
- CRM: More Relevant Than Ever – DestinationCRM
- CRM Is Only Half of the Story – CustomerThink
- A Sneak Peek at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - CRM Software Review
- Should we stop marketing to the CIO? – Chris Koch
- Kickstarting your Social CRM Initiative: 5 Fundamentals and 5 Immediate Opportunities – Brian Vellmure
- Who Are Our Customers ?! – B2B Buzz
- The 15 Minute Prospecting Workout – Sales 2.0
- Always Be Closing?!? – The Pipeline
- Focus Funnel Expert: Barbra Gago of Cloud9 Analytics – The Funnelholic
- E2.0 Thinking: Steve Jobs - The FastForward Blog
- Myopia and Entropy – IT’s Great Escape – The Cloud Blog
- 9 Helpful Tips To Deal With Negative People - The Chris Voss Show
- Mom, what’s a phone booth? – TeleSmart Communications
- How to Improve Your B2B Sales Workflow with Social Media – Social Media B2B
- Salesforce.com’s Benioff unplugged: Supervendors suck, Oracle, Zuckerberg as Gates – Saleforce.com
- 8 Ways To Reduce Sales With Twitter – Sales Operations Blog
- An Opportunity For “Wow”! – Paul Castain
- You failed at Customer Service, so now try Social Processes. – Micahel Moaz
- 25 Case Studies Using Twitter to Increase Business and Sales – Kyle Lacy
- Why Should I Network on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn etc? – Jonathan Farrington
- 7 Trends Leading to the Growth of Marketing Automation – Eloqua Blog
- Sales 2.0 Conference – Collaboration That Delivers – InsideCRM
- 8 Ways to Not Get ReTweeted – HubSpot
- What’s Hindering Cloud Adoption? Try Humans. – GigaOM
- Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM, Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together – Entperprise 2.0
- CRM: More Relevant Than Ever – DestinationCRM
- CRM Is Only Half of the Story – CustomerThink
- A Sneak Peek at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - CRM Software Review
- Should we stop marketing to the CIO? – Chris Koch
- Kickstarting your Social CRM Initiative: 5 Fundamentals and 5 Immediate Opportunities – Brian Vellmure
- Who Are Our Customers ?! – B2B Buzz
- The 15 Minute Prospecting Workout – Sales 2.0
This post originally appeared on the Focus.com Group, where InsideView regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology for sales organizations.
Companies of all sizes that focus on their sales teams have to put effort in building them into superstars. If the sales people are going to be unleashed into the world to follow up on leads, generate interest in your product/service they need some external efforts by the sales leadership to succeed. In order to work with prospects, move them through a buying cycle, and close deals, they need some training and enablement. I think the concepts of sales training and sales enablement are two sides of the same coin designed to make sales people much better than they are.
Sales Training
Training should be seen as a map or method of engaging with sales people on the art of sales. Answering questions like “How do you position the product?” or “What trigger events should you be looking for?”. Training is something that should help sales people become better sales people in a general sense. These skills will be what helps them in the short and long term with identifying opportunities and getting to decision makers. Most of this can be given to the sales teams by your own sales leadership and even supplemented by specific training classes offered by companies like Miller Heiman or Huthwaite. Teaching sales people how to do their jobs better falls within the sales training bucket for example InsideView sales went through a training recently by Vorsight designed around sales prospecting.
Sales Rep confidence and competency in delivering your message in a way that gets the customer to care enough to do something different… and then choose you… is the ultimate goal of Sales Enablement. Training is absolutely critical to making this a reality in the field. – Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions
Sales Enablement
Part of a successful sales enablement process is training but enablement should be a deeper dive. A sales enablement process should give sales people tools, resources and technology needed to complete their jobs. I covered the best technologies for a sales team earlier. Sales enablement should involve more than just the sales team and should bring in resources from marketing, support and other departments that could produce information or content for the sales teams. I would argue that focusing on sales enablement is much more important than just a sales training because giving sales people the ability to sell weighs more than just teaching them to sell. A true sales enablement plan leaves sales teams with a map, compass and marching orders to drive revenue. Enabled sales people are highly successful compared to a sales person that just knows the landscape and is told to go find deals. I guess you could say that SalesView is a component of a great sales enablement plan.
The ‘tools’ bucket is potentially the most difficult because it ranges from collateral to calculators to case studies – and for each business/buyer there is a different mix of tools that will be the most compelling content. – Kirsten Knip of HubSpot
As I said earlier, they are two sides of the same coin and real sales enablement must have a training component in order to be successful. Management needs to make sure that sales training is implemented and the sales leadership should put the pieces in place that lets the sales teams feel enabled and empowered to do their jobs.
Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
Tracking large companies as a sales person is not an easy task. If you’re targeting a large software company as a sales prospect you could spend days or weeks trying to find out who you need to speak with that can make a decision and even longer doing the pre-call research to get an idea of how to position yourself.
Nothing hurts more than to spend any length of time getting someone on a call and then finding out from them that they just announced a series of layoffs or that the company is cutting costs because of unhappy investors.
Now thats the bad side and as sales people we focus on the positive. Let me use Symantec (SYMC) as an example to the type of sales intelligence you could gather and help you make sure you are getting in front of the right people with the right message. Let’s say you are selling a new product designed to increase sales productivity and you want to call the Director of Inside Sales for Symantec and discuss how it can help them. Here is a copy of the Symantec Corporation listing from our InsideView Directory.
If you have InsideView installed in your CRM you can let the application do all of the leg work for you and get a wealth of information about the company without having to do any of the searching on your own. The Smart Agents tell you everything you need to know about news related to the company and executive staff and within the application you can see any of your LinkedIn connections that you have connected to the company. Having this aggregated data from different sources injected to your CRM gives you more data than any other sales productivity application available. But it doesn’t stop there.
Having company information is great but that’s only one piece of the puzzle and you still need someone specific to contact. SalesView lets you drill in or do a search on a specific title or name and get the contact name(s) for Symantec and pin point the person you need to reach out to and even give you some initial perspective on them. SalesView lets you see that David is a Director of Inside Sales for Symantec, provides all of his contact information and even highlights some of the social networks he is a part of like Facebook and Twitter and now you know that he’s a golfer and maybe that’s how you start building rapport with him. Or you can dig in one step further and see that he recently held a summit for BizSummits that covered “Sales Team-Motivation and Attitude Adjustments”.
Using SalesView for the aggregated sales intelligence lets a sales person know a great deal of information about a company all the way down to key decision makers in an organization. Adding in the functionality of a Social CRM lets you follow leads and contacts in more detail and get alerted to trigger events that can activate buying cycles. Having a completely integrated application pulling information form sources all over the internet is what will help you as a sales professional build your pipeline and know whats happening with your prospects and customers.
