Closing out the year we wanted to look over the content that you have found most interesting and shared most often. 2011 was a big year for sales intelligence and the use of technology by sales teams to be more effective in finding new opportunities and closing more deals.

This is the list of the top 25 sales intelligence posts that people read during 2011

1. 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
2. How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
3. Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
4. 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
5. Gamification of the Sales Process
6. 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
7. 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
8. The History of Apple CEOs
9. Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
10. Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
11. Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
12. 10 of the Best Sales Sites
13. The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
14. 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
15. Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
16. Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
17. 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
18. 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
19. The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
20. Should Sales People Be Blogging?
21. The Problem with Big Data
22. The Future of Social CRM
23.  Do You Listen to Your Customers?
24. 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1 
25. A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence

It’s not only sales managers that are interested in increasing sales productivity. Every sales rep that is serious about their career tries to be more productive and effective in their sales efforts. One of the best ways to learn to be more productive as a sales person is to learn what is working and what is not by other experts.

Sure, we have a bunch of posts on how to be a more productive sales person but there is always more tips and tricks that come from other well known people that should be shared.

1. How Entrepreneurs Can Increase Productivity by 500% -TechCrunch
2. Top 5 Sales Strategies for 2012. Accelerate Your Momentum with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
3. The Three Types of Team Commitment
4. What’s Driving Your Customers Away?
5. 8 Ways to Incentivize Employees to Use CRM
6. Negative Assumptions Before Your Calls Usually Come True
7. What’s Your Plan Once You’ve Connected Via A Social Network?
8. The 10 Biggest Referral Mistakes Salespeople Make
9. Anatomy Of A Lousy Sales Email
10. One Marketing Guy Who Gets It (What Sales Needs, That Is)
11. Why Sales Forecasts Are a Joke
12. The Presentation Trap: Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale
13. 10 Tips that Separate the Good Sellers from the Great Ones
14. Ignite More Sales with Sales Intelligence
15. Determining What Metrics to Track with CRM

“Using competitive intelligence to sell more effectively is not a universal practice, but the Best-in-Class include it in their solution mix 36% more frequently than Industry Average companies, and 51% more than laggards”

If traditional sales and marketing methods no longer work, what do prospects respond to? How can sales and marketing reach, connect and engage with prospects effectively in today’s world?

The secrets to successful B2B sales and marketing are simple: Right Person. Right Time. Right Message.

Right Person: The first task is to identify the right person, find relevant information about them and connect with them through someone they know and respect. 84 percent of prospects usually respond to a sales rep when recommended by someone inside the company. Rather than calling a phone number from a list, identify an individual at the right level within the organization. This person should hold a position that gives them the authority to make a decision and makes them likely to have a need for the product or service. Be aware of the prospect’s work profile and recent tweets to easily establish a rapport, and know which colleague or reference customer can provide a warm introduction to the prospect.

Right Time: Know when to call a prospect. Picking up the phone right after a company secures funding, when a new executive has come on board, or when a new regulatory requirement comes into effect matters. Calling the prospect even days or weeks before a competitor does can be the difference between winning and losing a deal.

Right Message: Prospects take it in their own hands to go online to learn about vendor solutions, and they are often aware of the key features and big differences. As a result, they value reps that are more customer-focused and who can articulate how they can address the prospect’s unique business needs. The nuanced message should be about how to help a prospect be successful rather than what a product does.

A recent paper by Aberdeen titled “Understanding the Science of  Sales Intelligence” identified the key areas that companies and sales teams should be focusing on for results.

• Executives/ People Information
• Targeted company details; Financials; Competitors
• Contextually relevant news
• Analyst data on tends
• User generated content (blogs, social media)

“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,”

“InsideView distinguishes itself as one of the few vendors in social CRM focused on sales processes,” reads the Gartner report, available for purchase here. The report continues, “With an emphasis on usability, InsideView has promoted a compelling vision for applying search and relationship mining technologies to aid salespeople with key informational needs around sourcing contacts and leads, as well as monitoring business events and personnel within accounts.” Ease-of-use is also praised: “…easy to set up and personalize to specific needs (i.e., list building, lead generation, lead qualification, precall research in prospecting, account research, etc.).”

The report also highlights InsideView’s ability to uncover new sales opportunities and relationships, as well as to provide real-time intelligence and social information on leads and prospects through its unique Buzz Tab. One new area of emphasis by InsideView is the establishment of broader community: just last month, InsideView launched a Lithium-powered community for its nearly 100,000 users.

“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “It’s great to see the industry analysts agree on the importance of these one-to-one relationships. We are now expanding more into the areas of marketing and service as these recognize the need for deeper relationships. Look for some exciting announcements about our offering soon.”

One of the most important rules of sales is to listen to your customers. As a sales person if you are doing all of the talking, your customer is probably going to fall asleep on the other end of the phone. The same is true when giving presentations, you have to make it entertaining if not interactive so you can keep the audiences attention. You want your customers attention, you want them to be engaged with you wherever they are in the process.

Anthropologist’s View on Listening

Recently, Chris Bailey published a post called Listening to What Isn’t Said. Chris is an anthropologist who works in customer experience design and his post is definitely worth reading.

In his post, he gives us five simple ways to listen to what is not said.

• Shut Up
• Be Naive
• Get Curious
• Show Me
• Record It

But listening to your customers on the phone or in person is only part of the conversation you should pay attention to. A sales person should be listening to everything around your customer as well as their company and there are a few ways to do this.

Set up your InsideView Watchlists. Why go searching for trigger events and news about your customers when you can get a custom email sent to you every day. This is a pretty comprehensive list of news around the companies you are tracking covering leadership changes, acquisitions, lawsuits, and executives that show up in the news.

Another practice you should follow for you customers is to setup a search specific to them on social media networks. Does their company have a Twitter profile? Big announcements and other company news will be shared through the corporate Twitter profile that you might want to be aware of. You can always go the next step and follow your cusotmers personal Twitter feeds also. You can do this by setting up a list in Twitter and making it private if needed so you can see what the people from inside the company are saying. Sometimes this is a great way to get introduced to others in the company or see what you contact is interested in outside of work. InsideView has a list specific for employees that anyone can follow or read.

Paying attention to your customers and listening to them on and offline can give you better insights to what matters most to them and gives you multiple ways to engage with them and build stronger relationships.

How are you listening to your customers? What tools or applications do you recommended?

Business Insights, Contacts and News Immediately at Fingertips of Users of SAP CRM 7.0

InsideView, a sales intelligence leader, today announced its InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence 2.0 solution is now SAP-certified for integration with the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application 7.0, earning “Powered by SAP NetWeaver®” certification status.

Through the integration of InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence with SAP CRM 7.0, users now have access to complete and relevant intelligence on millions of companies and decision-maker contacts worldwide, directly inside the platform. Users can spend more time selling and less time researching their prospects and customers. InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence dramatically improves sales performance by bringing together traditional business information from the world’s leading sources, breaking news and social intelligence about companies and contacts into a single window within SAP CRM 7.0. The “all-in-one” sales intelligence makes it fast and easy to discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision makers, close deals, and grow customer relationships and top-line revenue.

InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence also incorporates all major social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs for easy access to warm connections and real-time insight about customers and prospects. Sales intelligence has been shown to increase revenue per sales person by more than 10 percent, compared to sales people who only have access to simple contact or company data.

“We are excited to deliver certified integration between InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence and SAP CRM 7.0, bringing rich business insight, alerts and actionable social media to customers,” said Heidi Tucker, Vice President, Global Alliances, InsideView. “The solution now integrated with SAP CRM delivers valuable functionality to empower 21st century sales warriors to achieve competitive edge.”

InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence is an indispensible resource for sales organizations that want to efficiently know their prospects and customers. It increases sales productivity, reduces cost (no need to buy company information and prospect lists from multiple sources), and improves CRM user adoption. To learn more about InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence integrated with SAP CRM, please visit www.insideview.com/SAP.

The SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC) has certified that InsideView CRM Sales Intelligence 2.0 has achieved status as powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform as an add-on for the ABAP™ programming language 7.0 for SAP CRM 7.0. This deployment was tested and certified by the SAP ICC.

Many attendees of the keynote address by Umberto Milletti and the breakout session on Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling asked for copies of the presentations used. InsideView has a profile on SlideShare and we continue to upload more content to it every week. These are the presentations we used during SugarCon.

 
Big Data & The Emergence of Social Selling | SugarCRM SugarCon #scon11

 
Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling | #scon11 @sugarcon

 
5 Must-Haves For Boosting Sales With Social Media

SugarCRM Users To Have Seamless Access to InsideView for Social Selling

InsideView, the social selling and sales intelligence leader, and SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, announced today that InsideView’s powerful sales intelligence solution will come preinstalled in all editions of SugarCRM.  The integrated solution will provide all of SugarCRM’s users with immediate access to InsideView’s state-of-the-art sales intelligence at no incremental cost. The announcement was made at the annual SugarCon customer and developer’s conference.

The partnership comes at a time when sales people are overwhelmed with an explosion of data that leaves them spending more time searching for information and less time selling.  InsideView’s sales intelligence dramatically improves sales performance by aggregating the most valuable sources of external information sales people need about companies and contacts into a single, easy-to-access view within SugarCRM. This sales intelligence makes it fast and easy to discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision-makers, close deals, and grow both customer relationships and top-line revenue.

Sales intelligence has been shown to increase revenue per sales person by more than ten percent, compared to sales people who only have access to simple contact or company data. InsideView’s platform aggregates and draws relevance from the huge quantity of business information available in tens of thousands of worldwide business publications; social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs; and financial and contact information.

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti’s participation in a keynote address at SugarCon –  SugarCRM’s marquee global user group event – highlights the importance and urgency of social selling and sales intelligence for today’s sales professionals.

“Sales professionals using SugarCRM need to be able to create effective and actionable information from the massive amounts of data presented to them at any given time,” said Clint Oram, CTO at SugarCRM. “With this partnership, InsideView brings meaningful business insight for millions of companies worldwide directly into our easy-to-use platform. With this integration, any user’s view of his or her leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities will include real-time, relevant social and business insights and triggers.”

“We are excited to partner with SugarCRM to empower all SugarCRM customers and partners with automatic access to rich insight about millions of companies and key decision-makers around the world,” said Heidi Tucker, VP Global Alliances at InsideView. “Combined with SugarCRM’s ‘single system of truth’ and collaborative platform, “InsideView will help SugarCRM users find more relevant ways to connect with their prospects and customers to understand their important business issues. “

Building off the existing integration between Sugar and SalesView, the sales intelligence solution from InsideView, the companies are announcing a combined social CRM and sales intelligence solution. The latest edition of Sugar 6 will include SalesView pre-loaded into the system. This offers users the ability to tap into thousands of global data sources, as well as the vast universe of social media to gain relevant and actionable insight into their prospects and customers.

“A CRM system is only as good as the data inside of it,” said Umberto Milletti. “By accessing real-time sales intelligence and relevant social information within Sugar 6, users can discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision-makers, close deals and grow customer relationships more quickly. SalesView and Sugar together form the building blocks of a winning social CRM strategy for any business.

SugarCRM is the first major CRM platform to ship with InsideView’s sales intelligence built right in. SugarCRM Cloud edition users will see InsideView immediately when accessing the newest SugarCRM version. All users of SugarCRM’s on-premise edition may download InsideView from SugarExchange or upgrade to the latest release of SugarCRM. To learn more about InsideView and how sales intelligence can dramatically improve your sales cycle, please visit www.insideview.com/SUGARCRM.

SugarCon ’11, SugarCRM’s fifth annual user & customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and experts from around the world. Packed with two days of business, technical and product presentations, SugarCon provides practical knowledge that you can apply to improve your company’s performance.

InsideView has the good fortune to have multiple sessions at SugarCon 2011 where we will have the opportunity to cover a great deal of content. Starting off with a Keynote address from Umberto Milletti and then two separate breakout sessions with Inbound Marketing Manager and Social Selling Director Koka Sexton along with the VP of Marketing Ralf VonSosen.

Big Data and the Emergence of Social Selling with Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO, InsideView

Room: Ballroom

Keynotes | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 1:15  – 2:00

As more businesses transact online and millions of users including executives and consumers use social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, there’s an overwhelming amount of data, also known as “Big Data”, on companies and contacts online.

This data deluge presents new challenges as well as big opportunities, especially for sales organizations, to distill actionable insights about prospects and transform selling from an art to science. Harnessing business and social intelligence about prospects will no longer be optional, but essential for increasing sales productivity and win rates.

Learn about why Big Data matters and how it can help you change the game of selling.

Session #1

Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton

Track 4: The Sugar Exchange | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 2:00  – 2:40

Today’s customers are not very responsive to traditional sales and marketing tactics such as email blasts, cold-calls, and canned pitches. Using social media, customers are researching products and solutions, and talking to their peers for recommendations instead of listening to vendor pitches. Over 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before it gets to sales.

Most sales reps and sales organizations are overwhelmed by too much data and frustrated by the loss of productivity as they seek actionable sales intelligence about their prospects!  Harnessing business and social insights about prospects from online data can be a game-changer and a productivity booster for sales teams.

Come to this session to learn about how you make your selling more of a competitive advantage, what you need to have in place, and how you can get started.

Session #2

5 Must-Haves For Boosting Sales With Social Media with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton

Track 6: Social Business | Wednesday, April 6^th | 11:30am – 12:10pm
Your customers have changed. How you find them and engage with them has changed too. It’s more important than ever for sales organizations to recognize this opportunity to build relationships and generate new leads using social media. The problem is what tools to use, metrics to track and how to train them.

In this session, you will learn about the 5 easy steps you should take, that will empower a sales team to engage with customers in social networks. You will also learn what tools work best and how to measure the results.

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.

Convergence is the premier Microsoft Dynamics event where you can experience first-hand how you can optimize your business and improve your bottom line. This event serves as the meeting point for the Microsoft Dynamics Customer and Partner business community.

Top Five Reasons to Attend Convergence 2011 Atlanta:

1. Learn how you can get the most out of your Microsoft Dynamics solution to drive sales productivity.
2. Network and collaborate with your peers and the product experts from InsideView and Microsoft.
3. Experience the latest solution innovations, new products and technologies InsideView offers to Dynamics users.
4. The event is cost effective, convenient, and organized to meet your needs.
5. Get insights into InsideView’s corporate direction for sales intelligence and understand future plans for your Microsoft Dynamics solution.

The best reason to attend Convergence 2011 is to be in the Geekiest party of the year

My first two blog posts in this series focused on productivity drivers that improve sales efficiencies:  Consolidation of disparate data sources into one clearly delivers significant time savings for sales reps as does the delivery of this information at the point of need – directly within a reps’ workflow.  Now I’d like to dive into sales productivity drivers that improve sales effectiveness, those that make reps not just faster but also better!

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.

While identifying the right people to talk to takes effort, determining a compelling reason for the prospect to respond to you can prove even more difficult, not to mention the challenges of identifying the right time and venue to conduct an initial outreach.  Independent research supports how intelligence trumps data in driving sales productivity: According to a recent CSO Insights study, sales intelligence users have much higher success with lead conversion rates.  The table below shows the percentage of firms reporting lead to first discussion conversion rates great than 50%.

Cases in point:

Trinet, a successful and fast growing HR services firm delivering payroll HR compliance to small to mid size businesses supports the CSO Insights findings:  Tapping into intelligence to achieve relevance with their prospects, the sales development team has an incredible 70% rate for conversion-to-appointment from initial calls!

Phil Rowlinson, former VP of Global Sales Operations for IntraLinks also agrees: “Today, the success of a CRM solution requires more than just quality data and detailed reporting.  Intelligence solutions like InsideView give sales a critical advantage as they quickly and intelligently connect with decision makers through direct-to-desktop account information and integration with social/professional networking solutions.”

Given the growing impact of intelligence on sales productivity, next week I will explore how sales reps can leverage an emerging intelligence source, namely social intelligence to improve the relevance of their engagements.    In the meantime, I look forward to any success stories or challenges you may have experienced in transitioning to an intelligence-driven sales organization…or hear about your plans to do so.

“Pelin Thorogood, principal at Schulman+Thorogood Group. Helping B2B companies drive ROI through creative go-to-market planning and focused marketing optimization”

Provide access to sales intelligence directly at the “point of need”

Last week I kicked off a multi-post blog series on the top sales productivity tips I have assembled based on my ongoing conversations with dozens of InsideView customers.   My first tip was about the significant efficiencies that can be realized from consolidating disparate sales data sources into one.  Sales productivity gains that come from access to a single “go-to” source of complete, up-to-date and relevant prospect intelligence are real and immediate.  However, as I’ve heard time and time again – confirmed by pretty much everyone one I’ve talked to – where and how this intelligence is delivered is just as critically important to sales productivity.

Given most sales professionals are mandated to use SFA/CRM systems to manage their client interactions, it only makes sense to deliver sales intelligence directly within the CRM, integrated into the sales reps’ daily workflow, and right at the point of need.  This is confirmed by Peter Ostrow, research director for sales effectiveness at the “http://www.insideview.com/directory/aberdeen-group-inc”>Aberdeen Group, who states “Access to sales intelligence, especially when directly fed into CRM/SFA systems, is clearly one of the major enablers for the best-in-class companies in the [Inside Sales Enablement] study.”  Ostrow goes on to say “Sales teams who are deploying InsideView’s sales intelligence application are indeed achieving 32 percent better performance than non-customers, in terms of current lead conversion rates and hitting quota, and year-to-year growth in revenue and win/loss ratios.”  In addition to CRM integration, browser and mobile access also emerge as important productivity drivers, delivering easy access to intelligence when and where the sales reps need it …and thus enabling the reps to stay abreast of their prospects anytime/anywhere.

Cases in Point:

“The primary reason for our decision to switch to InsideView was its tight, easy-to-use integration with Salesforce.com.  The single point of access is a significant sales productivity enhancer, enabling fast and effective prospecting and account planning.” John Knotwell, senior director of sales operations at inContact

“The SalesView mash-up with Salesforce.com gives me great functionality and excellent usability – basically everything I need for boosting sales effectiveness– all in one place.  We have realized huge gains in productivity and the sales team is excited!” Tina Babbi, VP of Sales and Service Operations for TriNet. 

“SalesView significantly accelerates account research with one-stop-shop access to prospect data and enables more relevant customer engagement with alerts on compelling business events.” Michelle Coolican, Business Development Manager, Oracle Health Sciences Global Business Unit

Both data consolidation as well as its delivery at the point of need clearly improve sales efficiencies.  Next up, I will explore sales productivity drivers that go beyond efficiencies, and focus on sales effectiveness strategies that result in increased success with customer engagements.  In the meantime, I look forward to hearing about top contributors to sales efficiencies and sales effectiveness for your organization.

InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence, today announced that its award-winning sales intelligence application is now available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customers. InsideView is one of the first companies to earn the elite Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) status. InsideView is also a National sponsor of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2011 launch tour in Canada and several cities in the U.S.

Salespeople who understand how to use social media and sales intelligence to quickly build trust and credibility with prospects are more successful than those who do not. InsideView is the only application that combines millions of company and decision-maker contact records with actionable sales triggers, rich social profiles, relevant news alerts and major social networks into one simple user interface. Within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, account and contact records, InsideView delivers an all-in-one sales intelligence source. Salespeople save time and trump their competitors with real-time insights that get them into more deals at the right time, with the right decision-maker and with a relevant, meaningful message.

Using InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, salespeople can increase their sales productivity — as measured by lead generation volumes, lead conversion rates and opportunity win rates. InsideView drives higher CRM adoption and ROI.

“We look forward to helping Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customers and partners increase their sales productivity and achieve measurable ROI,” said Umberto Milletti, founder and CEO of InsideView. “We are pleased to be one of the most popular Dynamics’ applications and an elite Certified for Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner.”

As a CfMD partner, InsideView is now recognized with the highest distinction available for Dynamics partners, reflecting outstanding customer ratings, stringent product certification and support requirements. InsideView is the only CfMD application to incorporate thousands of sources of traditional business insight and new social media/social networking fully integrated inside Dynamics CRM.

InsideView is a free application that installs in minutes directly from the newly live Dynamics Marketplace, where it is already the most popular (and five-star rated) application. It’s available for CRM 2011 and CRM 4.0 online and on-premises, and is also available in subscriber version with millions of contact records (including email addresses and phone numbers), and more. InsideView has a robust partner program with social selling training, special offers and generous commissions for Microsoft CRM partners. Contact partners@insideview.com for details.

As part of the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, InsideView is also sponsoring the launch tour in the U.S. and Canada at the following locations:

• San Francisco, February 3^rd
• Irvine, February 8^th
• Chicago, March 8^th
• New York, March 10^th
• Montreal, March 21^st
• Toronto, March 29^th
• Vancouver, April 19^th

To easily get started with InsideView for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and increase your sales productivity through unparalleled sales intelligence, please visit www.insideview.com/microsoft.

SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the results of its 2010 Social CRM Survey. The poll’s results reinforced the notion that in the year 2010, CRM practitioners have been slow to embrace social. Those that have chosen to take advantage of this new technology have enjoyed a competitive advantage in the market and a considerable return on investment, placing them firmly ahead of their challengers.

According to the survey, 2011 will bring much change to the CRM market; virtually all of the respondents agreed that over the course of the new year they planned to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data. While nearly half of all respondents stated that having social CRM capabilities would impact their decision-making when purchasing their company’s next CRM system, it’s clear that social CRM will become a staple in the market by 2012.

Some companies have chosen to lead the charge on social CRM, and upgrade their CRM software before it becomes an industry norm. Insource Performance Solutions, a SugarCRM customer, is one of those companies.

“The integration between InsideView and SugarCRM allows us to leverage social media and other real time data sources to our advantage, all in a simple-to-consume, automated format,” said Chip Meyers, sales operations manager for Insource. “The merging of social and CRM system data gives us a competitive edge.”

SugarCRM users can get a FREE copy of InsideView for Sales in the Sugar Exchange Marketplace.

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.

There is a shift being made in businesses regarding their approach to gaining new business and managing their customers. Social CRM is on the rise and this is more than a few bells and whistles being added into your contact database. With a large focus being made in the movement away from sales data and into sales intelligence, sales professionals will need to make a few adjustments on how they do everything from prospect, develop new opportunities and manage their existing accounts.

Customer 2.0 is not waiting around for a sales person to get back to them with information, they are online looking for answers from people outside of your company within their own social networks and generally searching for people they should be in contact with. The trick (if you want to call it that) is to make yourself as visible as possible so that this new breed of customer has no option but to come across your name or profile during these searches. This is why Sales 2.0 starts with YOU.

5 Steps a person should take to make themselves more sales 2.0 ready

1. Create or optimize you LinkedIn profile. I came across another company this week that only had 20% of their sales team on LinkedIn. At first the sales manager was resistant to the idea of their team using LinkedIn but after some discussion, I think they changed their mind. I guess we’ll see in a couple weeks when we check back in with them.

Sales people should look at their online presence as an extension of themselves. Sites like LinkedIn can become self service lead generators once you optimize your LinkedIn profile and start building a network.

2. Get over your fear and join Twitter now! Maybe it’s because I didn’t have many friends as a teenage kid but I have always found Twitter to be a useful tool to meet people interested in the same things as me and have small conversations. Once I realized that Twitter could be used in a sales environment, I started building a mini network of people that were already customers and looking for products that I sold. You might be amazed at the number of executives on Twitter or just other employees that you can build relationships with online. Remember people buy from people, the more you are seen as a person and not another sales person the better.

Use the search feature or get an application like HootSuite or TweetDeck to help you focus on specific geographies and keywords your company is associated with.

3. This should be #1 but for the sake of editing it’s not. Go over to GoDaddy or another domain name company and buy yourname.com. Google yourself and look at what the results are. Owning your own domain name and building a simple site or even pointing the domain to your LinkedIn profile will help you stand out from the crowd. Your prospects are looking at your online identity just as you are them. Make sure you are searchable and showing your customers/prospects that you are a professional.

4. Stop cold calling and start engaging in conversations. Now that you have a shiny LinkedIn profile start spending a little bit of time in groups and asking/answering questions. You will be amazed at the number of people that are willing to give free advice to you about how to make yourself better or how thankful some people are that you were able to help them out. These are all little building blocks to make you a sales 2.0 expert and bring more prospects to you.

5. Add your social profiles to everything you send to prospects. Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and company blog URLs to your email signature. This is a great way to get some exposure to your Sales 2.0 identity and will let people learn more about YOU and not the sales person contacting them.

These are some simple steps a sales person can take that will build their credibility online and make it near impossible for customer 2.0 not to notice. Would you like me to look at your LinkedIn profile and offer any suggestions? Leave me a comment with the link and I’ll check it out.

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.

This was a timely update from Paul as I was putting together the post on personal branding for sales people. Anyone that is serious as a sales person needs to be aware what their personal brand is. I think this is one of the most overlooked aspects of a sales person’s life and should really be developed. As a sales person you need to be aware and in control of what is found when people look for you. This is why it is so important to optimize your LinkedIn profile. Dealing with Customer 2.0 is hinged on being searchable and having a rich online identity that shows you are more professional than the competition. Obviously this is about your personal brand as a sales person but this also translates into how you represent your company’s brand as well. If you have an extensive presence online providing information and helping people, you are going to get an extra level of engagement from prospects and others looking for answers.

What comes up when you Google yourself?

Chances are if you Google yourself now there may be something that comes up related to you. If nothing else, your LinkedIn profile should show up in the first few results if you have optimized it correctly since LinkedIn has a lot of Google juice. But what if that’s all that comes up about you? Even worse, what if you have negative results that show up? If your customers look you up online, there are some simple things you can do that will help both of these issues.

Remove bad content at the source.

Chances are you just uploaded some pictures or have a profile somewhere that you don’t use or just isn’t how you want to be seen in the professional world. Go to the site and delete the profile, picture or contact the site administrator to remove it for you. Sounds like a little bit of work but you will be thankful that this won’t come back to haunt you in the future.

Bury it with newer, positive information.

You are on your way to being a Sales 2.0 ninja and the more professional profiles you set up and content you share on sites like LinkedIn, business blogs and sales sites, the more the older information will be buried from the front page of Google and other search engines. Start taking control of your personal brand and directing people to your showcase pages and profiles. If you add a new profile and provide content to just a couple sites a week you will see the other listings disappear.

Sales 2.0 in the mirror

You should always be thinking about helping your customer by providing valuable information and resources to get educated online. Sales 2.0 is about using the Internet to educate prospects, find new opportunities and build stronger relationships. Your social profiles will be the glue that holds your credibility together.