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Selling Power, one of the premier voices on the sales industry, focused their latest issue on “1,009 Ideas for Building Sales in a Touch Economy,” and we were thrilled to see InsideView featured in their section on Lead Management. Selling Power notes that InsideView is “one of the best sources for finding valuable leads going forward.” The article provides an in-depth analysis of the role of Web 2.0, particularly LinkedIn, in generating quality leads and why the new sales tools that they highlight are becoming indispensible resources for sales professionals. Regarding SalesView, the author notes that it is effective at “cutting through the clutter” and that the application “accurately finds and alerts [sales] reps to key events that affect account management.” This issue of the magazine is definitely worth taking a look at, as it tackles a number of timely topics for sales professionals during this challenging economic period and provides many insights about how to improve performance. We are very excited to receive this recognition by Selling Power, as well as to know that our technology is making a real impact for sales professionals during this daunting moment in our economy.
Sales 2.0 is transforming how companies sell, market, and run their sales organizations. It arms salespeople with better tools and improved processes so they can connect with the best prospects, pursue richer opportunities, collaborate more efficiently with customers and members of their team, and close more sales faster. As we watch the world of selling organize itself around the customer, and as we monitor the evolution of well over 1,000 technology solutions in that space, we’ve noted a group of distinct characteristics that come up consistently in conversations around Sales 2.0. To help capture the particular attributes that make Sales 2.0 distinct, we will be publishing a weekly series of blog posts that define specific characteristics of this emerging industry. We’ve based much of our content on the recent article “Sales 2.0: How soon will it improve your business?” by Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner — if you’re eager to read more you can access the full article here.
This week we’ll begin our Sales 2.0 blog series by discussing the role of acceleration in Sales 2.0.
1. Sales 2.0 is about acceleration.
Selling is moving from human speed to Internet speed. Salespeople spend less time on every phase of the sales call, from finding prospects to closing the sale. Since every phase of the sales funnel is optimized, salespeople will pursue better opportunities, waste less time chasing unprofitable business, accelerate the creation of better solutions for their customers, and move deals faster from the discovery phase to the close. Sales managers can rely on better technology to respond to the constant shifts in the marketplace with agility, precision, and lightening speed.
Examples: ConnectAndSell empowers salespeople to speak with 7 to 10 prospects per hour instead of 10 prospects per day. InsideView gives salespeople clear insights into their prospect’s business, as well as access to relevant social information about the prospect. Jigsaw allows salespeople to quickly target prospect companies, bypass gatekeepers, and go straight to the decision makers.
Umberto Milletti, InsideView CEO, recently shared InsideView’s vision for a Sales 2.0 world with writer Geoffrey James, a leading authority and reporter on all-things-sales-related, in the most recent addition of SellingPower.com. We talk a lot on this blog about the need for more relevant data and collaboration across the social Web, but we thought you might want to hear from the InsideView ‘head honcho’ himself about the role of socialprise, technology, and InsideView in the sales profession, so we’ve included the full transcript of the interview below.
Selling Power: You’re credited with coining the term “socialprise.” What does it mean?
Umberto Milletti: Socialprise means bringing the benefits of social media (like blogs, forums, social network sites, etc.) to the enterprise in general, and to the sales organization in particular. Sales professionals realize that there is a great deal of information on the Web about various people and organizations, but they are often at a loss about how to find what they need to know. Our product, SalesView, leverages and aggregates that ever-growing information in a way that doesn’t place an undue burden on sales professionals’ time and energy.
SP: Can you give us an example?
UM: Certainly. A sales professional can ask the application questions, like, “Who are some people with the title of vice president who live in Ohio and are interested in employee performance?” SalesView aggregates the information from blogs, LinkedIn entries, press releases, SEC filings, news articles, etc., to provide a list of individuals who fit that profile. A sales professional could, of course, do much of that research through multiple searches, but that would take a large amount of time that otherwise could have been spent in more productive selling activities.
SP: Is the technology useful for more than just lead generation?
UM: Absolutely. It’s frequently used for further qualifying leads that have been generated using other methods. For example, if your Web site logs inquiries from a hundred prospects, it can use information on the Internet to categorize and prioritize those leads so that you call the ones that are most likely to buy, or which are most likely to have the money to buy. SalesView is also a good tool for account development and cross-selling because it provides an alternative and detailed view of the people inside a current customer organization.
SP: Many sales reps already feel overwhelmed by having to learn so much technology to get their job done. How are you keeping this from being yet another burden on their time?
UM: Actually, that’s the “prise” piece to “socialprise.” We simply inject it into their existing CRM application. You don’t have to be trained, really…just show up to work one day and see the new information. Also, we’ve been working with over 150 companies to ensure that this product is extremely easy to use. In most cases, it’s presented as a button or field right inside the CRM application. For example, if you list your current opportunities, you’ll also be presented with links to relevant information about the customer, such as a new blog entry or an update to the customer’s Facebook entry. You can then click on the links and learn the details. In other words, it provides a deeper perspective into your customers and contacts. You can also have regular email sent to you on a daily or weekly basis summarizing what SalesView thinks is important.
SP: How has the product been received?
UM: At the CRM application level, this year we established partnerships with the likes of salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM On Demand, SugarCRM, and Landslide Technologies. At the user level, we’ve experienced a rapid growth rate with an accelerating adoption rate inside the companies that already have it. We originally saw companies consuming it for just a subset of their sales team, maybe 10 or 20 users. Now we’re seeing many more cases where it’s just being rolled out to the entire sales staff. It becomes immediately popular because it piggybacks atop the CRM system and just suddenly appears, with all its functionality, on the Monday morning that you turn the functionality on.
SP: What’s in the future for InsideView?
UM: In the short term, we’re focusing on the changing economy of the sales profession. Longer term, we see InsideView as an essential element of the entire Sales 2.0 movement, which applies technology in new ways to help sales professionals sell. We plan to continue to make our product more integrated and more relevant so that our customers can be more productive.
