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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
- 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
- How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
- Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
- 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
- Gamification of the Sales Process
- 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
- 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
- The History of Apple CEOs
- Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
- Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
- Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
- 10 of the Best Sales Sites
- The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
- 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
- Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
- Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
- 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
- 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
- The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
- Should Sales People Be Blogging?
- The Problem with Big Data
- The Future of Social CRM
- Do You Listen to Your Customers?
- 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1
- A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence
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?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
Sales Intelligence drives revenue.
“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.”
Here 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.
“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)
It can be a pain in the rump trying to find a couple of blog posts worth spending your morning reading and jump-starting the week. Literally hundreds and thousands of sales blogs with self-proclaimed “best sales solutions” trying to cram their way into your Twitter feed, Google search results and your existence. Fret no more as I have done the searching for you and found what I deem some great sales blog posts. Take a look and have a phenomenal week.
- The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study – CRM Outsiders
- 5 Steps to Create a Killer Google+ Business Page – BrainSell Blog
- Are You Lost In a B2B Sales Lead Paradox? – Marketo Blog
- New Study Says Customers Think Companies Don’t Give a Damn ABout Their Time…Just Their Money – Brent’s Social CRM Blog
- Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business - Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog
- Eight Business Apps That Will Change the Way You Work - Emergence Capital Partners
- How Much Will You Sell in 2012 With Social Media? - Selling Power
- Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make – Selling to Big Companies
- Data Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data – DataMyth
- Three Steps to Develop Yourself – S. Anthony Iannarino; the Sales Blog
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.
- 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?
The traditional approach to demand generation focuses primarily on outbound offers and campaigns to drive new leads into the funnel. However, the shift in buyer behavior forces companies to rethink their approach to demand generation. Social media stands out as a new source of customer engagement because it provides sales and marketing organizations with a tremendous opportunity to follow potential customers – even before they reach out to them.
Because the buyer relies more on peers and independent research in the early stages of engagement, it has become even more imperative that B2B firms bring sales and marketing together with a shared approach to revenue generation. Social intelligence has proven to be a key piece of this aligned approach as it enables deeper, more relevant engagement.
According to B2B’s “2010 Outlook: Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey, more than half (53.5%) of marketers surveyed said they currently use social media as part of their marketing strategy, up from 45% the prior year. Lead generation (cited by 48.9% of respondents) ranked as the second highest use for social media, behind only thought leadership (59.8%).
In one case study illustrating how progressive companies are integrating social media into their demand generation efforts, Concur Technologies has successfully integrated social intelligence across sales and marketing, influencing performance at each phase of the funnel.
Because the buyer relies more on peers and independent research in the early stages of engagement, it has become even more imperative that B2B firms bring sales and marketing together with a shared approach to revenue generation.
In the early stages of lead generation, Concur has utilized the list-building capabilities enabled by sales intelligence platforms to better target the SMB market. The company also improved conversions within the funnel by using social intelligence to address lead pre-qualification for inside sales. Finally, reps are able to receive alerts notifying them on trigger events at key accounts.
Despite the dramatic impact social media and social intelligence can have on demand generation, many companies do not integrate social media into their existing processes. During a recent presentation at the 2011 SiriusDecisions Summit, Jonathan Block, VP and Service Director for Reputation Management Strategies at SiriusDecisions, proclaimed, “Organizations ignore the leverage social media can offer throughout the cold-to- close process.”
Block emphasized the important factors that go into a successful social media strategy. He pointed out holistic measurement and reporting are key aspects of building an integrated social strategy. By effectively measuring both activity and impact, companies realize positive paybacks in brand reputation, demand creation and sales enablement.
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.
- How Entrepreneurs Can Increase Productivity by 500% -TechCrunch
- Top 5 Sales Strategies for 2012. Accelerate Your Momentum with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
- The Three Types of Team Commitment
- What’s Driving Your Customers Away?
- 8 Ways to Incentivize Employees to Use CRM
- Negative Assumptions Before Your Calls Usually Come True
- What’s Your Plan Once You’ve Connected Via A Social Network?
- The 10 Biggest Referral Mistakes Salespeople Make
- Anatomy Of A Lousy Sales Email
- One Marketing Guy Who Gets It (What Sales Needs, That Is)
- Why Sales Forecasts Are a Joke
- The Presentation Trap: Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale
- 10 Tips that Separate the Good Sellers from the Great Ones
- Ignite More Sales with Sales Intelligence
- Determining What Metrics to Track with CRM
After tremendous growth in the US, InsideView, the leader in sales intelligence and social selling, announced today the beginning of its global expansion beginning with its InsideView UK and Ireland Edition. Thousands of US companies now deploy InsideView’s award-winning company and people intelligence to increase the productivity of their customer-facing employees, improving metrics across the customer cycle, including lead conversion, win rates and customer retention and expansion.
With the UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView takes this competitive advantage worldwide, providing professionals with effective intelligence that helps them be more targeted, relevant and timely in their sales and customer management efforts. The UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView will be generally available in Q1, as a stand-alone application as well as a mash-up within market-leading CRM applications including Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, SAP, and SugarCRM.
“There is a worldwide demand for more intelligent ways of doing business, nowhere is this more true than in marketing, sales, and service. Our expansion today is part of our commitment to bring professionals around the globe the kind of intelligence that drives productivity, relevance and revenue.” – Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView.
Global Demand for InsideView’s Sales Intelligence
InsideView is seeing huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland-based businesses, where over 45% of the population is active on social media including Facebook and LinkedIn, making it the second largest market in the world for new solutions that can drive ROI from social media.
Sales Intelligence has become an imperative as the deluge of data, the changing buying process, and new social media dynamics have surfaced in customer processes. InsideView provides professionals with the most relevant information about customers and prospects, and alerts them on the best time for outreach. This intelligence results in highly effective, productive and lucrative customer-facing employees: In fact, companies that employ InsideView’s style of intelligence see a ten percent improvement in top-line revenue.
Sales Intelligence Tailor Made for the UK and Ireland
Thousands of users are already using InsideView for targeting UK and Ireland, and with this launch they and other customers will have access to deeper and tailor-made sales intelligence . InsideView gathers and analyzes tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions, resulting in more effective sales and even improved CRM engagement.
For its UK and Ireland Edition, InsideView is partnering with top global and local providers of business information, as well as gathering and analyzing information from all major online news publications, user-generated, and social media sources specific to UK and Ireland.
InsideView is also teaming with leading CRM system integrators including Outsourcery, Ciber, Alfapeople, ConsultCRM, The CRM Business and No Blue to bring its intelligence to relevant CRM platforms in the UK and Ireland. ConsultCRM, one of the UK’s leading Microsoft Gold Partners specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is delighted to be partnering with InsideView in its go-to-market expansion.
“Our clients are constantly under pressure to maximize the value from their Microsoft CRM deployment. InsideView adds immediate value because it offers ready-integrated real-time company intelligence, contact data, news, tailored alerts and even social media,” said John Pearson, Sales Director at ConsultCRM. “We are excited to be working with an offering that truly answers the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question for CRM users in sales and account management.”
A New Type of Connection
What are People Insights? Connections are more important than ever for reaching and engaging your prospects. More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails, while more than 80 percent do engage when referred by a connection – whether through a friend, colleague, customer or industry peer. Intelligent Connections grow your reach beyond social networking sites (your personal connections) to automatically leverages your extended business network of coworkers, executives and board members, previous employers, and customers (your corporate connections). Even young professionals, who often have a limited Rolodex and professional network, can now instantly leverage their company’s extended network of corporate relationships.
“The biggest business impact comes from knowing how best to connect to prospects, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone.”
Going beyond the business card
“There is little value in basic contact data – for example a phone number or email address – for today’s business professional,” says Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What’s important is cutting through the noise and getting the accurate information that matters about leads and prospect. The biggest business impact then comes from knowing how best to connect to them, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when you should pick up the phone. And for a busy sales or marketing pro, this kind of insight needs to be delivered directly where they are working most – email or CRM application.”
“There is no competitive advantage to be gained by using basic contact data. Everyone has access to phone numbers and email addresses, and response rates are abysmal,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “What creates differentiation is cutting through the noise and engaging people. The biggest value of People Insights is knowing how best to connect to people, what is top of mind for them and their business, and when is the best time to reach out.”
With the launch of People Insights, sales and marketing organizations can now easily find the right person to contact, identify any mutual connections, get a complete picture via social media profiles, view recent news mentions, and be alerted about when to reach out. No other solution brings together such a comprehensive set of insights about people within a business context.
Sell to people, not contacts
Most good sales people know this already. This is supported by research by Marketing Experiments that dives event deeper. When engaging with new prospects look at them as people and learn about WHO they are not WHAT they are.
A study by the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carlina fond that 92% of prospects don’t take a meeting when cold-called or emailed by a sales rep. Our customers don’t report numbers this high but when looking at the bigger picture, we can understand why this is the case. Cold-calls are dead in the traditional sense. There are many reasons for this and a lot of supporting arguments to the death of cold calling but what we find is that many sales people still do not know how to call a prospect with relevant information that can make an impact and identify new opportunities. Harvard Business Review recently published a blog titled “The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask” and if you don’t know what is keeping your prospects up at night then you are not doing your job as a sales person. It’s that simple.
“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)
Sales 2.0 is the bread and butter of what we do here at InsideView. Essentially, we want salespeople to incorporate sales intelligence into the new generation of sales where social selling comes into play. Unfortunately, this methodology of sales 2.0 is skewed in various definitions and discussions of its effectiveness. As a result, I have had the privlidge of gathering 15 great sales 2.0 posts that provide some solid definitions, rich in content.
- Sales Tip: The Social Graph is Your Friend – Nigel Edelshain
- 37 Character Tweet Led to Huge Sales Opportunity – Anneke Seley
- 5 Essential Books to Understand B2B Sales 2.0 – Katie Byrnes
- 7 Forward Thinking Presentations You May Have Missed – Chad Levitt
- Sales Success Strategies for a Social World – Gerhard Gschwandtner
- What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care) – Pamela Seiple
- 40 Great Social Media Infographics for B2B - Koka Sexton
- Sales 2.0: Is Hunter vs. Farmer Theory Outdated? – Claire Moore
- How to Shorten Your Revenue Cycle – Andrew Hunt
- 10 fresh Ideas on Sales 2.0 And Sales Process – Marci Reynolds
- Productivity on Steroids (Podcast) – John Cousineau
- Lead Scoring is 878% More Effective Than Cold Calling – Paul Rafferty
- What is Sales 2.0 (And Why You Should Care) – Padalog
- Statistics Show the Business Case for Sales Enablement - Paul Krajewski
- Sales 2.0 The Impact on Selling and Sales Process – Tony Cole
