From Ireland to the United Kingdom, sales people just gained more intelligence as InsideView announced the general availability of InsideView UK & Ireland edition. Working with eight of the leading integrators and resellers in the region we are already making an impact for over fifty businesses since we announced our move into Ireland and the UK.

InsideView gathers tens of thousands of information sources, filters what matters, and delivers the intelligence on UK and Ireland businesses directly into all of the market-leading CRM solutions. But what will the UK and Ireland Edition offer?

UK and Ireland Edition capabilities include:

• UK and Ireland territory maps for list building and prospecting
• Turnover displayed in GBP (£) or Euros (€)
• Individual profile setting for country-specific display of currency
• Expanded content coverage for companies, executives, public sector and government entities

What will the UK and Ireland Edition Offer?

With the UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView comes new Channel Partners. Together, InsideView and these partners are bringing actionable sales insights to teams of sales professionals in enterprises across the region. CGE Software, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a distributor of add-on CRM enhancements, highlighted the advantages that InsideView brings to its customers.

Content Sources – UK and Ireland Edition of InsideView

In response to the huge demand from companies selling to UK and Ireland businesses, InsideView is continuing its global expansion by bringing the industry’s leading sales intelligence solution to the UK and Ireland. We pull content from over 7,000 UK specific sources, the top 8 can be found here.

“InsideView is a powerful application that gives marketing and sales people great insights into the prospects and customers they target,” said Mike Spink, sales director of CGE Software Limited. “The most significant aspect of InsideView, is its ability to identify key people in millions of companies throughout the UK and the world — and deliver rich social profiles and connection paths to them. Of all the solutions I have seen, InsideView is the absolute best.”

Audra Oliver, head of marketing communications for King Worldwide and InsideView customer offered: “We are thrilled to have InsideView not only for the company information, but for the contact details, news, smart connection feature, and financials. We sell everything from investor relations services to high-level crisis management consulting and being able to get relevant company information at the click of a button is very valuable to us. Moreover the InsideView team is helpful, responsive, and made getting started virtually effortless. I would highly recommend it.”

InsideView is also teaming with business information providers and gathering data from all major news, social, and company sources that are specific to the U.K. and Ireland. This information improves the effectiveness of sales professionals that serve these markets where more than forty-five percent of the population is active in social media.

Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView, commented, “As more businesses understand that they can get an inside edge by leveraging social, news, company and professional information, they are turning to InsideView. The delivery of InsideView for the U.K. and Ireland is an indication that we can rapidly respond to the growing demand for sales intelligence around the globe.”

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

• 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.

1. The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study – CRM Outsiders
2. 5 Steps to Create a Killer Google+ Business Page – BrainSell Blog
3. Are You Lost In a B2B Sales Lead Paradox? – Marketo Blog
4. New Study Says Customers Think Companies Don’t Give a Damn ABout Their Time…Just Their Money – Brent’s Social CRM Blog
5. Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business - Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog
6. Eight Business Apps That Will Change the Way You Work - Emergence Capital Partners
7. How Much Will You Sell in 2012 With Social Media? - Selling Power
8. Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make – Selling to Big Companies
9. Data Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data – DataMyth
10. Three Steps to Develop Yourself – S. Anthony Iannarino; the Sales Blog

• 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.

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

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.

“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.

1. Sales Tip: The Social Graph is Your Friend – Nigel Edelshain
2. 37 Character Tweet Led to Huge Sales Opportunity – Anneke Seley
3. 5 Essential Books to Understand B2B Sales 2.0 – Katie Byrnes
4. 7 Forward Thinking Presentations You May Have Missed – Chad Levitt
5. Sales Success Strategies for a Social World – Gerhard Gschwandtner
6. What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care) – Pamela Seiple
7. 40 Great Social Media Infographics for B2B - Koka Sexton
8. Sales 2.0: Is Hunter vs. Farmer Theory Outdated? – Claire Moore
9. How to Shorten Your Revenue Cycle – Andrew Hunt
10. 10 fresh Ideas on Sales 2.0 And Sales Process – Marci Reynolds
11. Productivity on Steroids (Podcast) – John Cousineau
12. Lead Scoring is 878% More Effective Than Cold Calling – Paul Rafferty
13. What is Sales 2.0 (And Why You Should Care) – Padalog
14. Statistics Show the Business Case for Sales Enablement - Paul Krajewski
15. Sales 2.0 The Impact on Selling and Sales Process – Tony Cole

Sales Data may be defined as the quantifiable facts and figures about prospects, including company and contact details as well as financials, that can be pulled from a variety of editorial or user-contributed sources. Essentially, sales data is exactly how it sounds: it’s just data. A phonebook is a book of data. A textbook is a book of data. When you Google search a term or word, what you get back are search results which is essentially data. Everything is there but how do you know which are the right nuggets of information?

Sales Intelligence may defined as going beyond demographic and financial data to provide accurate, relevant and timely business insights on their current initiatives and urgent business challenges. This presentation dives into a number of examples of how sales intelligence can greatly impact a sales team’s revenue. With the right applications, sales teams can find the precise insights from the most relevant resources to accelerate the sales performance cycle.

Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence

View more presentations from InsideView

“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.”

What is Gamification?

One of the trending topics in business is gamification. If you are not familiar with the term, in short, gamification is the application of game mechanics to non-game experiences that can drive an audience to a desired behavior.The size of the audience available through gaming is enormous and rivals television as a medium.

According to Forrester, gamers span just about every demographic.

• 65% of Xbox gamers are male
• 59% of “social gamers” (like Farmville…) are women
• 23% of the “social gamers” are Boomers between 45 and 65 years old.

In general gamers are also more motivated to have ‘connections’ with people than non-gamers. In the world of sales, connections and engagement is key to driving pipeline growth and creating new opportunities.

A few definitions of gamification:

• A game is structured play, usually for fun.
• Gameplay is interaction inside of a game.
• Game Mechanics are constructs or tactics commonly used in games to encourage gameplay. These are things like badges, points, leader boards, levels, challenges, achievements and virtual sheep you can put on your virtual farm.
• Game Dynamics are strategies commonly used in game design based on psychological motivations. These include things like “Appointments,” in which someone does something to gain a reward, “Avoidance,” in which someone does something to avoid a punishment, or the “Free Lunch” dynamic, in which people feel they are getting something because of their behavior.
• Currencies are ways to give people incentives based on various motivations in a digital world: the need for financial reward, the need to do good, the need to help one’s community, the need for recognition and influence, the need for pleasure. We can assign currencies to each one of these motivations to reward people for desired behaviors.

Gamification for Sales

Turning the sales process into a game is not a stretch of the imagination for companies. In may ways companies with B2B sales people have already added game mechanics into the process on a small scale. Glenngary Glen Ross has an amazing scene in the beginning of the movie where Alec Baldwin is addressing the sales team where is explains First Prize is a Cadillac and Second Prize is a set of steak knives. This is how most businesses gamify sales to date.

• Commission checks
• Presidents Club
• Spiffs

These are all typically based around revenue for a company and these game mechanics drive the behavior of the sales team to sell more. This is where most companies end the game process but that is about to change.

Companies like Xactly have developed an application that drives compensation management , most typically marketed to businesses that have become buried in spreadsheets trying to track sales teams and their commissions. That’s a big enough problem to tackle for companies but their application has some functionality that brings gamification to the sales teams directly. At a recent event I heard Xactly discuss how their customers base compensation and commissions on a series of behaviors that lean more ‘reward’ to the sales person if they do things such as close a deal early in the month or if they sales can close a deal within a specific time frame.

This opens up a lot doors into how companies could introduce game mechanics for sales even extending beyond revenue events.

Game On for B2B Sales

Research shows that financial rewards for gamers is only one incentive and not even the primary factor that people play games. We saw this internally at InsideView when we wanted to drive social media adoption by the company. The only game mechanic we had to put in place was a monthly email that highlighted to most active employees on Twitter. The internal competition to be in First Place drove up the number of updates from employees 312%.

Sales teams could, and I think should be incentivised for a number of activities outside of just revenue generation. True, the primary responsibility for sales teams is to close deals but within that process of selling there are a number of activities or tasks that can be measured and applied with game mechanics to drive even more productivity. Image a sales team that saw their work as a game and wanted to unlock as many achievements as possible to be recognized publicly and financially?

I hear more and more companies trying to add a layer of gamification to their sales processes. There are several ways to do this and the achievements and metrics are different depending on each companies desired goals.

• Number of calls
• New opportunities created
• Engagement on social media
• Discussions created in company communities
• Leads generated by online/personal social activities.

The list can go on forever. The truth is that they are almost limitless and all drive business metrics across different departments.

Is your company thinking of implementing gamification to sales or have any game mechanics that have been working so far?

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?

This is the first mentions of Salesforce having Metallica as their featured performer at their annual Dreamforce 2011. Metallica known for songs like The Unforgiven, Master of Puppets, Fade to Black. I was skeptical about the news but the profile is owned by a Salesforce.com sales rep. Sure it could just be a rumor but coming from someone within the company adds some credibility to the update I would think.

There has been no official statement from the Salesforce or Dreamforce team on this news but I would suspect that will happen soon. They need to get on that before the entire world knows Metallica will be attending their massive conference before they say anything. It’s also really nice that Shakeel is willing to give out some passes. I’m sure he’s going to be the popular guy within the #DF11 group if that’s the case.

Twitter has been spreading the news about Metallica fairly quickly and most people are excited at the news. Are you more or less excited about Dreamforce now?

Update: Marcus Nelson the head of social media for the company passed along this reply to my request. hmmm…. I didn’t hear a “NOT True” in there. I bet we hear something by the end of the day.

Salesforce has officially responded which makes me think Metallica IS going to be the performer. Why else would they @metallica (hence getting their attention) if they were not planning on signing them or already have. Again. Still all rumor but this is all adding up to a Heavy Metal Dreamforce.

Thank you Marc for confirming the news!

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 of our customers and students of the Social Selling University have asked what they should do once they decide that their sales team should leverage social media more during their sales prospecting. We have created a 5 step process that

1. EVALUATE WHAT YOU’RE DOING.
Many people on your team probably already use LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, etc. Take stock of how you’re currently connecting with and listening to customers, and see what seems to be working. Where are you successfully engaging and building relationships with prospects and customers?

2. START BY LISTENING.
Just as you wouldn’t run into a cocktail party and start shoving your business card under everyone’s nose, don’t jump on Twitter and start jabbering about your business. Instead, listen to what your target market is saying. Get a sense for who your customers’ mouthpieces are and their communication and interaction styles.

3. SHARE INFORMATION.
Create a way for your team members to share information internally. There are a variety of CRM-compatible tools to facilitate the tracking and sharing of information companywide. So if at a trade show your marketing manager meets a prospect who loves to ride horses, that information can be entered into a collaborative database and used to strengthen ties during follow-up calls.

4. COMMIT TO THE PROCESS.
Building relationships online is not something you can do all at once. Realize you may not see the payoff right away, and commit to three to six months before you evaluate your efforts.

5. COMMIT TO EVOLUTION.
Your team’s social-selling skills will need to evolve with the Web. Prepare to invest time and effort in updating your social- selling strategy, learning about new tools, and keeping skills sharp.

Jonathan Farrington has taken the lead in organizing one of the largest online events geared towards the sales profession. The 2011 Sales & Marketing Success Conference is an event where 36 of the top speakers, bloggers and experts from the sales world are getting together  over a 5 day series to educate and enlighten sales professionals in  succeeding, winning and exceeding expectations. We have come through the toughest financial crisis in history, and we believe it is now time to be positive and look forward.

Besides being one of the largest events of it’s kind that is sure to leave people with a ton of take aways, we have an opportunity to provide support for the relief efforts to the tragedy in Japan. There is a small fee for each session ($5) that will be collected and then donated to the Japanese Disaster Fund (via the Red Cross).

We are part of the launch event on Monday May 9th. This is the schedule for Monday: All times are Eastern (for GMT, add +5)

5 Must-do’s to Leverage Social Selling
for Your Lead Generation and Sales Teams
Presented at: 15:00 – 15:30 by Koka Sexton

Your customers have changed. How you find them and engage with them has changed too. They get information from their social network and trusted sources online, leaving information about what they need in their online social interactions. It’s more important than ever for sales organizations to recognize this opportunity to build relationships and generate new leads. You need to create a personal and trusted relationships via online interactions to beat the competition.

There are many alternatives to cold calling. Most companies have already discovered that their customers are spending their time online in some social network like LinkedIn, Twitter or forum. Customers are asking questions and getting recommendations for products and services from their friends, peers and field experts. InsideView customers that have adopted social selling into their sales process have reported a slow but steady decrease in the number of “cold calls” their sales team makes on a daily basis. Even though there was a bit of a controversy over the post Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel, it appears that sales leaders are beginning to leverage social media more for initial outreach to prospects and using the phone for cold calling less.

Alternatives to Cold Calling

I’m not trying to dig up the debate on cold calling, using the phone to talk to prospects will be a constant staple in the sales profession. That is until video conferencing and other tools take over. Tools like Skype are not just being used for internal chats, I connect and have short conversations through chat and video with Skype all the time with people interested in Social Selling University and InsideView. I was also introduced to an up and coming technology called iMeet that takes video conferencing to a different level by allowing you to see the social profiles for the people in the virtual meeting room with you.

InsideView is being leveraged by sales people to build territories, create watch lists for trigger events and identify social networks that their prospects and customers and active in. Using sales intelligence applications will not only identify hundreds of new prospects, it will also show you how these prospects are related to you and who in your network might serve as an introduction eliminating the “cold” and making it a warm call. All of this research can be done in a matter of seconds at a total cost of zero. Instead of making 50 cold calls in a day, a good salesperson can make a thousand warm calls in under an hour. If that’s not efficiency, then I don’t know what is.

What’s holding sales people back?

When it comes to doing pre-call research and getting some background on a prospect or company you are calling into, there is a lot of information gathered by just doing a Google search. The problem with this is there is very little context around the results. You can spend an hour digging through search results and other resources to get an idea of who the person is and what challenges their company is facing but you’re busy too and can’t justify a large amount of time to research to make a call that may only take 10-15 minutes. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, in a video interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner. “The gap is that people can’t find it.”

Another obstacle facing sales teams from reducing cold calls is that sales leaders are still afraid of social media as a tool. Sure they see the value as a research tool but having an entire sales team making connections and getting introductions online while their phones collect dust is a scary thought for them.