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.”

Selling to people has not changed dramatically over the past hundred years. You have a product or service, identify a pool of prospects and then discover how many of them you can help. Sure thats over simplified but when it boils down, those are some of the key components. What has changed a great idea over the past few years is not so much the overall process but the details of how to sell to people.

Most sales people do not have the opportunity to walk into the offices of their prospects, see the awards on the wall, photos on the desk and bag of golf clubs in the corner. These were the details a salesperson would use to break the ice, find some common interests and start a conversation. Without these insights, a salesperson is left to their own devices and would be left with being just another sales guy with a pitch. Get beyond the contact data of someones business card and get to know your prospect as the person and not just a contact in your CRM.

People buy from people. Business is done not necessarily with the company with the best product but more often with the salesperson who has found a connection with their prospect through a shared interest or a referral. In the post on the 8 ways to increase sales we outlined some best practices to follow.

More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails.

Sales intelligence can identify connections between colleagues within an organization and prospects to reveal opportunities for meaningful sales contact. By arming sales professionals with actionable information from social sources, media outlets, company information and changes in business dynamics they are more likely to trigger sales. Sales professionals can quickly identify relevant connection points and build profitable, trusted relationships with prospects and customers that win more business and drive revenue.

‘It’s like watching an Ancestry.com commercial’

You’ve seen the commercial, a site that starts connecting the dots between you and your family and then builds a map of your entire family tree. It lets you see your connections to people you may never have known existed just by following the trail of connections through out history.

How can that apply to B2B sales?

• What if you could identify connection across multiple social graphs and include people you may not be connected to through a social network?
• How valuable would it be to have social streams from your prospects so you could see the updates, pictures and interactions they share?
• Would it be beneficial to be able to follow these people so anytime they were mentioned in the news or online you would get an alert so you could show you are listening?

Early adopters of People Insights like Network Hardware Resale are already seeing an impact in lead generation, opportunities and revenue.

“Social media mapping is my favorite feature. It’s just so cool. It’s almost like watching that Ancestry.com commercial- it’s like ‘I got a leaf!’ It’s when you find that connection that absolutely breaks you into an account; and once you’ve done that, your energy in looking for more of those connections goes WAY up. That becomes your best lead gen strategy ever. Now you want to have and create personal relationships with people through social media so that you can leverage those relationships.” - Michael Lodato, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at NHR

Leveraging people insights isn’t just a good idea, it’s the only way you will increase your lead generation and create new opportunities in 2012. As explained in the post 5 ways sales intelligence can increase revenue, research shows that:

• 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

For salespeople and sales leaders, understanding how to sell to people not contacts will be the difference between hitting or missing your number.

Congratulations to David Greenwald of PGi for being our 5000th follower! David has been using InsideView to make him more productive for years. It’s awesome to have customers like him making an impact by leveraging sales intelligence. PGi is a developer of video conferencing software that has a pretty slick interface. They were the first video conferencing platform I saw that integrated social networks into their product, and you all know how much of a fan I am when it comes to B2B use of social networks.

As a Global Sales Executive, David can really benefit following our tweets as we generally like to reach out to sales people around the world to better their skills and selling methods. Give him a follow @nexgentechsales. Thank you David!

We would like to take this opportunity for those who are reading this blog post and follow InsideView through any social media channel, to say thank you for all of the tweets and feedback you have given us over the years…You truly are our #1 fans.

2012 is here folks. New goals and high ambitions are in place as the slate is cleaned for the new year. It’s time to stoke the 2011 coals and fuel the 2012 fire. Here are 15 posts I put together with some very interesting predictions and strategies for this coming year. Hope you enjoy it and best of luck for this fine year!

1. 30 Social Media Predictions for 2012 From the Pros – Social Media Examiner
2. 5 Sales Management Questions We Answered in 2011 – Selling Power
3. 8 Great Marketing Infographics To Inspire Your 2012 Objectives – B2B Marketing Insider
4. 11 B2B marketing trends to watch (or wish) for in 2012 – Customer Think
5. How to Get Your Prospects to Call You Back in 2012 – InsideView
6. Sales Discussions That Need To Disappear in 2012 – Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook
7. Things I’m Wishing For In 2012 – Insider Sales Experts Blog
8. Social Media: Five Facts to Bank On in 2012 – Ad Age Digital
9. CRM 2012 Forecast – The Era of Customer Engagement – ZDNet Blog
10. SaaS Predictions for 2012 – Smart SaaS
11. Top 7 Critical Sales Trends for 2012 – Heavy Hitter Sales Blog
12. 12 Sales Trends for 2012 – Barrett Sales Blog
13. Bring on 2012 – Salesopedia
14. Your 2012 Marketing Plan: Tell Me What to Do – Business Grow
15. How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK – Guy Kawasaki

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

This is the final post 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)

Cultivate your own personal brand on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and beyond.

“The one thing I learned early in sales is that the most unique thing you are selling is not always the company or the product, but it is always you. Social media provides you a unique opportunity to build your brand — as well as endless opportunities to ruin your brand. The first thing anyone does before meeting with someone is to check their LinkedIn profile. Successful social salespeople carefully and thoroughly complete their LinkedIn profile, including a picture. All their social bios (Twitter, etc.) are meaningful, unique and memorable. Limit access to your Facebook if it has any offensive or borderline offensive photos.” (Rosenberg)

“Many sales managers dont think Twitter is a place for sales people. I disagree. With social media exploding as a form of communication, there are going to be more and more people leveraging the channel for business conversations. Not just brands but real people that want to solve business problems by asking others online. Learning how to listen and track people on Twitter will be a goldmine of information in some cases for salespeople.” (Sexton)

“Social media provides platforms for the individual sales rep to stand out from the crowd like never before. To be the one who is providing the most helpful information, the best references, and what is going on in that industry/market. I recommend that sales open their consideration more broadly than just the big three of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Each has its place and purpose in an overall social strategy that must be in place prior to any active social media use for a company or an individual producer. How about a personal landing page for you as an individual where prospects/customers can go to learn more about you? Take a look at creating an http://about.me page, and then highlight all of your other online activities with links to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even your company website for example.” (Austin)

Establish your expertise by contributing to conversations — without selling.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand how the science of sales intelligence has an effect on driving revenue. In addition to knowing more about yur industry and prospects than your competition, you will be able to lock yourself in as an expert of your market. By not just being a salesperson, you will open more lines of communication that will lead to more opportunities.

“Step 1: Figure out where your buyers are. Step 2: Be there Step 3: Contribute without intruding on the safe social environment people are interacting in. You hear a lot of stories of vendors finding leads in social platforms, but a lot of salespeople are just ‘there’ — contributing and building both trust and reputation. This approach serves them well. Many people are not just turned off by sales in general, but are absolutely repulsed by salespeople invading their online conversation to sell them something. My advice to salespeople is to get ‘in the mix,’ but don’t sell. Join the community and have conversations with industry leaders, peers and end users. There are salespeople who have built their online presence to the point where prospects have reached out to them for advice. That’s a big win.” (Rosenberg)

“Directly share information, become an expert, and generate a following. You are an expert. You understand your market, your customer’s problems, and the information they need to be more successful. You read the trade publications and regularly (possibly daily) find articles that your prospects and customers should read.” (Heinz)

“If our customers are already there (as research would indicate), then we as salespeople can’t afford not to be there and participating. Initially, salespeople should use social media (blogs, discussion forums, websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) primarily for listening and learning—what are the customers saying/asking, what is competition doing, etc. They should be engaging customers there, as well as using traditional channels. They need to be taking part in social conversations, they need to be representing their products and solutions in those conversations.” (Brock)

“With all the talk in the market about the importance of customer/buyer engagement, it is vital that today’s B2B rep use social as a means to dialogue with their buyers and customers. As reps thought the dialogue must change from one of pure sales to one of helping shape the discussion and to establish themselves as thought leaders and knowledgeable about their market, their buyers’ challenges and seen as a resource for answers. The best way to do this is via social, and the more reps understand that their involvement in this medium and having an active part in the discussion is key to the buying decision, the more they will begin to engage.” (Hidalgo)

“Become an industry source of knowledge by using one or more of the many curation tools that are now available, many at no cost.” (Austin)

• 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.

Since this is a new social network, we’d like to hear from our community on how you would like us to use Google+. After adding InsideView to one of your circles post your suggestion on your wall and tag +insideview. We’d love to hear what you’d like us to share on our Google+ page.

Here’s a few suggestions that were thrown around here at InsideView HQ on ways to use the page.

• Industry news
• How to’s
• Partner news
• Curated content about sales and marketing
• Product releases
• Social Selling tips

Let us know what you think on the page.

1. Selling Successfully in a Down Economy – Selling Power Blog
2. Four Keys to a Great 4th Quarter – Salesopedia
3. What I Learned From Steve Jobs – How to Change the World
4. Deal Stalled? There Is Always More Than One Way. – The Sales Blog
5. Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make - Selling to Big Companies
6. Who is Killing Your Sales Motivation? – The Sales Hunter
7. Tips for Finishing the Year Strongly – Jonathan Farrington’s Blog
8. Chasing Your Passion! - Sales Playbook
9. Sales Presentations the Don’t Suck [share this with your team] – Inside Sales Experts
10. Are Top Salespeople Born or Made? - Heavy Hitters Sales Blog

LinkedIn has quickly become one of the most effective and business-savvy social networking sites. Sales professionals are able to take advantage of valuable insight about prospects and peers, in turn developing a strong network that translates into increased productivity through resources, tips, advice and much more. By joining these groups, you will gain some incredible knowledge in the world of sales as well as discovering some of the top leaders in the industry.

To help those in the sales industry, the following groups and channels are among the most influential and valuable on LinkedIn.

Social Selling University

Description: Social Selling University is not like social media courses which are typically designed only for marketing departments. This is how to use social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter for sales people. Join this group to find out how and pass this group along to anyone you know in sales.

Owner: Koka Sexton | 632 members

Inside Sales Experts

This group allows Inside Sales practitioners to share ideas and information, and provides networking opportunities for  global professionals from a variety of industries to connect with their peers.

Owner: Trish Bertuzzi | 11,521 members

SalesBlogcast.com

Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Owner: Doyle Slayton | 36,356 members

The Sales Association

Description: The Sales Association is the premier association for sales & business development professionals. We provide members a powerful means to connect at events and online. Topics: sales, marketing, sales jobs, convention, conventions, jobs, trade show, trade shows, conference, conferences, CRM and careers.

Owner: Troy Davis | 26,483 members

Sales Playbook!

Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Owner: Paul Castain | 25,110 members

Sales 2.0

Description: This group is for: sales people, sales managers and business owners who want to: 1. Exchange information about the emerging discipline of Sales 2.0 2. Partner up to help each other sell more, penetrate accounts and exchange leads.

Owner: Nigel Edelshain  4,160 members

Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators

Description: Innovate with innovative marketing, public relations, promotions sales and selling professionals skilled at using creative marketing methods. Join thousands of members to learn & share best practices & advice. LinkedIn’s largest Marketing & PR Innovation Group.

Owner: Gerald “Solutionman” Haman | 148,010 members

Sales Management Association 

Description: The Sales Management Association (www.salesmanagement.org) is a global, cross-industry professional association for sales managers, sales executives, sales operations, sales trainers, sales enablement practitioners, and thought-leaders engaged in supporting or leading the sales organization.

Owner: Bob Kelly | 15,274 members

Sales Gravy

Description: Sales Gravy helps Sales Professionals, Sales Leaders, and Sales Recruiters gain the winning edge. We discuss sales techniques, sales training, sales jobs, sales careers, sales tips, sales recruiting, sales process. www.SalesGravy.com is the most visited sales content website on the internet.

Owner: Jeb Blount | 15,274 members

Sales Best Practices

Description: Have you some Sales or Marketing skills? Let’s share our experiences: Sales development, marketing, CRM, productivity and trade performance, team management and more.

Owner: Laurent J.V. Dubois | 82,904 members

If marketing is the focal point of social media engagement, sales NEEDS to be brought into the loop. Training sales teams to use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs can have a huge impact on building pipeline and driving awareness of your company. Customer centric marketing brings a 1:1 relationship with prospects and customers that can be transitioned and managed by sales teams.

Leveraging social media and online communities to drive revenue works. You may remember the post Should Sales people be Blogging where we explained how IBM is leveraging social selling. In the Social Selling University we have had great speakers like Jill Konrath, Anneke Seley, Joanne Black and others that have given Enterprise Social Selling tips and strategies to members of the community. Umberto Millet our CEO has written a number of articles around the revolution of social selling in B2B.

Enterprise social selling is growing up. With the growing desire for Social CRM within companies, collecting social conversations for analysis was only scratching the service. What the social enterprise does with those conversations is where the rubber meets the road. Social media is more than a tool for marketing people and it’s being well established that every department across the enterprise can leverage social media for everything from prospecting, opportunity management and customer retention.

Every morning I arrive to work, I spend about an hour or so scouring the discussion boards of LinkedIn. Not only do I find the dogfights between business strategies to be extremely entertaining but I also love seeing perceptions on discussions from both sides of the equation. A topic wrestled by a number of business figures in many of these discussion boards is the reliability of cold calling for the emerging generation of social selling in business. Working in social media, I have seen the unbelievable results of building relationships and generating leads through social selling. As a result, I have grown increasingly biased towards social selling being the more successful strategy. To completely cement this ideology of mine, I scoured the Internet in search of the brightest minds to see what they thought of the dawn of this new era. Bare in mind these posts do not completely dismiss cold calling as an effective means for sales and lead generation but instead provide powerful, alternative strategies.

1.  Demand Creation vs. Cold Calling - Hubspot
2.  Why Cold Calling Is the Bottom of the Barrel – No More Cold Calling
3.  Never Cold Call Again – Enough with the Hype - Chad Levitt
4.  Have You Evolved Past Cold Calling – Marketo
5.  Cold Warm calling in the social selling era - Brian Jameson (Customer Think)
6.  Cold Calling: Forget Plan A, B & C. Let’s Use Plan D – Nigel Edelshain
7.  Your Cold Call is Lonely! - Paul Castain
8.  Ten Steps to Use Social Media to Get in the Door – Barbara Weaver Smith
9.  Is Social Media the New Cold Call? – Koka Sexton
10.  No, You Don’t Have to Cold Call-Ever – Paul McCord
11.  Is The Cold Call Dead? - Opportunity Engineers
12.  Social Media vs. Cold Calling – SalesHQ
13.  YES founder Carly Warm on turning cold calling into ‘warm calling’ - Carly Ward
14.  Social Media and Blogging For Business Can Turn Cold Calls Into Warm Leads - Web Savvy PR
15.  Startup Company Eliminates the Cold Calling With Twitter - Social Media Examiner

Talking to sales executives about the results of sales intelligence has opened the door to many new conversations. One of those is the growing need for marketing departments to understand the use of applications like InsideView in the overall strategy of identifying new prospects beyond just buying lead building lists from data providers and focusing on specific companies and contacts that can benefit from their products and services TODAY vs. in the future. As more and more companies are trying to blur the lines between sales and marketing, leveraging sales intelligence applications to be used by both groups has become more important.

We were approached by the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) on becoming a sponsor to their event and what we could offer to their large audience. The synergy between our message and the marketing professionals attending the event was obvious. Marketing professionals are focusing on the use of social media to communicate and engage with their customers and prospects, how that translates into sales is become even more important as a ROI is attached to these activities online.

InsideView will have a booth at the event and we will be in great company. Companies like Adobe, ExactTarget, Marketo and Social Media Examiner will have a presence as well as be providing speakers during the show.

We believe that marketing departments are hungry for information and applications that can build strong relationships beyond the one to many approach typically rolled out. Sales intelligence allows for marketing to target companies with pin-point accuracy and then give sales teams the same relevant information with the social media connections for those companies and contacts.

InsideView will be speaking about this during the event in a session titled Social Selling: The Sales Strategy that Will Lift your Marketing Success where we will give an explanation of where social media plays a part in sales, how to build strategies to engage customers through their lifecycle and why marketing should be focusing on the 1:1 relationship.

Leveraging social media during a sales process can make a huge impact on the deals you are working on. Using Twitter for Sales Intelligence gives sales teams some great insights to the companies and contacts you are targeting. Never before in the history of sales have sales people had the ability to know so much information about the activities of a prospect. Where they travel, who they hang out with, even as much information as how they are feeling. Don’t you think it could make a difference on when you call a prospect based on if they are having a bad day or not? If nothing else, it will let you decide how you approach them.

As more companies and employees start leveraging tools like Twitter for communication you have the opportunity to get a direct line of sight on what’s happening within their worlds.

How Can Sales People Use Twitter For Sales Intelligence and Sales Growth

Based on our research, there is irresistible evidence that Twitter should be a component of a B2B sales person’s tool kit. Here are some easy steps you can take to boost sales using Twitter:

1. Create a Twitter account.
2. Identify the Twitter profiles of your customers and prospects. The easiest method is to look for the Twitter symbol on the website or to run InsideView to search for contacts with Twitter profiles.
3. Create a Twitter List of your target profiles. This will enable you to isolate the tweets from your targets (vs. those form your family and friends).
4. Use various Twitter search tools (e.g., search.twitter.com)

Here’s a list of some tid-bits of sales intelligence we came across:

• Customer recommendations
• New company initiatives
• Exhibitions at conferences
• Job openings
• New senior hires
• Articles by executives
• New customer wins
• Product launches
• Awards won

New Social Selling University Website

Social Selling by definition is the use of sales 2.0 tools to identify and engage prospects to create new opportunities and drive revenue. The biggest obstacles I encounter when talking to sales teams is that even though they are familiar with social media on a personal level, they don’t know where to start when it comes to applying these tools to their professional life.

Social Selling University is broken into 4 main parts that are designed to offer education and resources to sales people that want to know more about leveraging social media for sales.

• Resources
• Webinars
• Blog
• Forum

The amount of content is growing and we are just about to roll out our next series of webinars featuring sales experts and training on ways to make the most out of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social tools that can get you more connected with your prospects.

Companies have realized that a solid social media strategy is vital to the companies goals for revenue and growth. Emphasis still remains on common business goals like

• Customer retention
• Customer acquisition
• Customer profitability
• Branding

With these priorities in place, traditional methods of execution are being supplemented by social media. Even with such large numbers of companies leveraging social media, research shows that only 17% of them feel they are ahead of the curve when it comes to using social media to achieve these goals. (source)

One of the things I notice most when talking to companies about their social media strategies is that it focuses primarily around marketing and support. These have obvious benefits that can be measured and scaled to show an ROI.

What we are finding more of now are companies that want to be in that group of companies that are leveraging social media a head of the curve. This is done through the use of applications and training. Where many companies are building a more strategic focus is in their sales teams where social media is getting used to drive revenue and customer acquisition.

With sales enablement and sales intelligence applications the ability to turn social media into a sales tool becomes a reality and even a necessity to many companies that see the financial benefit of them.

When companies become active in social networks with the goals listed above, the actions should not stop with the marketing department. Sales teams should be trained and active in the networks where marketing has identified new prospects. The goal is to bring the prospects from a virtual environment into a live conversation with the sales team. This may be easier with some prospects than others but some prospects will gladly take a demo or a call with the sales team but want an active engagement online as well during the buying process.

If your company is not activating the sales team members to engage in social media where the prospects are responsive (that’s where you found them originally) then you risk losing them. Your sales team may lose them in the sea of other emails and calls that they receive on a daily basis.

When a prospect is engaged online and sales or lead qualification gets involved there should be an effort to incorporate a social selling strategy that blends common sales process with an online one. You’ll find more engaged buyers and customers that communicate with you in many channels and become advocates for your company during the buying process and throughout their time as a customer.

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?

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.

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.