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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.
On January 26th, InsideView reached its 5,000th follower. Although some may not view this as an astronomical milestone in the metrics of social media, to us it is a huge accomplishment. We are not your typical company when it comes to social marketing, where the number of followers rule the measured success of our social engagement. Though more followers is always nice to have, we’ve held the position that its better to have 200 engaged members in our community than 10,000 people that don’t really care what we have to say and never interact with us. InsideView marks each follow as the establishment of a relationship geared towards benefiting all individuals throughout all cornerstone of business.
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.
Welcome to the year 2012! I hope the first couple of weeks is everything and more you could have hoped for in terms of sales and getting jazzed for a fresh start. I compiled a list of some blog posts I thought you all might find interesting. They outline a lot of really great best practices to get you up and running this year. For those who didn’t quite hit your marks last year, now might be a good time to start switching things up a bit. Spend the morning or afternoon reading these from some truly influential figures in sales.
- Personality Study of 1,000 Top Salespeople-Harvard Business Review - Heavy Hitter Sales Blog
- 12 Ways to Increase Sales – Inc.
- Being True To “You” – Paul Castain’s Playbook
- Optimism is a Selling Skill. Is Your Glass Half-Empty or Half Full? – Salesopedia
- How to Create an Enchanting Pitch #OfficeandGuyK – Guy Kawasaki
- 5 Leadership Tips for Sales Managers - Better Closer
- Seven Steps to Sales Transformation – Selling Power
- 8 Ways to Increase Sales – InsideView
- Want the Sales? Watch What You Say… – Joanne Black
- The Beauty of Imperfection – Jill Konrath
Shoot us at a tweet @insideview if you like our collection of blog posts!
The assembly line has been a manufacturing process in the making for hundreds of years. However, it wasn’t until 1913 that it was perfected by the Ford Motor Company creating huge ramifications for the entire industry of automobiles and manufacturing. The concept of sales intelligence seems similar of creating such ramifications as it comes brings together a different concept of sales combined with extraordinary results.
An Industrial Revolution
Henry Ford’s assembly line changed all that the world knew about manufacturing in the early 20th century. Following this new form of production, companies all over the world began to develop similar models creating a small industrial revolution as automobiles and mass production began to change everything about business. The age of sales intelligence comes with dawn of a new industrial revolution steered by the power of a more social type of business. Sales intelligence is emerging as a result of the rise of social media. Humans are now linked to one another more than ever drastically changing the method of sales. Research is showing that the theory of 6 degrees of separation has been broken by social networks like Facebook.
Efficiency
Prior to Henry Ford’s assembly lines, the production of a single car took an astronomical amount of manpower, money and time. The average car cost $850 and took about 12.5 man-hours to make. Following the introduction of the assembly line, Model Ford T’s were being sold at $290 and only took 1 hour 33 minutes to make. Sales intelligence brings similar results of vastly improving efficiency. The average sales rep spends more than half of their day (4-5 work hours) researching customers and prospects. With real-time company and contact information paired with social media and smart agents, sales reps cut down their researching time of prospects and customer data by 50% – hence, giving them more time for prospecting and selling. (Understanding the Science of Sales Intelligence)
A Change in Tradition
The assembly line was a massive change in the tradition of craftsmanship and mastery. With very small and easy work done for less amount of workers, the traditional factory production system moved away from skilled workers and a larger workforce. Sales intelligence moves beyond traditional selling and moves into an age of social selling. As mentioned in the study the Science of Sales Intelligence, 92% of prospects don’t make a meeting when cold-called or emailed by a sales rep. With the power sales intelligence sales reps are able to move out of rhythm of blindly cold-calling and instead given the right people, the right message and the right time for selling.
The most notable element to derive from this analysis is how paramount both business solutions changed their industry. Sales intelligence will one day be a huge part of the sales industry as it will cease providing reps with contacts but the person behind the data.
This is part two in a study we created along with Focus.com to discuss the best practices to leverage social media for sales teams. After talking to eight of the top thought leaders in sales training and sales technology we wanted to bring their insights to you. This is going to be a 3 part series that covers what successful salespeople are doing to leverage social media in lead generation and accelerating their opportunities. Some of these experts are listed in our post on the 25 most influential sales leaders. Much appreciation to these experts for taking the time to address the question “How do your successful salespeople leverage social media for selling?“
- Miles Austin
- Marge Bieler
- Dave Brock
- Barbara Giamanco
- Matt Heinz
- Carlos Hidalgo
- S. Anthony Iannarino
- Craig Rosenberg (AKA The Funnelholic)
Sales Intelligence drives revenue.
“Based on the 12 ways sales people leverage the internet it is clear that B2B sales teams spend a lot of time researching prospects and customers on the web and social networks. It’s no longer an issue of not having any information ahead of time, the issue is that there is an overwhelming amount of personal insights available. Sifting through it to find the relevant information you can act on today appears to be the challenge at hand. Sales intelligence drives revenue by feeding sales people trigger events and insights within a company or contact.” (Koka Sexton)
Make the most of a B2B Social Networks more advanced features and functionalities.
“On the B2B side of the house, LinkedIn is the networking tool in the US with some 130 million members of the 100 million-plus community. Many people know how to invite people to their network, but they usually do not know what to do after that.”
Here are a few of the ways that savvy B2B salespeople will leverage B2B social networks:
- Advanced people search: Create prospecting lists based on the criteria of your ideal buyers. Save the list, and LinkedIn dynamically updates and alerts you weekly to the new people matching your criteria who have joined the network. Each week, you can then plan your strategy with respect to how you’ll approach the initial interaction.
- Applications: Use the applications to add video, compelling presentations, white papers and case studies or sync your blog posts to your profile. Keep your content fresh and people pay attention. In the past eight weeks, I’ve secured four paid gigs and in every single case, I was told it was because my profile stood out from the rest and because they liked the video. It is all about engaging people and enticing them to want to know more.
- Polls: Create a poll to gather real-time trending information that you can share with your prospective buyers.
- Status updates: Ongoing status updates that are ‘relevant’ and provide value to others keep salespeople visible; because at the end of the day, it is all about visibility.
- Groups: Leveraging groups (the right groups!) gives you an incredible opportunity to demonstrate credibility, but not selling!
- Use the Answers section to listen and respond to the questions that people are asking. Every single day people ask what products to buy and from whom.
- Events: Hosting an educational session for potential clients? Use the events functionality and use it to share with your network.” (Giamanco)
Monitor prospect discussion and social data for buying signals.
“Prospect research has changed forever. In no other time in my life have we seen prospects update their own information and update you on what they are doing in their personal and professional lives! Today’s modern social salesperson is exceptionally prepared for their sales calls. One tip: Company data is interesting (e.g., … [alerts] about your sales prospect’s company: ‘New product launch!’), but prospect social data is even more interesting, because it will tell you what the person really cares about (‘Just got back from sales training in Florida, learned a ton!’).” (Rosenberg)
“Leveraging twitter for sales is very effective. Once you know how to use Twitter as a sales tool, you can get insights into people and companies in realtime.” (Sexton)
“Watch for buying signals across the social Web. One of the greatest opportunities for salespeople via social media is to see into the buying cycle far earlier than we’ve typically had access to. Before social media, we could deepen our understanding of the buyer and use outbound marketing to connect with a particular need, try and find resonance with a buying signal, etc. But that, at best, was a fishing expedition most of the time. Now, if you know the buying signals and pain/problem keywords your prospects typically exhibit before they’re ready to buy, you can watch for those discussions and keywords across the social Web. Do a couple keyword searches on Twitter, for example, and you’ll be surprised how many people, in real-time, are talking about their existing challenges, their frustrations with competitive products and more.” (Heinz)
“Social media is a great tool for salespeople, but for not for the reasons that some people believe. Social media isn’t a replacement for the prospecting activities that success in sales requires, as some seem to suggest. It is a simply a set of tools that allow the execution of some of those activities. There is way too much focus on using social media tools for inbound marketing, and way too little on leveraging the tools to better enable the execution of the fundamental roles of salespeople: opening new opportunities. Opening new opportunities isn’t a passive activity, and salespeople who wait for their prospects to find them aren’t successful by any of the measures we use in sales. The salespeople who are successfully using social media are using the tools to identify and open communication with their dream client contacts. They are using tools like LinkedIn to identify the people who they can most easily create value for within their target accounts. More still, they are researching their prospects, discovering what they are reading, what they are writing about, and where their interests lie. Social media better enables salespeople to know who to call and how they might best create value for those people.” (Iannarino)
We partnered 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)
The first step and one that was consistent across 100% of the successful salespeople was to get connected.
Use your existing connections and networks to actively pursue new introductions. 
“It’s so easy, on sites from LinkedIn to Facebook and more, to see who your existing ‘friends’ and connections already know. On LinkedIn, for example, you can quickly search for contacts you want to meet based on which of them are already connected to people in your existing network. This is one of the best ways to get referrals and introductions, not by asking your network to ‘keep you in mind’ but, instead, periodically asking for specific introductions. By getting specific, your conversion rate goes up and you’re talking to the people you specifically want to meet and sell to. In your existing organization, there is the sales team, but I’m thinking the rest of the company is a gold mine of potential introductions — especially founders, longtime employees and others who have spent a long time in your industry. They know people, people know them, and they’re more likely to help you make connections and new introductions.” (Heinz)
“Every time they receive a referral, email or leadership content, salespeople can highlight names mentioned in document, then research mentioned leaders, clients and customers — even competition — and send a note or invitation asking to join their conversations via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. By connecting with each other, you then can offer assistance or referrals and also build a trusted network of individuals to help build your referral base. Most people are thrilled you took the time to reach out to them when reading their books, viewing their videos, etc.” (Bieler)
“Successful salespeople are also using social media to identify the relationships that their prospective clients have to other people they already know. Successful salespeople aren’t afraid to leverage their relationships, to ask for introductions, and to rely on the people they know and what they know to open these relationships. Because these social media connections exist, what was once invisible is now visible; it’s easy to identify relationships and leverage them to find a way in. But it’s important to remember that your prospective clients are also using the tools to learn about you. Recently, I called on a major prospective client. After our meeting, he searched for my name on the Internet and found that we had a common connection on Facebook (his best friend from high school). He called his friend to get a reference on me before deciding whether or not to move forward. Fortunately, his friend recommended my work. Social media is no longer something salespeople can opt out of. It reminds me of what President Richard Nixon used to say about foreign affairs: ‘You might not be interested in the world, but it’s interested in you.’ ” (Iannarino)
Use Twitter and other social channels to build deeper, early relationships with new prospects.
“Here’s exactly how you do it (at least with Twitter, but other social channels can likely be done in a similar fashion). Build a list of the prospects in your territory or market. With the help of an admin or an outsourcing service like eLance, go and collect the Twitter handles of each company and as many of the individuals as you can find. Using your own Twitter account, follow those companies and individuals. Then, using a tool such as HootSuite, set up a separate column where you can specifically watch activity from those prospects. This makes it easier and faster to engage with them on a regular basis. Answer their questions. Share a resource. Retweet their articles. In other words, use their attention to this social channel to build value by interacting where they are already spending their time and looking for information.” (Heinz)
It can be a pain in the rump trying to find a couple of blog posts worth spending your morning reading and jump-starting the week. Literally hundreds and thousands of sales blogs with self-proclaimed “best sales solutions” trying to cram their way into your Twitter feed, Google search results and your existence. Fret no more as I have done the searching for you and found what I deem some great sales blog posts. Take a look and have a phenomenal week.
- The Secret Lesson Hiding in Nucleus Research’s ROI Study – CRM Outsiders
- 5 Steps to Create a Killer Google+ Business Page – BrainSell Blog
- Are You Lost In a B2B Sales Lead Paradox? – Marketo Blog
- New Study Says Customers Think Companies Don’t Give a Damn ABout Their Time…Just Their Money – Brent’s Social CRM Blog
- Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business - Brian Vellmure’s CRM Strategies Blog
- Eight Business Apps That Will Change the Way You Work - Emergence Capital Partners
- How Much Will You Sell in 2012 With Social Media? - Selling Power
- Video: The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make – Selling to Big Companies
- Data Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data – DataMyth
- Three Steps to Develop Yourself – S. Anthony Iannarino; the Sales Blog
The best way to increase sales effectiveness is to speed up the research process and then get regular updates on your prospects and the companies they work for. In an article, Forbes spoke with some leaders in sales and got insights on the sales process and what steps sales managers should take to increase their effectiveness on finding more deals and closing them faster.
The overwhelming observations and advice from Wendy Weiss and Paul Castain pointed to finding the right prospects, being more prepared for the call, having intelligence around the prospects, and leveraging non-traditional communications channels to reach prospects.
Paul Castain,Vice President of Jedi Mastery at Castain Training Systems, says a lot of salespeople research a prospect only once during the process. “Business is moving at the speed of light, and things change constantly,” he says. “When you gather information, review it over and over again before you reach out to the client.”
Finding the right prospects to contact shouldn’t be a painful process. Sales intelligence can give you a fresh group of prospects based on sales trigger events in the industry specifically in your territory. These trigger events give you accurate and relevant news about the company or person you are calling. Since we know that most executives will not respond to a cold call, using connections to get introduced is important. If you can’t locate a professional connection to your prospect, use the intelligence you gather through news sources and social media to understand your prospect and make the connection.
Top sales tips to follow
- Approach them before they are in buying mode
- Focus on finding the best prospects
- Stop calling prospects if they are not responsive. Get creative in communications
- Sales people are expected to know about their prospects before the call
- Only talk 20% of the time and listen the other 80%
- Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions
- Turn rejection into a learning experience
- Never stop learning how to be more effective
Surprisingly there are still a large number of companies that do not leverage sales intelligence. The Aberdeen study on the Science of Sales Intelligence shows that most companies deal with some very specific business pressures that sales intelligence can help with.
- 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
All of these point to companies needing to be more nimble and enabling their sales teams to move faster with more targeted information. What are you going to different in 2012 to address these business issues?
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.
