You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘socialprise’ tag.
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. NHR CASE STUDY
“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.
There is a shift being made in businesses regarding their approach to gaining new business and managing their customers. Social CRM is on the rise and this is more than a few bells and whistles being added into your contact database. With a large focus being made in the movement away from sales data and into sales intelligence, sales professionals will need to make a few adjustments on how they do everything from prospect, develop new opportunities and manage their existing accounts.
Customer 2.0 is not waiting around for a sales person to get back to them with information, they are online looking for answers from people outside of your company within their own social networks and generally searching for people they should be in contact with. The trick (if you want to call it that) is to make yourself as visible as possible so that this new breed of customer has no option but to come across your name or profile during these searches. This is why Sales 2.0 starts with YOU.
5 Steps a person should take to make themselves more sales 2.0 ready
1. Create or optimize you LinkedIn profile. I came across another company this week that only had 20% of their sales team on LinkedIn. At first the sales manager was resistant to the idea of their team using LinkedIn but after some discussion, I think they changed their mind. I guess we’ll see in a couple weeks when we check back in with them.
Sales people should look at their online presence as an extension of themselves. Sites like LinkedIn can become self service lead generators once you optimize your LinkedIn profile and start building a network.
2. Get over your fear and join Twitter now! Maybe it’s because I didn’t have many friends as a teenage kid but I have always found Twitter to be a useful tool to meet people interested in the same things as me and have small conversations. Once I realized that Twitter could be used in a sales environment, I started building a mini network of people that were already customers and looking for products that I sold. You might be amazed at the number of executives on Twitter or just other employees that you can build relationships with online. Remember people buy from people, the more you are seen as a person and not another sales person the better.
Use the search feature or get an application like HootSuite or TweetDeck to help you focus on specific geographies and keywords your company is associated with.
3. This should be #1 but for the sake of editing it’s not. Go over to GoDaddy or another domain name company and buy yourname.com. Google yourself and look at what the results are. Owning your own domain name and building a simple site or even pointing the domain to your LinkedIn profile will help you stand out from the crowd. Your prospects are looking at your online identity just as you are them. Make sure you are searchable and showing your customers/prospects that you are a professional.
4. Stop cold calling and start engaging in conversations. Now that you have a shiny LinkedIn profile start spending a little bit of time in groups and asking/answering questions. You will be amazed at the number of people that are willing to give free advice to you about how to make yourself better or how thankful some people are that you were able to help them out. These are all little building blocks to make you a sales 2.0 expert and bring more prospects to you.
5. Add your social profiles to everything you send to prospects. Add your LinkedIn, Twitter and company blog URLs to your email signature. This is a great way to get some exposure to your Sales 2.0 identity and will let people learn more about YOU and not the sales person contacting them.
These are some simple steps a sales person can take that will build their credibility online and make it near impossible for customer 2.0 not to notice. Would you like me to look at your LinkedIn profile and offer any suggestions? Leave me a comment with the link and I’ll check it out.
This was a timely update from Paul as I was putting together the post on personal branding for sales people. Anyone that is serious as a sales person needs to be aware what their personal brand is. I think this is one of the most overlooked aspects of a sales person’s life and should really be developed. As a sales person you need to be aware and in control of what is found when people look for you. This is why it is so important to optimize your LinkedIn profile. Dealing with Customer 2.0 is hinged on being searchable and having a rich online identity that shows you are more professional than the competition. Obviously this is about your personal brand as a sales person but this also translates into how you represent your company’s brand as well. If you have an extensive presence online providing information and helping people, you are going to get an extra level of engagement from prospects and others looking for answers.
What comes up when you Google yourself?
Chances are if you Google yourself now there may be something that comes up related to you. If nothing else, your LinkedIn profile should show up in the first few results if you have optimized it correctly since LinkedIn has a lot of Google juice. But what if that’s all that comes up about you? Even worse, what if you have negative results that show up? If your customers look you up online, there are some simple things you can do that will help both of these issues.
Remove bad content at the source.
Chances are you just uploaded some pictures or have a profile somewhere that you don’t use or just isn’t how you want to be seen in the professional world. Go to the site and delete the profile, picture or contact the site administrator to remove it for you. Sounds like a little bit of work but you will be thankful that this won’t come back to haunt you in the future.
Bury it with newer, positive information.
You are on your way to being a Sales 2.0 ninja and the more professional profiles you set up and content you share on sites like LinkedIn, business blogs and sales sites, the more the older information will be buried from the front page of Google and other search engines. Start taking control of your personal brand and directing people to your showcase pages and profiles. If you add a new profile and provide content to just a couple sites a week you will see the other listings disappear.
Sales 2.0 in the mirror
You should always be thinking about helping your customer by providing valuable information and resources to get educated online. Sales 2.0 is about using the Internet to educate prospects, find new opportunities and build stronger relationships. Your social profiles will be the glue that holds your credibility together.
We’ve had the opportunity to introduce our vision of Social Selling to customers, sales professionals and our visitors at Dreamforce. InsideView has been defining the use of social media for sales people for years and now we want to raise the bar. InsideView has created a Social Selling University to educate sales people on the benefits of social media and the best practices to using social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs. Customer 2.0 is not just a buzzword, people are no longer going directly to the companies asking questions. Customers are looking in their social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter asking questions and getting advice from other customers and friends on what to buy. If sales people are not engaged with these conversations they are missing out on an excellent opportunity to connect with people in the earliest stages of the buying cycle.
As InsideView continues to develop real strategies around social media for sales people, we will enable entire sales teams to listen, connect and engage with people that will develop new opportunities and create better relationships with current customers.
There were many requests to have this presentation available for people to watch and save as a reference. We have added the introduction to Social Selling on our YouTube page for people to watch. There is more content being edited for this YouTube channel so make sure you click the subscribe button on the page.
After a little wait and some help by people voting up the topic, InsideView was accepted as a speaker at the 2011 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin TX. We believe we have some very compelling content based around the subject of social selling and how to take the creepy factor out of using social media to engage with customers. Here is the synopsis of the topic.
Social Espionage and Selling to Customer 2.0
Monitoring. Listening. Tracking. Measuring. No, this isn’t a covert CIA operation: It’s the way brands and businesses are marketing…and selling…to YOU, Customer 2.0. Is it creepy? Regardless, it’s also a reality, and it’s working tremendously, as well as being adopted at a rapid rate by everyone from your local coffee shop to Best Buy to enterprises like Adobe. From social CRM to mobile-social tech to community management, 2011 is the year of full-blown execution after, well, two years of panels discussing ‘the future of social business.’ Come hear about the truly effective processes and best practices around social customer relationship management and intelligence, and walk away with an actual plan for your business in social marketing and selling.
Questions Answered
- What are the BEST PRACTICES of social CRM that matter today?
- What are the SUCCESSES and FAILURES companies have experiences in the past two years?
- If you could employ just THREE social CRM tactics at your company, what should they be?
- Where should you NOT put your money and time when it comes to social CRM?
- How can you really get your teams to ADOPT any social CRM tools and processes?
Are you attending SXSW 2011?
After searching far and wide for infographics I figured I would share some of the ones I have come across that focus on social media and B2B. InsideView puts out infographics on a regular basis, two are included in this post with more to come. These are my favorite 40 that cover Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other social media trends and business related infographics.
Social Media Facts and Figures for B2B Sales
Social Media Spending
Sales Productivity Lost During the World Cup
Building a Company with Social Media
Read the rest of this entry »
Last year at Dreamforce, InsideView showed the power of Smart Agents and how it developed typical data into sales intelligence. This year InsideView is going a few steps forward to show companies how to get a 3D view of your customers and prospects to increase revenue. DreamforceIn3D.com
See Your Leads in 3D
Sales people are always looking for an edge. Looking for any piece of information that they can use to identify an opportunity or build stronger relationships through social media. With Twitter on its way to hitting 200 Million registered users, 80 Million professionals on LinkedIn and 500 Million on Facebook, sales people should be looking at this as an opportunity to drive opportunities through the roof.
InsideView recently kicked off the Social Selling University and the entire campaign is designed around showing sales people how to use social media in a way that builds their networks and generates new opportunities.
Dreamforce Resources
Dreamforce is only a couple weeks away and fans of the cloud are going to be looking for online resources that can keep them up to date with Dreamforce news.
InsideView has a few resources for our Dreamforce readers. The InsideView Facebook page will have a lot of information but we have segmented a few other Dreamforce Facebook places for you. The Dreamforce Event page already has over 850 people saying they will attend.
Dreamforce Parties
I’ve been trying to find a list of all the parties that people will be hosting during Salesforce but there has not been much posted on them. Maybe InsideView is ahead of the curve with our announcement of our joint party with ExactTarget on Wednesday at the Metreon and InsideView is hosting a party on Monday that will be sure to welcome all of our friends and customers coming in from all over the US.
InsideView will be at Booth # 924 in Dreamforce and you will want to come by early and get entered to win our event prize, a 50″ 63″ Samsung 3D ready TV.
We will also be breaking our booth into two parts. one or general foot traffic a demonstrations of the application and the other half will be used as a theater to where w will have guest speakers (to be announced) and more Social Selling University content.
Paul Greenberg published an article on ZDNet called “Looking Back at 2010 – In 2010” and he gave a great explanation of his methodically scientific approach to forecasting. Covering the increased priority of mobile CRM social marketing, and the growing need for companies especially y in the support function deploying social CRM to work with customers.
When it came to integration with traditional CRMs Paul had some great things to say about InsideView.
InsideView continued its relentless drive to integrate with everything including the basil plants that are growing inside varying foodies homes – and they’ve been a happy success accordingly with integrations to most of the CRM standards out there.
You can read the entire article on ZDNet here.
- Built-In CRM Reports Vs. the Data You Really Need – CRM Software Blog
- Don’t Fear the Influencer (Now with More Cowbell) – CRM Outsider
- What Can You Do For Me (Right Now)? – B2B Buzz
- How does Sales 2.0 Help your Customers? – Anneke Seley
- Too Shy to Network? – Dig It!
- 5 Mental Attitudes of Winners – Eyes on Sales
- Displaying Facebook Profile Images with the Facebook Toolkit – Developerforce
- Thanks to Microsoft, the Cloud Meets The Onion – Gigaom
- Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy – Eloqua
- What’s Holding Your Prospecting Back? By Kendra Lee – Jonathan Farrington
- Your Customer’s Twitter Account Can Build or Kill Your Brand – Kyle Lacy
- You’re Allowed To Walk Away You Know! – Paul Castain
- Convince The Boss Your B2B Company Should Use Social Media – Social Media B2B
- The Guy in the Glass – Its The Identity Inside You – Chris Voss
- Plans and Next Steps – Renbor
