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.

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.

Social Selling University

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

1. What are the BEST PRACTICES of social CRM that matter today?
2. What are the SUCCESSES and FAILURES companies have experiences in the past two years?
3. If you could employ just THREE social CRM tactics at your company, what should they be?
4. Where should you NOT put your money and time when it comes to social CRM?
5. How can you really get your teams to ADOPT any social CRM tools and processes?

Are you attending SXSW 2011?

Social Media Facts and Figures for B2B Sales

Social Media Spending

Sales Productivity Lost During the World Cup

Building a Company with Social Media

A Day in the Internet

Women In Social Media

Social Media In Business

Who Participates Online

Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

Twitter Territory

The World Of Facebook

The Story (so far) of Twitter

The Social Media Effect

The Rise Of The Social Networking Ad Spending

The Rise of Facebook Mobile: 2010

The Social Media Effect

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

The Journey of a Tweet

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

The Evolution of Twitter: 2010

The Biggest Shift

Social Media Statistics

Social Media Addiction

Social Marketing Compass

Social Landscape

Profiles of a Twitter User

Popular Site Demographics

More Truth About Twitter

Make Social Media Work For Your Company

How The World Spends Its Time Online

How People Share Content on the Web

How Companies are Leveraging Social Media

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media

Gender Balance on Social Networking Sites

Facebook was a Country

Facebook Vs Twitter

Facebook Facts and Figures 2010

Conversation Prism

Breakdown of the Blogosphere

Balance Your Media Diet

Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

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.

Microsoft is allocating a lot of resources into their cloud based software offering. We recently had a team of Microsoft CRM specialists in our office discussing the product and how it has been drastically improved over the previous version. They have also had a large marketing push with commercials trying to solidify their position in the space. Some of the commercials miss their mark but they are moving in the right direction.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison as well as Mark Hurd made the list. They are the only company that that had two executives listed.

Netsuite also made the list with Zach Nelson the President and CEO.

Of course this list wouldn’t be complete without Marc Benioff of Salesforce being listed.

1. Built-In CRM Reports Vs. the Data You Really Need – CRM Software Blog
2. Don’t Fear the Influencer (Now with More Cowbell) – CRM Outsider
3. What Can You Do For Me (Right Now)? – B2B Buzz
4. How does Sales 2.0 Help your Customers? – Anneke Seley
   
5. Too Shy to Network? – Dig It!
6. 5 Mental Attitudes of Winners – Eyes on Sales
7. Displaying Facebook Profile Images with the Facebook Toolkit – Developerforce
8. Thanks to Microsoft, the Cloud Meets The Onion – Gigaom
9. Stop Selling and Start Helping People Buy – Eloqua
10. What’s Holding Your Prospecting Back? By Kendra Lee – Jonathan Farrington
11. Your Customer’s Twitter Account Can Build or Kill Your Brand – Kyle Lacy
12. You’re Allowed To Walk Away You Know! – Paul Castain
13. Convince The Boss Your B2B Company Should Use Social Media – Social Media B2B
14. The Guy in the Glass – Its The Identity Inside You – Chris Voss
15. Plans and Next Steps – Renbor

I have had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds in sales 2.0 and sales effectiveness since joining InsideView and one of the topics that came up 90% of the time was that even though social selling and sales 2.0 are messages that sales people are adopting, there hasn’t been a real focus on how an individual sales person specifically can adopt social media to drive more opportunities. Until now.

InsideView has put together a Social Selling Primer that will be our launching pad for all of the future content on helping sales teams maximize their efforts online in social networks. Sign up for this webinar today before all of our WebEx seats are filled.

Thursday, November 18, 2010 : 11am PT / 2pm ET

When sales organizations try to leverage social media into their sales processes, they are often overwhelmed by too much information and underwhelmed by its impact on productivity.

At InsideView, we help hundreds of organizations to increase sales productivity and get substantial returns on their investments, using social media.

In the age of social selling LinkedIn is the B2B sales network of choice. There are many blogs and sites that cater to the B2B sales professional but LinkedIn is by far the place most sales people flock to when trying to find out more information about who they should be talking with. The only limitation is that a normal LinkedIn account limits some of the information you can view, messages or InMails you can send and doesn’t let you connect with people that you do not have a direct relationship with.

Connect with more people on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more than a place to keep your work history up to date and can be used for more communication than to just keep in contact with past colleagues. I have used LinkedIn for years as a way to contact and communicate with customers and new prospects and now I want to extend that opportunity to all of you. By upgrading your Linked account you get added to the OpenLink Network.

The OpenLink Network lets LinkedIn users find and contact other professionals who are interested in meeting new people. The OpenLink Network is available exclusively to premium account holders.

What a Paid Account Includes:

Social networking service LinkedIn is free, but if you choose to upgrade to a paid account, you have access to additional features. What are the four top advantages in updating your account?

1. Send messages directly, without waiting for an introduction from one of your contacts (called “InMails”), which the site says get a 30 percent response rate;

2. Access the Profile Organizer that allows you to track important profiles in a dedicated workspace, organize profiles into folders and add details to contacts such as notes and contact information;

3. View more profiles when you perform an advanced search (free accounts limit you to 100 search results); and

4. Access more specifics on who’s viewed your profile.

There are three types of paid accounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro. The Business account costs $24.95 per month and allows you three InMails per month, 300 profiles per search and five folders in the Profile Organizer. Business Plus costs $49.95 and allows you 10 InMails per month, 500 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer. The Pro account costs $499.95 per month, allows you 50 InMails per month, 700 profiles per search and 25 folders in the Profile Organizer.

More information on the specifics of paid accounts can be found here.

Let InsideView upgrade you to a Premium Business Account.

We are giving away a free 6 month Business Account to one of our friends. All you need to do is go over to the InsideView page on LinkedIn and leave us a recommendation. While you’re there you might as well follow us on LinkedIn also so you can keep up to date on other promotions and business news we share. We will choose a winner of the 6 month Business account on Dec. 15th and we will contact the winner through LinkedIn.

Leave InsideView a recommendation and you could receive a 6 month paid LinkedIn Business Account upgrade. $150 value

Infographic by our friends at HubSpot.

Do you really want an upgraded LinkedIn account, leave us a comment telling us what you would use it for.

This year we are full steam ahead with our booth design and working out the details for this years theme. What we wanted this year was a Dreamforce event that would jump out at people looking for new and better ways to integrate social selling and Social CRM to their busineses. ince we already know the stats on the number of Fortune 100 businesses involved in social media, having a sales team that knows how to target those customers is more important than ever.

InsideView has created a new Twitter list for this years Dreamforce ’10 that is also rolling up into the Dreamforce Daily web-paper. If you or someone you know should be added to our Dreamforce ’10 Twitter list, leave me a comment or send me a tweet. Since InsideView is all consumed with Dreamforce this year we also started a Dreamforce Facebook event.

InsideView already brings sales teams the most comprehensive social media content into your Salesforce CRM and we are going to continue bringing new content into your favorite social networks. Join us on Twitter or Facebook to get new content and special news on us and be the first to know what we are developing for this years Dreamforce ’10 event in December.

Now thats the bad side and as sales people we focus on the positive. Let me use Symantec (SYMC) as an example to the type of sales intelligence you could gather and help you make sure you are getting in front of the right people with the right message. Let’s say you are selling a new product designed to increase sales productivity and you want to call the Director of Inside Sales for Symantec and discuss how it can help them. Here is a copy of the Symantec Corporation listing from our InsideView Directory.

If you have InsideView installed in your CRM you can let the application do all of the leg work for you and get a wealth of information about the company without having to do any of the searching on your own. The Smart Agents tell you everything you need to know about news related to the company and executive staff and within the application you can see any of  your LinkedIn connections that you have connected to the company. Having this aggregated data from different sources injected to your CRM gives you more data than any other sales productivity application available. But it doesn’t stop there.

Having company information is great but that’s only one piece of the puzzle and you still need someone specific to contact. SalesView lets you drill in or do a search on a specific title or name and get the contact name(s) for Symantec and pin point the person you need to reach out to and even give you some initial perspective on them. SalesView lets you see that David is a Director of Inside Sales for Symantec, provides all of his contact information and even highlights some of the social networks he is a part of like Facebook and Twitter and now you know that he’s a golfer and maybe that’s how you start building rapport with him. Or you can dig in one step further and see that he recently held a summit for BizSummits that covered  “Sales Team-Motivation and Attitude Adjustments”.

Using SalesView for the aggregated sales intelligence lets a sales person know a great deal of information about a company all the way down to key decision makers in an organization. Adding in the functionality of a Social CRM lets you follow leads and contacts in more detail and get alerted to trigger events that can activate buying cycles. Having a completely integrated application pulling information form sources all over the internet is what will help you as a sales professional build your pipeline and know whats happening with your prospects and customers.

The question seems to be very general in nature but has some very specific parameters. There are dozens if not hundreds of examples of social media being a revenue driver for B2C businesses as explained in this WSJ article on Merchants Push Sales Through Social Media.  B2B sales environments have been trying to crack the code in how best to use social media as a lead generation tool and it may be a while before that code is cracked. Social media channels like Twitter or Facebook need to be used strategically for communication, distribution and for lead generation. Nothing makes a new fan or follower run away from your company faster than getting bombarded with update after update with download links for your product or some other equivalent of social spam.

photo by HubSpot

The data around social media’s role in a B2B environment is not as cut and dry as the B2C counterpart. As Craig Rosenberg pointed out, B2B sale cycles are not as easy as going to Office Depot and buying printer ink. The process a company goes through before buying a product or service is very research intensive and that’s where social media can be of help.

Marge Bieler the founder of RareAgent gave some great insight about the need for you to use social media around a common theme or campaign that can drive traffic and generate leads. This seems to be the best advice you can get. There are many paths you can take as a company trying to generate B2B sales through social media, but none of them are quick transactions. Your social media efforts should be in support of and could be the spearhead of a much larger coordinated effort from marketing. The results from this type of social marketing will pay much larger rewards than just focusing on capturing more email addresses for your newsletter.

The one position that was only touched on by Melissa Galt that I think is probably one of the most important things to remember is that you will reap the largest rewards if you know where your customers are online and communicate with them there. Listening online for your brand and keywords can’t be over stressed and the reality is that no matter how much you listen or what tools you pay for that collect this data, you will never hear everything being said. The idea is that you can identify the places where these conversations are taking place the most often and determine that this is where a large group of your fans would be ‘hanging out’ online. Maybe I should write a whole post on tools to listen for conversations online?

The overwhelming response from the answers in the group was that “Yes” social media has a very solid place in generating revenue for a B2B sales environment. The results will come from a much larger strategic initiative around a topic, category or event centered on your company. Look at the social marketing efforts of the largest brands in the world, 65% of Fortune 100 companies have a Twitter profile and they all use them to communicate with their followers and update them on news related to their company and their industry. This should be the cornerstone for any B2B company looking to get into social media and then build from there.

What are your thoughts? How Can Social Media Provide a Push in a B2B Sales Environment?

Join hundreds of industry leaders like InsideView, Marketo, Oracle and others to discover how BigMachines helps companies overcome their sales challenges and learn best practices to increase sales productivity and improve business processes. BigIdeas Chicago 2010 provides a forum for customers, partners, industry experts, and progressive companies to discuss innovative business strategies and best practices to increase revenues, improve sales efficiencies and reduce costs.

SALES AND MARKETING INTELLIGENCE AND AUTOMATION IN THE CLOUD

Learn how to apply intelligence and automation technologies to learn more about your prospects and sell more effectively.

Featuring Marketo & InsideView

Are you in the Chicago area and planning to attend? We would like to meet with anyone that makes it to the event and hear your thoughts on SalesView and what we can do to improve the product for your company. Leave a comment here and you can always add the event to your LinkedIn Events here.

We have seen a great response to a series of posts by Umberto Milletti the CEO of InsideView. Starting with a post from September where he discussed the difference between sales data and sales intelligence. He explained that Customer 2.0 is much more internet savvy than most companies want to believe and therefore companies need to rethink the way they attract and nurture new prospects. Sales people that used to rely only on data (company name, revenue, size…) are falling behind companies that have learned how to harness this data and turn it into actionable intelligence.

In a recent post on Social Media B2B by Umberto following along this topic he goes one step further to explain how a companies CRM should be playing a larger role in sales enablement. A companies entire sales methodology needs to make a shift to include intelligence from social media into driving more revenue.

Photo by laverrue

There is a major difference between data and intelligence. Most companies are very familiar with using sales data for their sales teams. As a sales person I was spending a good portion of my days digging through places like blogs, LinkedIn and Jigsaw for information on companies and the decision makers.

Sales Data

I haven’t found a one stop shop that provided all of the updated information I needed as a sales person. Company size, location, revenue, industry focus and most important was relevant business events. Now with social media being a major initiative by businesses there is a flood of information being pushed online through blogs, Twitter and other social networks that can put a sales person in a catatonic state from information overload.

A sales team focused on moving deals through the sales cycle to close has very limited bandwidth to do all of the searching needed to get updated relevant information and therefore they typically only check a couple sources, assume the information is correct and then they act on that data. The problem that we all know is that data pulled from these sources is not always the most up to date and in some cases the information is just wrong. So even with a small amount of research you could still spend the first part of your call fumbling around to get to the meat of the conversation.

Sales data is a necessity for an effective sales team. But the data is really only the first step. What’s needed is turning that data into intelligence that can be acted on.

Sales Intelligence

Taking all of that data and pulling it together to make an action plan is the next evolution of the sales process. This is referred to as Sales 2.0 and changes a sales person from hunting down information on their accounts to being able to filter through the sea of data and focus on the important information that can be used to get a deal closed.

Real sales intelligence is not offered by a single source like Hoovers but in a combination of hundreds of sources that can be aggregated so it provides a real view of the company and employees.

This is the process that SalesView is taking with company data. Why would any sales person rely on one source for their data when information is literally in thousands of places? Using better tools as a sales person can increase your pipeline and closed deals.

You can also read a guest post on Social Media B2B by our CEO on Converting B2B Sales Data into Social Intelligence