You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘SugarCRM’ tag.
Summer of Sales Intelligence: InsideView Sees Huge Gains in Customers and Major CRM Platforms, Delivers 8 Million Sales Triggers in Recent Quarter
Ten times more companies started using intelligence to sell better in 2011′s Q3 than any other quarter. That’s according to the latest numbers from InsideView, the leading provider of sales intelligence for the enterprise. The company also revealed it delivered more than 8 million unique new opportunity sales triggers to its customers during the same period.
Intelligence Over Data: Quality and Quantity in Harmony
InsideView’s sales intelligence provides something data simply can’t: a competitive advantage. Anyone can provide a current title, phone number or email address on a lead. Only InsideView can provide this basic information, but more. For example, a business event — like an acquisition or merger — that warrants sales outreach, or news event like a product launch, that matters to the ongoing sales conversation.
“While other companies are betting their business on providing more and more data, we’re finding accelerating demand for higher quality sales intelligence, not just more data,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “Sales intelligence is the combination of not only business data, but social context, how you’re connected to a lead or prospect, valuable news insight, and real-time triggers that inform you when to take action. In fact, we’re delivering 35 million unique news trigger events to our users a year to help them sell better and generate more revenue.”
Independent research firm Aberdeen Research has found that InsideView’s style of sales intelligence increases several key areas for sales success, including sales quota attainment, customer retention and overall revenue growth.
“We have seen that, in 2010, the best-in-class organizations outperformed by achieving 28% revenue growth compared to just 3% for others — and intelligence is a key reason for this,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research.
Big Growth and Launch of CRM+
InsideView’s own growth saw almost 10,000 new professionals using its free product, and over 250 enterprises signing on to its award-winning paid version, since July. In August, the company launched CRM+, which brought its intelligence technology to a broader business sector including marketing, service, human resources and more.
“InsideView gives businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients,” noted TechCrunch in coverage of InsideView’s CRM+ launch. “CRM+ now brings social data to all CRM users (marketing, operations, customer service, etc.), not just sales.”
InsideView was also the only provider of sales intelligence included in August’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social CRM.
Success On All CRM Solutions
InsideView’s leadership continues across all major CRM platforms:
- Salesforce.com: InsideView continues to be the all-time most popular sales app on the salesforce.com AppExchange.
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM: In July, the company was selected as a 2011 Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year.
- SAP: Earlier in the summer, InsideView gained the prestigious “Powered by SAP NetWeaver®” certification status.
- SugarCRM: In June, InsideView and SugarCRM combined forces to bring InsideView standard and out-of-the-box.
- Oracle CRM OnDemand: InsideView is part of the Inner Circle program.
- NetSuite: Collaboration through the Preferred Partner Program.
To learn more about InsideView, please visit www.insideview.com.
On top of all the work to continue optimizing the application for our growing list of customers, we wanted to highlight some enhancements to the application that all of you should be seeing with the latest release.
Updated Connection Summary: You are now able to get a snapshot of any personal & professional connections from any company. This was a request brought to us by a few customers that wanted a snapshot in the record so they could see who they were connected to and how they were connected.
We now identify for you if you are connected through a coworker, a reference account or through previous coworkers.
The result is that you can now look at the snapshot and have more intelligence about who you want to drill into further to help make the introduction or use as leverage to connect with your target.
The new Connection Dashboard gives you a list of connections that you have access through using our Smart Connections. These are not direct connections that can be found using networks like LinkedIn but more implied connections that look at my past employers and other information from my profile to identify ways I can be connected to my target.
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
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?
We are happy to announce that our July 2011 (v64) release is now live.
V64 release features:
• Text-only alerts for Blackberry users
• Enhanced partner contact search
• Improved Twitter profile search
• Salesforce – Multiple contact sync
• Salesforce – Self-service field mapping for CRM administrators
V63 release features:
• Add a company on-demand
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook – Data Sync & Export
• NetSuite CRM – Partner intelligence
• Salesforce – Easy watchlist set-up
Do you have questions about the latest InsideView Release? Leave us a comment or ask your question in the community Q&A section.
SugarCRM Users To Have Seamless Access to InsideView for Social Selling
InsideView, the social selling and sales intelligence leader, and SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, announced today that InsideView’s powerful sales intelligence solution will come preinstalled in all editions of SugarCRM. The integrated solution will provide all of SugarCRM’s users with immediate access to InsideView’s state-of-the-art sales intelligence at no incremental cost. The announcement was made at the annual SugarCon customer and developer’s conference.
The partnership comes at a time when sales people are overwhelmed with an explosion of data that leaves them spending more time searching for information and less time selling. InsideView’s sales intelligence dramatically improves sales performance by aggregating the most valuable sources of external information sales people need about companies and contacts into a single, easy-to-access view within SugarCRM. This sales intelligence makes it fast and easy to discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision-makers, close deals, and grow both customer relationships and top-line revenue.
Sales intelligence has been shown to increase revenue per sales person by more than ten percent, compared to sales people who only have access to simple contact or company data. InsideView’s platform aggregates and draws relevance from the huge quantity of business information available in tens of thousands of worldwide business publications; social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs; and financial and contact information.
InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti’s participation in a keynote address at SugarCon – SugarCRM’s marquee global user group event – highlights the importance and urgency of social selling and sales intelligence for today’s sales professionals.
“Sales professionals using SugarCRM need to be able to create effective and actionable information from the massive amounts of data presented to them at any given time,” said Clint Oram, CTO at SugarCRM. “With this partnership, InsideView brings meaningful business insight for millions of companies worldwide directly into our easy-to-use platform. With this integration, any user’s view of his or her leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities will include real-time, relevant social and business insights and triggers.”
“We are excited to partner with SugarCRM to empower all SugarCRM customers and partners with automatic access to rich insight about millions of companies and key decision-makers around the world,” said Heidi Tucker, VP Global Alliances at InsideView. “Combined with SugarCRM’s ‘single system of truth’ and collaborative platform, “InsideView will help SugarCRM users find more relevant ways to connect with their prospects and customers to understand their important business issues. “
Building off the existing integration between Sugar and SalesView, the sales intelligence solution from InsideView, the companies are announcing a combined social CRM and sales intelligence solution. The latest edition of Sugar 6 will include SalesView pre-loaded into the system. This offers users the ability to tap into thousands of global data sources, as well as the vast universe of social media to gain relevant and actionable insight into their prospects and customers.
“A CRM system is only as good as the data inside of it,” said Umberto Milletti. “By accessing real-time sales intelligence and relevant social information within Sugar 6, users can discover prospects, qualify leads, engage decision-makers, close deals and grow customer relationships more quickly. SalesView and Sugar together form the building blocks of a winning social CRM strategy for any business.
SugarCRM is the first major CRM platform to ship with InsideView’s sales intelligence built right in. SugarCRM Cloud edition users will see InsideView immediately when accessing the newest SugarCRM version. All users of SugarCRM’s on-premise edition may download InsideView from SugarExchange or upgrade to the latest release of SugarCRM. To learn more about InsideView and how sales intelligence can dramatically improve your sales cycle, please visit www.insideview.com/SUGARCRM. Read the rest of this entry »
SugarCon ’11, SugarCRM’s fifth annual user & customer conference, brings together SugarCRM users, developers, partners and experts from around the world. Packed with two days of business, technical and product presentations, SugarCon provides practical knowledge that you can apply to improve your company’s performance.
InsideView has the good fortune to have multiple sessions at SugarCon 2011 where we will have the opportunity to cover a great deal of content. Starting off with a Keynote address from Umberto Milletti and then two separate breakout sessions with Inbound Marketing Manager and Social Selling Director Koka Sexton along with the VP of Marketing Ralf VonSosen.
Big Data and the Emergence of Social Selling with Umberto Milletti, Founder and CEO, InsideView
Ballroom
Keynotes | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 1:15 – 2:00
As more businesses transact online and millions of users including executives and consumers use social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs, there’s an overwhelming amount of data, also known as “Big Data”, on companies and contacts online.
This data deluge presents new challenges as well as big opportunities, especially for sales organizations, to distill actionable insights about prospects and transform selling from an art to science. Harnessing business and social intelligence about prospects will no longer be optional, but essential for increasing sales productivity and win rates.
Learn about why Big Data matters and how it can help you change the game of selling.
Session #1
Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton
Track 4: The Sugar Exchange | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 | 2:00 – 2:40
Today’s customers are not very responsive to traditional sales and marketing tactics such as email blasts, cold-calls, and canned pitches. Using social media, customers are researching products and solutions, and talking to their peers for recommendations instead of listening to vendor pitches. Over 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before it gets to sales.
Most sales reps and sales organizations are overwhelmed by too much data and frustrated by the loss of productivity as they seek actionable sales intelligence about their prospects! Harnessing business and social insights about prospects from online data can be a game-changer and a productivity booster for sales teams.
Come to this session to learn about how you make your selling more of a competitive advantage, what you need to have in place, and how you can get started.
Session #2
5 Must-Haves For Boosting Sales With Social Media with Ralf VonSosen and Koka Sexton
Track 6: Social Business | Wednesday, April 6th | 11:30am – 12:10pm
Your customers have changed. How you find them and engage with them has changed too. It’s more important than ever for sales organizations to recognize this opportunity to build relationships and generate new leads using social media. The problem is what tools to use, metrics to track and how to train them.
In this session, you will learn about the 5 easy steps you should take, that will empower a sales team to engage with customers in social networks. You will also learn what tools work best and how to measure the results.
SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the results of its 2010 Social CRM Survey. The poll’s results reinforced the notion that in the year 2010, CRM practitioners have been slow to embrace social. Those that have chosen to take advantage of this new technology have enjoyed a competitive advantage in the market and a considerable return on investment, placing them firmly ahead of their challengers.
According to the survey, 2011 will bring much change to the CRM market; virtually all of the respondents agreed that over the course of the new year they planned to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data. While nearly half of all respondents stated that having social CRM capabilities would impact their decision-making when purchasing their company’s next CRM system, it’s clear that social CRM will become a staple in the market by 2012.
Some companies have chosen to lead the charge on social CRM, and upgrade their CRM software before it becomes an industry norm. Insource Performance Solutions, a SugarCRM customer, is one of those companies.
“The integration between InsideView and SugarCRM allows us to leverage social media and other real time data sources to our advantage, all in a simple-to-consume, automated format,” said Chip Meyers, sales operations manager for Insource. “The merging of social and CRM system data gives us a competitive edge.”
SugarCRM users can get a FREE copy of InsideView for Sales in the Sugar Exchange Marketplace.
InsideView was founded to help business professionals take advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications — or what we refer to as “socialprise“. For several years now our application has been helping you track key business events and relationships across thousands of traditional and new media sources. Today we’re happy to be adding one more voice to the mix with our company blog, The Inside View. The cobbler’s children have shoes after all.
This blog is intended to help you leverage InsideView applications more effectively, gather your product feedback, and stay informed about key industry trends. In the future we will regularly be posting about product updates, new features, tips & tricks, customer success stories, and the evolving business search and intelligence landscape. There’s plenty to discuss about the changing face of sales and marketing, information overload, new search technologies, and the emergence of socialprise applications. And we would love to hear your thoughts!
We have a great team here at InsideView with diverse backgrounds, expertise, and perspectives. You can expect to see many of our team members contributing to this blog. To get things started, I’m Marc Perramond, Product Manager here at InsideView. Lately I’ve been spending most of my time working on SalesView, our flagship business search and intelligence application. We first launched SalesView and the socialprise concept on March 18th.
If you’re not familiar with SalesView, it is a business search and intelligence application designed to provide sales and marketing professionals with real-time, relevant business insights that are aggregated from 20,000+ sources including subscription-based data providers, unstructured Web content, national and regional news outlets, trade journals, blogs, job boards, and social networks. For a better idea of what’s going on “under the hood” you can read about our platform here.
SalesView FREE is currently available as a mash-up for Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. We have also established partnerships to make SalesView FREE available for Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle On Demand, and Landslide Technologies. SalesView PRO and TEAM are available both as an integrated CRM mash-up and as a stand-alone Web application that compliments any CRM. If you’d like to learn more about SalesView, contact us to attend one of our weekly Webinars.
We consider your input an integral part of this conversation, so please don’t be shy with your feedback and suggestions about how we can make this blog most useful to you.
