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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.
How a few shifts in your sales process can have a huge impact on sales revenue.
I read a great article on Inc. yesterday on 12 ways to increase sales. The author Geoffrey James pointed out some of the most important things a salesperson or sales manager should do to increase sales in 2012. He hit the nail on the head when it comes to why these 12 ways to increase sales revenue will work, I want to tell you how to do it in 8.
1. Reduce the number of opportunities you pursue. It’s not a numbers game. By focusing your sales energy on fewer opportunities that have a higher chance of closing, you can give these customers more of your time to move the deal along. Leveraging traditional sales drivers and trigger events you are aware of, you will know which prospects have a much higher percentage of closing.
2. Increase the percentage of time you spend selling. There will always be admin work. As a salesperson you may not have the ability to hand your busy work off to others but there are ways that you can still increase your time selling. Most sales people on average spend 10hrs a week researching prospects. By leveraging technology and sales intelligence you can cut that amount of time in half and free up some of that precious time to be talking to prospects and customers and sell more.
3. Stop buying technology because it’s cool.
Stop spending your money on the next shiny object. Invest in technology that is actually going to help you sell. Focus on tools that will provide you
- Trigger events that effect your prospects and customers
- Valuable connections through multiple social networks and existing business relationships
- More personal insights that turn your CRM contacts into people you can relate to and add context around
- Highly targeted and intelligent prospect lists
4. Terminate weak engagements–politely but immediately.
Just as your company should have a solid lead qualification process to identify new opportunities you should spend the time to disqualify deals. A sales team should know what their ideal customer looks like and focus their energy on them. If a prospect doesn’t fit the mold, quit trying to force them into it.
5. Hone your lead generation effort.
Sales people need to understand the art of lead generation is shifting to an online world. Stop waiting for your phone to ring and look for the people you can help in real time. Social networks are a goldmine for the socially savvy sales rep. If you know what you are looking for, finding new opportunities with social media isn’t difficult. For example our sales team found this update on Twitter and jumped in.
What’s a good company database alternative to Hoovers? They don’t seem to want to sell me anything.
— Ross Mayfield (@Ross) January 10, 2012
These types of updates are something your sales team needs to be on the look out for. After 24 hours, Hoovers still has not replied to Ross’s update on Twitter. Listening is key. Leveraging connections and personal insights our sales team was able to connect and help Ross with his business needs.
6. Don’t focus on the gatekeepers.
Understand who the real decision makers are. Get to know them as people instead of the contact that makes decisions at XYZ company. Stay engaged with them during the sales cycle by engaging with them outside of the actual sale. Connect with prospects on social networks and try and help them with other questions they may have and add valuable insights on their industry.
7. Stay on top of your opportunities.
Build a watchlist on your opportunities so you can be fed news and other alerts to things that are changing within their company. Leveraging technology to keep your finger on the pulse of your opportunities will insure that nothing slips by you and you can even stay a step ahead during the sales process.
8. Outflank your competition.
I say it during my speaking engagements: Be different, Be better. Your prospects are getting 100+ emails a day and called as many times a week. This tactic may work some of the time but don’t do what your competitors are doing. Stand apart from them by leveraging your connections to get the introduction, connect with the decision makers on social networks to have more engaged conversations in a medium that they are already spending time in.
It works!
Closing out the year we wanted to look over the content that you have found most interesting and shared most often. 2011 was a big year for sales intelligence and the use of technology by sales teams to be more effective in finding new opportunities and closing more deals.
This is the list of the top 25 sales intelligence posts that people read during 2011
- 25 Influential Leaders In Sales
- How Science is Changing Sales As We Know It
- Why Cold Calling is the Bottom of the Barrel
- 40 Social Media B2B Infographics
- Gamification of the Sales Process
- 10 Reasons You Need a LinkedIn Profile
- 15 Posts on Why Cold Calling Is On Its Way Out the Door
- The History of Apple CEOs
- Bridging the Massive Social Media Gap Between Sales and Marketing
- Have No Fear: Why Sales Teams SHOULD Be On Social Media
- Creating a Sales Plan and Executing It.
- 10 of the Best Sales Sites
- The Death of Cold Calling – Ending the Debate
- 10 SlideShare Presentations That Will Make You a Better Salesperson
- Why Social Media is Important to the Sales Process.
- Top 10 Reasons for using Facebook for your Business
- 20 Awesome Sales Posts You Should Read
- 5 Great SlideShare Presentations on B2B Selling
- The Social Media Landscape – Facts and Figures for B2B Sales (Infographic)
- Should Sales People Be Blogging?
- The Problem with Big Data
- The Future of Social CRM
- Do You Listen to Your Customers?
- 10 tips for Driving Sales Productivity: Tip #1
- A Dip Into Sales Data vs. Sales Intelligence
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)
Sales 2.0 is the bread and butter of what we do here at InsideView. Essentially, we want salespeople to incorporate sales intelligence into the new generation of sales where social selling comes into play. Unfortunately, this methodology of sales 2.0 is skewed in various definitions and discussions of its effectiveness. As a result, I have had the privlidge of gathering 15 great sales 2.0 posts that provide some solid definitions, rich in content.
- Sales Tip: The Social Graph is Your Friend – Nigel Edelshain
- 37 Character Tweet Led to Huge Sales Opportunity – Anneke Seley
- 5 Essential Books to Understand B2B Sales 2.0 – Katie Byrnes
- 7 Forward Thinking Presentations You May Have Missed – Chad Levitt
- Sales Success Strategies for a Social World – Gerhard Gschwandtner
- What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care) – Pamela Seiple
- 40 Great Social Media Infographics for B2B - Koka Sexton
- Sales 2.0: Is Hunter vs. Farmer Theory Outdated? – Claire Moore
- How to Shorten Your Revenue Cycle – Andrew Hunt
- 10 fresh Ideas on Sales 2.0 And Sales Process – Marci Reynolds
- Productivity on Steroids (Podcast) – John Cousineau
- Lead Scoring is 878% More Effective Than Cold Calling – Paul Rafferty
- What is Sales 2.0 (And Why You Should Care) – Padalog
- Statistics Show the Business Case for Sales Enablement - Paul Krajewski
- Sales 2.0 The Impact on Selling and Sales Process – Tony Cole
Part of our job here at InsideView is to receive the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge about sales. Why? Because we love to know the in’s and the out’s of the sales industry. With today’s generation, knowledge is being passed around through networks like never seen before, most notably through Twitter. We have compiled a list of 25 influential leaders in sales who are some of the key distributors of rich, knowledgable content in the world of sales. If you are in sales and have a Twitter account, there is no question you should be following all 25 of these people. [The list provided is not in any specific order. I think all of these people are equally #awesome]
- Anneke Seley – @annekeseley
- Trish Bertuzzi - @bridgegroupinc
- Joanne Black – @ReferralSales
- Sam Richter – @SamRichter
- Jill Konrath – @jillkonrath
- John Barrows - @KenseiJB
- Kendra Lee - @KendraLeeKLA
- Josiane Feigon - @JosianeFeigon
- Barbara Giamanco – @barbaragiamanco
- Nigel Edelshain – @nedelsha
- Nancy Nardin – @sellingtools
- Don F. Perkins - @donfperkins
- Paul McCord – @paul_mccord
- Tibor Shanto – @Renbor
- Gary Hart – @SalesDuJour
- Gerhard Gschwandtner – @gerhard20
- John Cousineau - @jcousineau
- Kenneth Darryl Brown – @KenE3C
- Pelin Thorogood – @PelinT
- S. Anthony Iannarino – @iannarino
- Eric Blumthal – @EricBlumthal
- Doyle Slayton - @SalesBlogcast
- David A. Brock – @davidabrock
- Miles Austin – @milesaustin
- Mark Hunter - @TheSalesHunter
For the entire list plus more, check out our “B2B Superstars” list on Twitter: B2B Superstars
In a recent report by the Altimeter group they identified that many companies have formalized their social media efforts for customer facing employees. I expected Marketing to be the top of the list but was surprised to see Sales so far behind with only 11% of the companies having a formal approach for engagement through social media. With recent studies showing that 61% of LinkedIn members use the site for Networking, Sales is a prime group to be engaging with prospects and customers in social media. Whats even more surprising is that 31% of companies still block social media from all employees.
If marketing is the focal point of social media engagement, sales NEEDS to be brought into the loop. Training sales teams to use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs can have a huge impact on building pipeline and driving awareness of your company. Customer centric marketing brings a 1:1 relationship with prospects and customers that can be transitioned and managed by sales teams.
Leveraging social media and online communities to drive revenue works. You may remember the post Should Sales people be Blogging where we explained how IBM is leveraging social selling. In the Social Selling University we have had great speakers like Jill Konrath, Anneke Seley, Joanne Black and others that have given Enterprise Social Selling tips and strategies to members of the community. Umberto Millet our CEO has written a number of articles around the revolution of social selling in B2B.
Enterprise social selling is growing up. With the growing desire for Social CRM within companies, collecting social conversations for analysis was only scratching the service. What the social enterprise does with those conversations is where the rubber meets the road. Social media is more than a tool for marketing people and it’s being well established that every department across the enterprise can leverage social media for everything from prospecting, opportunity management and customer retention.
Adds Intelligence to the Social Enterprise with Launch of CRM+
Beyond Data: InsideView Brings Intelligence to Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations
By going beyond mere business data to provide complete customer intelligence, Our latest product CRM+ revolutionizes the way all CRM end users – from sales, marketing and service, to operations and partner channels – know their contacts and prospects, build trust, execute productive one-to-one relationships and, ultimately, drive more revenue. With today’s launch, we set a new standard in bringing holistic and social intelligence to the fingertips of all B2B CRM users.
“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.” – Aberdeen Group
“What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels: the intelligence needed for meaningful one-to-one relationships.,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “For example, just as sales has used intelligence to increase conversion rates, marketing uses contact intelligence to hone their campaigns, account management uses current news to time renewal offers, and professionals such as business development use intelligence to open new relationships.”
“Overwhelming ‘big’ data falls short in providing the intelligence needed for one-to-one business in marketing, service, sales and operations. For example, it’s a no-brainer to have current contact information on a prospect, but what about a holistic view of how you’re connected through former reference customers? Or a news article showing the company just made an acquisition? What about their latest tweets? It’s time for forward-looking intelligence in CRM to correct the ‘rear-view mirror’ approach currently provided by data companies,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO and founder of InsideView.
What made 100,000+ sales people more productive is now available to service, marketing, operations and partner channels” Umberto Milletti
CRM+ is for any company looking to empower all external-facing employees with real-time intelligence on prospects and customers, suppliers and partners. InsideView’s CRM+ provides just that to ensure all users are looking at the same information, improve KPI, and create more meaningful one-to-one relationships. InsideView CRM+ does this within workers’ process flow within their existing CRM platform.
Independent research firm Aberdeen Group has already shown the benefits of InsideView’s intelligence on sales results: At least a 10 percent increase in top-line revenue and more than 10 percent increase in quota attainment, to name a few. When intelligence is applied to additional areas – such as marketing and customer service – the impact is even greater.
“Providing intelligence to not just sales but to other parts of the organization including marketing, customer service, and operations makes a big difference in terms of overall organizational performance,” said Peter Ostrow of Aberdeen Research. “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.”
“As companies continue to embrace social CRM, they need intelligence – not data – to manage the rapidly changing landscape of customer relationships,” Milletti added. “We are excited to launch this next big step in providing this meaningful, actionable and results-driving intelligence to the entire social enterprise.”
Leveraging social media during a sales process can make a huge impact on the deals you are working on. Using Twitter for Sales Intelligence gives sales teams some great insights to the companies and contacts you are targeting. Never before in the history of sales have sales people had the ability to know so much information about the activities of a prospect. Where they travel, who they hang out with, even as much information as how they are feeling. Don’t you think it could make a difference on when you call a prospect based on if they are having a bad day or not? If nothing else, it will let you decide how you approach them.
As more companies and employees start leveraging tools like Twitter for communication you have the opportunity to get a direct line of sight on what’s happening within their worlds.
How Can Sales People Use Twitter For Sales Intelligence and Sales Growth
Based on our research, there is irresistible evidence that Twitter should be a component of a B2B sales person’s tool kit. Here are some easy steps you can take to boost sales using Twitter:
- Create a Twitter account.
- Identify the Twitter profiles of your customers and prospects. The easiest method is to look for the Twitter symbol on the website or to run InsideView to search for contacts with Twitter profiles.
- Create a Twitter List of your target profiles. This will enable you to isolate the tweets from your targets (vs. those form your family and friends).
- Use various Twitter search tools (e.g., search.twitter.com)
Here’s a list of some tid-bits of sales intelligence we came across:
- Customer recommendations
- New company initiatives
- Exhibitions at conferences
- Job openings
- New senior hires
- Articles by executives
- New customer wins
- Product launches
- Awards won
