LinkedIn has quickly become one of the most effective and business-savvy social networking sites. Sales professionals are able to take advantage of valuable insight about prospects and peers, in turn developing a strong network that translates into increased productivity through resources, tips, advice and much more. By joining these groups, you will gain some incredible knowledge in the world of sales as well as discovering some of the top leaders in the industry.

To help those in the sales industry, the following groups and channels are among the most influential and valuable on LinkedIn.

Social Selling University

Description: Social Selling University is not like social media courses which are typically designed only for marketing departments. This is how to use social media tools like LinkedIn and Twitter for sales people. Join this group to find out how and pass this group along to anyone you know in sales.

Owner: Koka Sexton | 632 members

Inside Sales Experts

This group allows Inside Sales practitioners to share ideas and information, and provides networking opportunities for  global professionals from a variety of industries to connect with their peers.

Owner: Trish Bertuzzi | 11,521 members

SalesBlogcast.com

Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Owner: Doyle Slayton | 36,356 members

The Sales Association

Description: The Sales Association is the premier association for sales & business development professionals. We provide members a powerful means to connect at events and online. Topics: sales, marketing, sales jobs, convention, conventions, jobs, trade show, trade shows, conference, conferences, CRM and careers.

Owner: Troy Davis | 26,483 members

Sales Playbook!

Description: Sales, leadership, management, marketing, CRM, Salesforce, recruiting, business development, selling tips, lead generation, prospecting, training, networking, jobs, career, Web 2.0, technology, software, strategy, social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Owner: Paul Castain | 25,110 members

Sales 2.0

Description: This group is for: sales people, sales managers and business owners who want to: 1. Exchange information about the emerging discipline of Sales 2.0 2. Partner up to help each other sell more, penetrate accounts and exchange leads.

Owner: Nigel Edelshain  4,160 members

Innovative Marketing, PR, Sales, Word-of-Mouth & Buzz Innovators

Description: Innovate with innovative marketing, public relations, promotions sales and selling professionals skilled at using creative marketing methods. Join thousands of members to learn & share best practices & advice. LinkedIn’s largest Marketing & PR Innovation Group.

Owner: Gerald “Solutionman” Haman | 148,010 members

Sales Management Association 

Description: The Sales Management Association (www.salesmanagement.org) is a global, cross-industry professional association for sales managers, sales executives, sales operations, sales trainers, sales enablement practitioners, and thought-leaders engaged in supporting or leading the sales organization.

Owner: Bob Kelly | 15,274 members

Sales Gravy

Description: Sales Gravy helps Sales Professionals, Sales Leaders, and Sales Recruiters gain the winning edge. We discuss sales techniques, sales training, sales jobs, sales careers, sales tips, sales recruiting, sales process. www.SalesGravy.com is the most visited sales content website on the internet.

Owner: Jeb Blount | 15,274 members

Sales Best Practices

Description: Have you some Sales or Marketing skills? Let’s share our experiences: Sales development, marketing, CRM, productivity and trade performance, team management and more.

Owner: Laurent J.V. Dubois | 82,904 members

“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,”

“InsideView distinguishes itself as one of the few vendors in social CRM focused on sales processes,” reads the Gartner report, available for purchase here. The report continues, “With an emphasis on usability, InsideView has promoted a compelling vision for applying search and relationship mining technologies to aid salespeople with key informational needs around sourcing contacts and leads, as well as monitoring business events and personnel within accounts.” Ease-of-use is also praised: “…easy to set up and personalize to specific needs (i.e., list building, lead generation, lead qualification, precall research in prospecting, account research, etc.).”

The report also highlights InsideView’s ability to uncover new sales opportunities and relationships, as well as to provide real-time intelligence and social information on leads and prospects through its unique Buzz Tab. One new area of emphasis by InsideView is the establishment of broader community: just last month, InsideView launched a Lithium-powered community for its nearly 100,000 users.

“While others focused on one-to-many marketing and service areas, we have focused on the one-to-one relationships critical for sales,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “It’s great to see the industry analysts agree on the importance of these one-to-one relationships. We are now expanding more into the areas of marketing and service as these recognize the need for deeper relationships. Look for some exciting announcements about our offering soon.”

There is a good conversation on the Social Selling University LinkedIn group that is worth sharing. The great thing about these communities is getting so much feedback from so many people with similar and different points of view.

I asked a question that comes up a lot with sales teams that are trying to close business. “Is it ever alright to nag or pester your prospects?” It’s a fine line that I used to walk when managing a territory. Your forecast shows a deal, you have a close date set and then the prospect goes radio silent and falls off the grid. So what do you do? How many calls do you make leaving voice-mails trying to get a status update? You can send an email a day until you get a response but that is definitely crossing into creepy nagging territory.

Social selling techniques can be used if they are not responsive to other communications. Without having a line in the sand as to what would be considered pestering, it’s hard to say. But some of our SSU members had great insights.

What do you think? Leave us a comment here or jump over to the Social Selling University LinkedIn group and post your response there.

As more than a place to waste hours of time digging through popular presentations, B2B sales people should run some searches on industries and other topics that you want to be more informed about. You could always be cutting edge and create your own SlideShare profile and start creating presentations that you can use for prospects and customers.

13 Ways to Make Selling Easy with LinkedIn

Selling to the CIO

Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling

Sales 2.0: Is Your Sales Force Ready for the Digital Age?

B2B Lead Genration Using Social Media

Stop Cold Calling and Start Attracting Clients

The preponderance of business and social data on customers poses both an opportunity and a challenge for today’s sales professionals.  Given changing customer behaviors and demands, engaging today’s socially-savvy customer – Customer 2.0 – requires a lot more than a grasp of the basic facts and figures about their companies.  It requires relevance at the time of engagement.  Reps need a 360 degree view into their prospects that incorporates recent business events, social conversations and social relationships.

Fortunately opportunities to gather both business and social data are abundant, and data consolidation certainly simplifies this process.  However, the challenge is extracting the salient points from such information for the purpose of increasing sales.  Sales reps need to be able to make sense out of this ubiquitous and sometimes conflicting mountain of data and turn it into actionable insights to engage the prospect.

Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn (as well as the entire blogosophere) are target-rich environments to find new opportunities and leads, and engage with prospects in a powerful and effectively intelligent new way. So what is holding companies back? Of the dozen or so objections I have heard, my conclusion is: FEAR. Fear that their sales team will not produce results, fear that the sales team will waste their time online and fear that their sales teams will do or say something online that will tarnish their brand and kill sales. The fact of the matter is, NOT letting sales professionals engage on social media is detrimental to the bottom line for the reasons below.

The sales productivity challenge can be addressed by putting in the right sales intelligence infrastructure in place to discover the relevant pieces of the prospect puzzle from all of these available sources, including social media.  A single “go-to” intelligence source helps sales professionals identify the most relevant, up-to-date and actionable insights about their prospects and customer with ease and efficiency -  driving sales productivity throughout the sales cycle.

Cases in point:

“Our decision to switch to InsideView was driven by our desire to consolidate multiple data sources into a single stream as well as improve the quality and relevance of the intelligence our business development team relies on daily to formulate target account strategy,” said James Warren, director, global business development at RightNow Technologies.

Let us know what you think about the video by leaving a comment here or on the InsideView YouTube page.

It used to be that companies controlled the flow of information to potential buyers and customers. The Internet has changed that paradigm completely. Today’s B2B sales teams need to know how to leverage social selling opportunities in order to create relationships and help their companies maintain a strong brand presence in the market.

Read this white paper and learn:

• Quantifiable benefits of adopting social business practices
• What it means to sell to “Customer 2.0″
• Actionable tips for launching a social selling initiative
• Which companies have used social selling to win more business

Social Selling Paper – Download

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 selling and marketing.

In true SXSW fashion the attendees were very vocal online about the content and session.

There was a lot of interest by attendees to get a copy of this presentation and we aim to please. A couple hours after Umberto was done with the session, we posted the slides on the InsideView Slideshare account and the response was amazing! The great people at Slideshare noticed and we got added into their Business and Management Spotlight.

InsideView Launches Social Selling University to Provide Comprehensive Education for Sales Professionals, Driving Sales Productivity Through Social MediaWorld’s Top Sales Experts, Social Media Pundits Unite for Launch of First-of-Its-Kind Education Initiative

Today Social Selling University officially launches as the first program to educate sales professionals on how to leverage social media technologies and methodologies to increase sales productivity and drive revenue throughout the entire sales cycle. The first-of-its-kind program instructs sales organizations, consultants and in-house teams about selling to the modern and socially-connected customer — Customer 2.0 — and offers both an on-demand curriculum and live workshops. The program is open to all sales professionals starting today.

Social Selling University’s (SSU) actionable content and interactive learning modules have been developed by expert instructors, including experienced thought leaders, authors and analysts. Classes are designed for all levels of sales professionals, covering a broad range of topics including entry-level social media instruction on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, best practices for managing personal online brands and how to accelerate the sales cycle by leveraging recent business events, social conversations and social relationships (aka “social intelligence”). The program’s instructors will provide expert advice to sales management on how to best incorporate social selling into their organizations, and educate sales professionals on how to utilize social media platforms to drive greater sales productivity.

“Social media is fundamentally changing the way sales professionals navigate the sales cycle — what worked two years ago, doesn’t work anymore because socially savvy buyers know far more about products and companies than ever before,” said Barbara Giamanco, Talent Builders CEO. “Fortunately, SSU levels the playing field by teaching sales executives, managers and reps how to interact with and sell to the modern consumer. These social sales practices breed relationships and eliminate the need for cold calling.”

Who should attend SSU?
Any sales professional — from account rep to sales team leader, director or executive — who CANNOT answer the question: “What is social selling and why does it matter to my sales organization?”

Isn’t social media for marketers? Why does social media matter to sales people?

• Social media marketing grew 50% in 2010 to $1.2 billion, and analysts predict that 2011 is the “year of social integration” for businesses. Social CRM has crested as the new and understood platform for sales and customer service.

“Salespeople who fail to leverage social media do so at their own peril. The problem is, many don’t know how,” said Jill Konrath, best-selling author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies. “Thankfully, technologies exist to allow any sales professional to gather and share relevant buyer information and achieve greater sales success. Social Selling University is a great place to start and continue learning what’s possible in the new world of social selling.”

As part of the initiative, SSU will host a Webinar series, featuring a panel of industry thought leaders to answer questions about how to use social media for sales, including:

March 3: Barbara Giamanco, founder and CEO of Talent Builders, Inc
March 8: Koka Sexton, director of Social Selling University
March 10: Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
March 15: Patrick O’Malley, social media trainer and consultant
March 17: Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0
March 22: Pelin Thorogood, principal, Schulman + Thorogood Group.
March 24: Anneke Seley, CEO and founder of Phone Works and coauthor of Sales 2.0
March 29: Dan Schawbel, managing partner of Millennial Branding, LLC
March 31: Tibor Shanto, principal, Renbor Sales Solutions

On March 8, SSU will host a live, complimentary workshop following the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where industry thought leaders will discuss the best practices for leveraging social media to increase sales team performance. Visit SSU’s registration page for more information about the agenda, speakers or sign-up information.

“Social media has completely changed the world of selling, and if you and your organization want to stay relevant, then you need to learn how to use these tools before your competitors,” said Dan Schawbel, the author of the number one international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future. ”Social Selling University is the first program to teach salespeople how to use Facebook, Twitter and other social tools to generate ready-to-buy leads and build relationships with customers that result in long-term business growth.”

About Social Selling University
Social Selling University is the world’s first initiative dedicated to teaching the sales profession how to put social media to work within their sales processes and organizations for greater productivity and revenue, through online instruction and in-person workshops. SSU staff includes dozens of the leading experts in social media, sales and Social CRM, and provides courses made specifically for executives, managers and representatives. Founded in 2011 by InsideView, SSU is the leading source of education about using the social Web to increase sales productivity through social intelligence. For more information, visit www.socialsellingu.com.

LinkedIn recently launched a new application in LinkedIn labs called InMaps. InMaps is an insight into who the major connections, bridges and influencers are in your network. People with bigger dots and their names in larger fonts have more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters.

At first glance the application just looks like some eye candy that lets you see your network in a different way but after further investigation, InMaps could be a great tool for a sales person that wants to maximize their social selling productivity. Every dot on the InMap besides being another point of connection also provides intelligence on how influential a specific contact has within your entire LinkedIn social graph. Paying special attention to your key influancers should be a goal in your sales profession since these connections will be able to get you introductions and spread information to much larger groups of people.

A sales person looking at their InMap can quickly identify who their key influancers are and take steps to be more engaging with them and leverage that relationship for additional referrals to new connections. This becomes more prevalent as your LinkedIn network grows but this can work if you have as little as 100 connections. Using my InMap as an example I was able to find one person that was connected to dozens of people across my network. Identifying who you are connected to in LinkedIn and how they are connected to the rest of your network gives you some great insights.

Social media has become a defacto marketing tool for any organization, but it’s incredible how scared sales managers and teams still are of letting their sales reps join the sales 2.0 party. But the reality is, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself…oh, and not closing more and larger deals faster than ever before.

Social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn (as well as the entire blogosophere) are target-rich environments to find new opportunities and leads, and engage with prospects in a powerful and effectively intelligent new way. So what is holding companies back? Of the dozen or so objections I have heard, my conclusion is: FEAR. Fear that their sales team will not produce results, fear that the sales team will waste their time online and fear that their sales teams will do or say something online that will tarnish their brand and kill sales. The fact of the matter is, NOT letting sales professionals engage on social media is detrimental to the bottom line for the reasons below.

In addition, it always surprises me when a company pushes off any new technology based on such fear, and masks it with an excuse. Businesses that embrace innovation and new tools have a great track record of becoming leaders in their spaces. Social media is no different as it applies to sales professionals. There are very simple reasons that all of these excuses should be thrown away and sales people given a green light to social media engagement with leads and prospects.

Fact: Social selling produces results

Sirius Decisions Inc. recently said in a webinar that in most sales cycles, customers are now in control. Customers are doing 70 percent of the research online that drives the buying decisions, and then contacting a specific vendor for the purchase. The old concept of customers calling into a company to be ‘sold’ something is quickly vanishing. Since more of the buying process is happening online in discussion groups and social networks, sales people that are paying attention and, in most cases, are already a member of these networks like Twitter, will capitalize on these conversations and identify new opportunities much earlier than those without such social involvement.

Myth: Social Selling is not a time-suck

If your sales team is wasting their time online or talking to friends on the phone most of the day, stop now and reevaluate your employees. If you have talented and hard working people on your sales team, then you shouldn’t expect them to behave any different with using social media throughout the sales cycle. If your sales team is already using Twitter or other networks for personal use, they will be able to adopt a sales methodology around the same tools to produce revenue.

Myth: ‘Social Selling’ is too risky

This is an objection that comes up more often than any other, and it’s a common misunderstanding that a business can be destroyed in the matter of one status update or blog post. But, I don’t agree with this any more than I would with the idea that a poorly sent email to a customer can do the same. There was a point in time where sales people didn’t have access to email for that exact reason, but can you imagine not having email as a tool? The same will be said about social media tools in 10 years – those who embrace it will be in the drivers seat, and ultimately win out.

It all comes down to “letting go” and enabling your sales teams to be more effective. Social Selling is not fit for every sales person, but I’d bet you have a strong percentage of your sales team that would welcome the opportunity to drive opportunities through social tools in addition to traditional phone and email tactics.

This post originally appeared on Sales2.com where InsideView has regular contributions. Sales 2.0 is a site dedicated to the improvement of sales 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.

A recent report by eMarketer shows why social media networks like Facebook should be a focus for more sales and marketing alignment. The fact that companies are spending $3 billion on Facebook means that sales teams should be trained on the use of Facebook as a tool for lead conversion and prospect engagement. Most companies are giving a large amount of resources on building their professional Facebook page and following it up with additional dollars from their budgets to drive new customers to those pages. Sure many companies are spending money on Facebook ads to push people to other landing pages off the network but it’s been shown that developing a solid presence on Facebook and keeping people in the network converts higher and helps spread WOM marketing. The same strategy should be used in other networks.

”2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.” “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

Sales teams should be encouraged to interact with the company Facebook page, commenting on updates and sharing news from the company page. The community you build on your Facebook page is something both sales and marketing should be very conscious of and nurtured. Even though LinkedIn is a professional network and we pointed out LinkedIn is Facebook with a tie,  different departments should be engaged on Facebook. Marketing for the general awareness and branding of the company and sales teams for the engagement of  new prospects wanting to know more about their product/service. Company support and services should also play a part by answering questions and providing updates based on best practices.

This means that companies should give up some control and designate Facebook ambassadors to the pages from sales and support and give them Admin access to post under the company name. Here are 10 reasons for using Facebook for your business. Since building a community on Facebook around your company should be the goal, you need to seed the community with people from your company that can help people from all sides of the sales cycle. Very few companies have done this that I know of and with the proper training (Sales 2.0) a sales person can quickly identify potential prospects and then generate new leads. Though Facebook is the origin of some of these new prospects and you should continue engagement with them on the platform, knowing who the prospects are that interact with your Facebook page and then bringing them into your CRM will give you the metrics needed to show it’s success. The same goes for current customers, if it’s primarily answering questions or fostering a relationship for continued business, sales people should be taking more of a leadership role in how social networks are managed.

Sales Intelligence and Social Selling Become The New Must-Haves
InsideView’s rapid growth in 2010 was driven by increasing numbers of large and medium enterprises that are adopting sales intelligence and social selling as core capabilities to improve their sales execution.

In 2010, sales organizations were looking to work smarter, not just harder. Gaining critical insights on not just who to call, but knowing when and why to call customers, sets apart top performing sales organizations from competitors. InsideView now boasts more than 60,000 end users. New customers include Avaya, AIG, Riverbed Technologies and Workday.

InsideView continued to invest substantially in R&D by doubling its development team in 2010. InsideView maintained its substantial lead in product innovation, with several new capabilities including:

• Social Profiles: View rich social profile information from dozens of social networks to gain unique insights into customers and prospects
• Social Search: Search for contacts on specific social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to better target prospects and engage via multiple channels
• Social Connections: Tap into existing relationships to leverage connections into a prospect or customer via the Facebook and LinkedIn APIs
• Social Mentions: Access a filtered, relevant stream of social media mentions to understand what is being said about customers and prospects
• Automated Watchlists: Automatically track and monitor key CRM accounts to ensure that potential opportunities and threats are never missed
• New User Interface: Access key insights with fewer clicks to streamline the most common B2B sales activities such as lead qualification and pre-call research

InsideView also won numerous awards for product innovation and market leadership:

• JMP Securities Hot 100 List of best privately held software companies for the second time in a row
• ZDNet CRM Watchlist for third year in a row
• The only sales intelligence and social selling vendor included in Gartner’s Social CRM Magic Quadrant

InsideView’s success was shared by its customers. InsideView customers, including Adobe Omniture Business Unit, Brainshark, Inc., BigMachines, Inc. and Unisfair, dominated 2010′s Sales and Marketing 2.0 Awards for innovative use of technologies to drive sales and marketing excellence.

Ecosystem Grows Substantially

InsideView’s ecosystem of partners grew exponentially in 2010 to more than 50 partners. This growth is a testament to more companies looking to get more out of their CRM investments, by investing in sales intelligence and social selling initiatives.

The top companies in Sales Effectiveness and CRM Implementation selected InsideView as their primary sales intelligence partner, recognizing the value InsideView provides in several key areas: increased sales productivity, higher lead conversion rates, higher opportunity win rates and rapid CRM adoption.

InsideView has also become the most popular and highest rated sales intelligence solution on all the leading CRM marketplaces and/or ecosystems, including:

• Most popular and highest rated Sales Intelligence application on the Salesforce AppExchange
• Most popular download on Salesforce ChatterExchange
• Most Valuable Bundle on NetSuite SuiteApp
• Most popular Sales Intelligence application on SugarCRM SugarExchange
• Only Sales Intelligence vendor in Oracle’s CRM On Demand Inner Circle
• Highest-rated app for Microsoft CRM 2011 on the Dynamics Marketplace

“InsideView’s growth in 2010 is a proof-point that enterprises of all sizes are increasingly looking to sales intelligence and social selling as must-haves, in order to compete and win,” said Umberto Milletti, founder and CEO of InsideView. “InsideView enables enterprises to quickly increase sales productivity and get measurable ROI. We are extremely proud of our success in 2010, and look forward to continuing our rapid growth in 2011.”

There is an interesting and very relevant diagram in the book UnMarketing that talks about the Hierarchy of Buying. Read the book, do some other research and it should be confirmed that cold calling is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to finding new customers. The book is positioned towards social media marketing but the lessons still apply to sales leaders trying to stay on the cutting edge. In the age of Customer 2.0 you should have people coming to you in some form or another. Maybe its all word of mouth, lead generation or other avenues. If people are not talking about your company you have bigger fish to fry. Outbound calling to a person that has never heard of you or your product is just about as likely to buy your widget as they are the Brooklyn Bridge. You have to build trust.

Current customers are key

Getting business from current customers is usually the easiest since they already use your product. Unless you have done a poor job with the account or have not been able to keep up with their needs, you are generally in a good place with them. Current customers are a great place for referrals and can and should be leveraged to bring in new business.  At the top of the pyramid is where B2B sales teams should be focusing their efforts but it seems like they are aiming much lower on the scale.

This is why companies spend so much time making sure they have great reviews and working with customers to write these reviews.

Why are you still cold calling?

90% of consumers trust peers based on a Nielsen poll, and less than 10% trust an unknown source. Cold calling is perceived a lot like phone spam. If customers want information they will search you out or at least leave digital breadcrumbs of questions or conversations that you can find and then engage.  As I said in the Sales Predictions for 2011, sales teams that are not already focusing on social media will, social selling training and tools will be a focus.

Selling is based on trust and you can spend the time (a lot of it) building it with people that have never heard from you or you can move further up to leads and prospects that you have some trust with.  This is why sales people have been hearing so much about the value in nurturing campaigns and social media marketing, but little of it seems to apply to anything a sales person can influence. That’s why Sales 2.0 is growing in popularity, sales people can have more relevant intelligence on prospects and become great resources to their customers by using social media and sales leaders see this as a priority.

Some of the best businesses in the world were built from cold calling and that was because they found a way to exploit a technology (phones) using a team of people to saturate a market of people that loved to talk to other people. That hasn’t changed a whole lot in the past few years other than the fact that the phone is no longer the best technology to use because decision makers have less time. Sales 2.0 savvy teams will be the next wave of revenue generators for companies, starting in the technology space and moving like a wave through different industries. Social selling will hit  resistance and may not apply at all to some companies (I can’t imagine which ones but I’m sure they exist).

Have you started using social media tools in your sales teams?

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.

Earlier this week, I participated in a very engaging panel at the Digiday: Target conference in Beverly Hills. The topic: “Social Media Targeting: How do brands really make friends?” My diverse panel also included Arnie Gullov-Singh of Ad.ly (@arniesingh), Teresa Basich of Radian6 (@teresabasich),  Dilip Venkatachari of  Compass Labs (@4caffeine) and our awesome moderator, Michael Vos of Appssavvy (@michaelvos). The conference focused on exploring the massive shift from buying content to buying audiences…and naturally our job was to dissect and provide some color on the role of social media in accelerating this shift. In other words, how do we engage the new social customer (aka Customer 2.0), given the control of a company’s brand is rapidly transitioning from corporate marketing departments to the customer-to-customer conversations taking place via social media!

In my experience, whenever people talk about reaching audiences with social media, inevitably the conversation revolves around B2C marketing. B2B organizations have been slower to embrace the growing power of social media. So one of the points I stressed during our panel is that the distinction between B2C and B2B tactics is narrowing considerably. Given the convergence of our business and personal lives – complements of social media – we are fast approaching the nirvana of 1:1 marketing. B2B and B2C are converging into a new paradigm of targeting each and every consumer/customer directly in a targeted way – and a new customer engagement model is emerging: Business-to-Individual (B2I).

However, just talking about targeted engagement is bit like putting the cart before the horse. What happened to the age old wisdom of listening before talking? It is true: social media gives brands (i.e. companies) the opportunity to converse with their audiences (i.e prospects) instead of trying to distract them with interrupt-driven old-school advertizing models. But to properly take advantage of this opportunity, companies first need to really understand what matters to their prospects. They need to listen to their prospects to gain perspective and color on their needs and wants. Engaging today’s socially-savvy customer requires a 360 degree view of the prospect that incorporates recent business events, social conversations as well as social relationships – in other words, social intelligence. And since prospects know that they are dropping so many breadcrumbs, they are beginning to (rightfully) expect their suitors to pay attention to these cues. Yes, you’ve got it, today’s crazy-busy prospect demands the right inbound pitch – whether in the form of an ad or a sales call or a tweet – at the right time in the right medium.

The aphorisms “Know thy customer” and “Go where your customers are” still hold true. The “shift to buying audiences” starts with understanding your audience and going where your audience is…one customer at a time. Social media gives us the unique insights as well as the pervasive new medium to listen to, connect with and engage each customer. It is time for the B2B professionals to catch up to their B2C counterparts in taking advantage of social media as the new customer engagement platform and start tapping into social intelligence to drive revenue.

“Pelin Thorogood, principal at Schulman+Thorogood Group. Helping B2B companies drive ROI through creative go-to-market planning and focused marketing optimization.”

editor note: I was notified via Twitter that the number of votes does not indicate who wins. Sounds like the judges make the final call. Either way, we appreciate everyone that voted for us and gave us the highest number of votes by a whopping 53%.

From the “Find Prospects” tab you can switch to “Contacts List” and plug in the title of the people you are looking for. After setting up the search to narrow down your results based on territory or other factors, choose to only show contacts on Twitter. Sure this may be a small list of people compared to all available but knowing who is actively on Twitter will pay off down the road because you can start to engage with them outside of traditional email and voice mails. This was recently posted about in Real World Social Selling as a key reason one of our customers continues to use InsideView.

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

Dreamforce is T-Minus 5 days 00 hours 44 minutes and 40 seconds as I write this post. The InsideView office has all hands on deck getting the last minute details worked out and preparing for the orchestrated chaos that is about to unfold. Every department has a role to play in the largest event we attend every year. Sales is polishing the presentations and following up with customers that will be attending, Marketing created some great graphics all around our theme of “See your leads in 3D“, created the microsite Dreamforce in 3D, and just received our shipment of the largest TV in the world that will be given away to a Dreamforce attendee.

As much fun as I know Dreamforce will be, it isn’t without a small level of stress that I’m sure every vendor has wrapped around worrying about all of the little things that could go wrong. Luckily I haven’t had any nightmares about the event but I would be lying if I said I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night from some lucid dream about the show and making a note about things I need to be sure to follow up on.

GlanceNetworks must be going through the same stuff since they posted this picture on there Twitter profile showing their Dreamforce final checklist.

Tradeshows especially the ones as massive as Dreamforce require a lot of planning and even more faith once it comes to execution. I started this week searching the intertoobs for blog posts about Dreamforce and trying to see what everyone else was writing about the event that could help Dreamforce veterans as well as the newbies of the show.

Dreamforce 2010 Resources

14 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Dreamforce by our friends at Marketo gives a great overview of what to expect at Dreamforce and even offered to give away a VIP prize to one of their fans by paying for their trip.

InsideView created an online paper all about Dreamforce that shows some of the best news on Twitter about the event and highlights some of the most interesting posts by Dreamforce fans.

CRMFYI aka. Jeff Grosse has a collection of blog posts around Dreamforce that go back a few years that are still relevant.

Arkus has a great post about the Top 10 reasons to go to Dreamforce. Although I think that #2 should be replaced by InsideView will be there, the #1 reason is spot on with education and going to this event expecting to learn more about the cloud and how Salesforce will impact your business in a wonderful way.

Dreamforce on Facebook:

Dreamforce: Tips for First Year Attendees was written by Force Monkey and has some excellent tips for people new to the Dreamforec experience.

7.) If you know certain people are going to be at Dreamforce, and you really want to meet them — make arrangements in advance! With Chatter, there’s no excuse to not reach out and make those connections now! Ask if they can get together with you for breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, drinks.

I just happened to stumble upon an #awesome collection of blog posts by Paul Young that feature an Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce. He covers everything from food, dealing with the over-stimuli of the show and even touches on the bathroom issues.

• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 1
• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 2
• The Insider’s Guide to Dreamforce, Part 3

Let’s not forget about the Dreamforce parties! After running around the event, collecting SWAG and listening to some of the best thought leaders in CRM, you get a chance to unwind and have a few drinks courtesy of some of the Dreamforce sponsors. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you look at the Dreamforce Party Directory.

Dreamforce Foursquare

For all of you geolocation addicts like me, you will probably be checking into Dreamforce from your phones. There are more venues being created daily it seems but there is only 1 Dreamforce 2010 – Moscone Center.