One of the biggest impact of social media on Businesses is the large amount of data that is being created every day.
This tsunami of data is having, and will have, a dramatic impact on both those who sell and on those who buy.
I will start by talking first about the impact on those who sell, and I will do so by telling you a real life story.
19. Smart Connections – Identify entry points My Employer Target Company Gerald S. Casilli Board Member -InsideView Xactly Corporation (Board Member) Also Works at Team Previous Employer Target Company Cory Ayres Former, Salesforce.com Xactly Corporation Director, Corp Sales Now Works at Daily Summary Alert Acquisitions Connection via Greg Volm Xactly, Inc – Xactly to Acquire Centive Xactly Corporation today announced it has acquired the Lowell, MA-based company Centive to become the software industry’s largest …. Smart Agents – Delivered via Email Smart Records – Close the loop
20. “Sales people using Sales Intelligence generate 17% more revenue than their peers who do not” Source: The Sales Intelligence Challenge, CSO Insights, Jan 2011 Winning
25. Today 2pm (Napa): “Getting a Competitive Advantage through Social Selling” Twitter: @umbertomBlog: umberto.insideview.com
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Good afternoon, and thank youI am the CEO of InsideView, and I’d like to talk to you about
One of the biggest impact of social media on Businesses is the large amount of data that is being created every day.This tsunami of data is having, and will have, a dramatic impact on both those who sell and on those who buy.I will start by talking first about the impact on those who sell, and I will do so by telling you a real life story.
The story begins in the mid 80s, at the dawn of what would become the longest and biggest bull stock market in recent history. The big trend was the globalization of financial markets (just like today the big trend is the socialization of internet users), and that globalization created an skyrocketing amount of bond and equity data.Stock brokers and bond traders made trading decisions by analyzing multiple streams of financial data and news feeds from information providers like Dow Jones and Reuters.
But the growth of financial data quickly overwhelmed the traders’ ability to analyze it, and make trading decisions
Michael Bloomberg has a better idea: let’s use technology to aggregate information from all these different sources all in one place: the Bloomberg terminal was born and intelligence entered the financial industry in a revolutionary new way.
Very quickly bloomberg terminals became a must-have for investment professionals. Knowing how to use a terminal became a job requirement, and traders moving to a new company demanded a bloomberg terminal as a requirement for joining the new firm. Financial professionals had a new intelligence mandate.
Bloomberg terminals changed the finance world, replacing human data aggregation with technology-aided analytics. By making traders more productive, Bloomberg has built a $7B/yr revenue company, generating over $2B/yr in profits.
Fast forward 20+ years, and I see a lot of similarities. Yesterday’s traders are today’s sales people, who are doing human aggregation and analysis of business information from a large number of disparate sources. It’s the combination of user-generated business data through social media (blogs, twitter) and social networks, tens of thousands of business publications now online, and the open government and open disclosure movement that forces companies and govt entities to publish a lot of their business data]
This business data is not just information about executives and their employers, it is also customers and prospective buyers leaving Intention Trails all over the internet
People go into sales because they like people, not systems. They are relationship people, and traditionally they have achieved customer intimacy by spending time on the golf course or at the local restaurant. Sales is clearly a relationship business which requires knowing your customers, yet we don’t have the time for these kind of interpersonal interactions.
[find better visual]But over the last 10 years financial constraints have shifted sales people away from traveling, replacing in person interactions with web conferences, phone calls and emails.How does a sales person get to know a customer that they can’t see, and don’t get to spend social time with? It comes right back to intelligence.
[replace this with one of the panelistsMake the visuals more appealing.]The answer is clearly social media. Our customers have left an information trail that sales people need to use to educate themselves on the people and companies they want to do business with. The trail is a combination of news articles, blog posts, twitter streams, facebook profiles, youtube videos and press releases, and real-time LinkedIn changes. Our interests are out there for people to see. Our companies share their strategies, needs and challenges openly on the web like never before. Visual: social media is the answer. Type of info available about people in social media.
Is your sales team ready for this new world?They need to be, because this new world brings unprecedendent opportunity to be more relevant and intelligent about our customers and prospects
[sugarcrm screenshot]And by integrated I don’t mean a link that launches your users into some third-party database, or to facebook or twitter where they will spend the next 5 minutes searching for information, or playing mafia wars. I mean integrated in every lead, contact, account, opportunity that they look at. Right in the same screen, so they don’t waste time searching, or even worse
[Add charlie sheen image]…when this intelligence is integrated into, say, sales - companies will become more successful, and sales people will be happier and more productive.
Good afternoon, and thank youI am the CEO of InsideView, and I’d like to talk to you about
In summary1. Traditional high volume, low relevant approaches (email blasts, cold calls) will continue to decrease in relevance as they are drowned by all the other noise/big data. We need to figure out how to become more targeted and relevant. If your lead conversion rates disappoint you, it’s a good sign that you are not being relevant.
2. You have an unprecedented opportunity to have more relevant and intimate customer conversations. Your best sales people have already figured this out, give them tools that make them more efficient. The other sales people are still spraying and praying. Give them tools, and a structure that helps them be more relevant. And for god’s sake stop incenting quantity over quality (“how many dials did you have today”) – how about how many qualified opportunities did you create this week, or how well do you know your prospects’ business – let me inspect.
[call to action slide]3. You can now have this, for free. We are announcing today this will be available for free to all users who upgrade to 6.2.1
[Thank you slide with my twitter handle and my blog umberto.insideview.com]