Today I had the pleasure of participating in an international Webinar moderated by Jonathan Farrington. The topic: Sales 2.0. Audience members were asked an interesting question: Did they have a clear definition of Sales 2.0? I was surprised that 60 percent said yes. It became clear to me that Sales 2.0 has become an unstoppable international movement.
In today’s post, Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView shares how his company has grown as a result of Sales 2.0 technology.
Like most organizations, improving sales productivity is priority number one for our company. Marketing generates a good percentage of our small and medium business leads which then get turned over to sales for qualification. In the enterprise market, there is a higher focus on sales-driven prospecting. At InsideView, we are fortunate to be at the forefront of using business and social intelligence to drive sales productivity for our customers. And that’s exactly what we delivered for our own sales reps when we implemented InsideView directly within their CRM workflow.
Here are some specific examples of how our sales team benefited from the InsideView implementation:
- The inbound leads we receive daily are automatically enriched with complete company and contact details from InsideView. This process not only enables accurate routing of leads, it significantly improves lead-qualification productivity, saving the reps approximately one day each week. It also helps us to keep the Web-lead forms short, driving up submission rates.
- With InsideView’s Smart Agents™, sales reps receive real-time alerts to potential sales triggers such as upcoming business expansions, new product announcements, acquisitions, or leadership changes. Automated access to this intelligence, aggregated from social media and user-contributed and editorial sources, saves the sales reps many hours of precall research per day and enables timely and relevant engagement with the prospects. These insights can literally mean the difference between losing a deal (or not even being aware of it in the first place!) and catching a lead in mid air.
- Selling is still a relationship-driven business and cold calling isn’t very effective. InsideView’s Smart Connections™ helps the reps easily identify any relationships that exist between themselves and their prospects through colleagues, previous employers, and existing customers to improve prospecting effectiveness. Using InsideView, the reps identify the decision makers, review their social profiles to get to know them better prior to engaging, and leverage any relevant relationships to make their outbound calls a whole lot warmer.
I am happy to report that our internal implementation has significantly improved our win rates and more than doubled our call volume by streamlining lead -qualification, as well as precall research. And naturally, the reps are much more credible selling a product they use daily and believe in!
Full disclosure: InsideView will be exhibiting at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Nov 8-9 2010. This will be the first conference where sales and marketing collaborate to create higher revenues.
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