Discussing the future of CRM–You can help!

We want to share an exciting opportunity for you, our loyal blog readers, to join and invigorate the conversation about CRM. InsideView is participating in the Dreamforce conference (sponsored by Salesforce.com) ”panel picker,” where potential speakers submit ideas and the community votes on what panels they would most like to see at the conference in November. Our proposed panel “Translating Social Media into Sales Intelligence,” aims to foster a discussion about the enormous potential within social media to enhance CRM applications. We think more people deserve to understand the socialprise and we can’t think of a better way to get people talking about it.

So, let’s get social about socialprise — please vote. (We tell you how below.)

To Vote:

1. Go to http://dreamforce.ideas.salesforce.com/, and click “Login” in the top left.

2. Log In–if you have a Salesforce.com account, use that. If not, make a free trial account (it takes about 30 seconds, and you will receive your user name and password via email.)

3. Read and reflect on the glory that is four pages of ideas and comments, all about CRM and sales–and how professionals can adapt the latest technology and practices for a more “with it” CRM.

4. Vote: We titled our contribution “Translating Social Media into Sales Intelligence.” Right now it’s the first one you’ll see on the page.

Article from Umberto Milletti on the ‘The ROI from Socialprise’

We wanted to let you know about a recent article that Umberto Milletti, InsideView CEO, wrote about ‘the ROI from the Socialprise.’ The article offers insights into how and why the sales industry is increasingly shifting to employ socialprise techniques and provides specific examples of the benefits that companies have experienced from utilizing socialprise technology.

The piece, which was published by Sales 2.0 and CRM Today, can be found here and here. And for those of you who can’t bear to leave the InsideView blog, not to worry, we’ve copied the full text below.

The ROI from the Socialprise
By Umberto Milletti, CEO InsideView

The amount of rich, unstructured data living on social Web sites continues to expand everyday due to the popularity of the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. This has the potential to offer salespeople a more updated, personalized view of leads than standard CRM applications alone can grant. Salespeople can leverage the social Web to unearth rich insights that result in getting better leads, faster; but it’s not easy and depends on the salesperson to be his or her own filter for what information and what networks deliver the right information at the right time.

For businesses, the problem has been applying a salesperson’s intuition across a lot of data and “making sense” of the constantly changing, unstructured information living on social Web sites. But fresh strategies and tools are making it possible for companies to mash up data with business search and intelligence applications, allowing them to collect, scan and sort social data to their advantage. My company, InsideView, has coined this new development “Socialprise” – the mash-up of social tools with the enterprise. Socialprise applications are making it easier for companies to leverage the social Web to help grow their business and increase ROI from applications that exist only within the enterprise walls.

Be efficient with your time
A key element to a successful salesforce is their use of time: how much they spend researching potential clients and updating customer databases, as well as understanding when to contact a lead. It shouldn’t take a significant amount of time to identify the right contact within an organization or to prepare for a call – the window for making a successful sales call can be very short. While pre-call research is essential, it’s the actual conversation that brings in the business. By strategically making use of the abundance of constantly updated, personalized customer data across the social Web on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, ZoomInfo, etc. – salespeople can improve their timing and time saved.

The data should come to you
CRM applications are filled with a wealth of sales management information, but that data is rarely utilized to stimulate more business. We’ve all seen the power of RSS feeds and systems, such as Google Alerts. Today, there are far more detailed, sophisticated systems that can be integrated with CRM applications and then deliver highly targeted, automated information alerts for salespeople. Imagine how many more leads you could generate if you received a notification every time a previous client took a new job or a company you’ve been chasing for months just announced record earnings. Getting that critical information to be sent directly to your salespeople as it’s announced guarantees they can make a sales call faster and with the most current information about their target.

ROI from the Socialprise
We have worked with a number of companies who have reported a significant ROI from integrating Socialprise technology with their CRM applications. Two of the key categories in which clients have benefited are productivity (time/cost savings) and close rate (opportunity quality.) Below are a few examples:

1) Productivity (Time / cost savings)
• Fortune 500 computer security provider saw a 33% decrease in named account research across a pilot group of 20 inside sales reps over 12 months.
• An online personal assistant company saw a 200% decrease in pre-call research time over 12 months.

2) Close rate (Opportunity quality)
• Closed More – Overall close rate increased 200%

• Sold Higher – Deals involving VP/SVP increased 80%
• Sold Faster – Average sales cycle decreased 10%

It’s time
Intelligently aggregating information about sales targets from the social Web should be a standard activity for all sales forces. There is just too much valuable data out there to ignore or stay wedded to an every man for himself approach. Companies that are merging relevant data from the social Web with their sales management systems and automatically receiving relevant updates about their sales targets have a significant competitive advantage over others. That advantage will only increase as these companies continue to mash up new Socialprise tools with existing CRM applications, while others around them are left waiting to get into the party.

An Interview with Umberto Milletti, CEO InsideView

Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView  was recently interviewed by Jeff Pedowitz, from The Pedowitz Group as part of their iGNITE® Demand Generation Series. The conversation was part of their series on ‘Cool 2.0 Demand Generation Technologies That Work‘ and focused on how companies are leveraging intelligence and content from multiple sources to develop meaningful relationships with customers and prospects and drive sustainable revenue.

Umberto was chosen to be part of this speaker series because of his expertise on the subject of how Web 2.0 technologies can be utilized to significantly increase demand generation. During the conversation, Umberto discusses the historical roots of the development of socialprise technology, the advantages that social media can now bring to demand generation efforts and some of the customer success stories that InsideView has witnessed.

You can hear the full interview here

Advantage Enters the Socialprise

We’re very excited to announce that Advantage has selected InsideView to enhance lead generation in their sales and recruitment efforts. Advantage is a global talent services firm that provides middle-market and Fortune 50 clients with the tools to find employees with high motivation and the right skills and experience. It’s a great company, and we’re thrilled to be working with them and having them explore the powers of the socialprise.

A portion of the sales team at Advantage has already begun to use SalesView and we’re proud to say that it has led to an increase in close rate from 10% to 50%! They’ve also reported seeing a steep decrease in pre-call research and pre-qualification time.

It seems safe to say that the benefits of socialprise technology are quickly growing on Advantage. James Zagelmeyer, Executive Vice President of Advantage noted, “We have experienced 100 percent adoption by our sales team in a short period of time and envision SalesView becoming a core part of our day-to-day sales efforts.”

You can read the full details of the announcement here.

A Little “Help” from InsideView

For the support staff, each day brings an infinite myriad of support scenarios ranging from “how do I…” to “why won’t that…”

And with such need, it’s perhaps the perfect time to introduce a new feature in the InsideView application. We call it “help.” No it doesn’t stand for anything like “Human Enacted Learning Procedure” (although that did make runner-up in the acronym naming contest) – but rather a usage scenario and use case write-up a la Salesforce.com.

For example, you have already accomplished the basics of adding companies to your watch list and now feel the need to assign your list or yourself to a territory. In the top right corner lies the “help” link. Click it.

A new window pops up (assuming you are kind enough to allow the pop-up window to appear). In this new window is a categorical arrangement of various help-ful topics. You can either choose one of the categories to search OR go search-engine style and do a search.

Searching for “creating territories” we get a list of results. And right there as the first result is “How can I set up my territory?” And if you didn’t notice, helps us explain why we chose to use a free-floating pop-up window… so you can leave it up as you follow the instructions : )

So with pop-up window open, I can follow the instructions to get what I wanted done.

Now granted this little feature isn’t going to solve the worlds hunger problems, but it should go a long way in giving you some level of empowerment for the major and minor tasks that you need done. And of course, if you can’t find what you want with help, we are more than happy to answer your call or email.

The Inside View on InsideView

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.