He was a man of ideals, and those ideals don’t have to die with him. While no one can fill the void he leaves, we can all take inspiration from his life’s work and step up our game.

We can all pursue our passions and our dreams a little harder.

We can all listen more closely to our inner voice.

We can all pick ourselves up more quickly when we stumble.

We can all think about design and aesthetics a little harder.

We can all focus more on our users’ experience.

We can all work harder to keep products simple.

We can all build something insanely great.

We can all make the world a better place.

When the team’s MVP goes down to injury, the rest of the team has an opportunity to step up their game. I think it’s what Steve Jobs would want us to do.

Meanwhile, at InsideView we have continued to invest in our products and our people, growing our business at over 100% year-over-year.  To keep up with our rapid growth, we need to find the most passionate, competent and innovative employees.  I believe that many of you fit that bill, and I’m writing this open letter to invite you to join InsideView. You will find a fun, vibrant environment with very bright people, and an open culture that fosters collaboration and innovation.

We are passionate about our products and our customers.  Last month’s data.com announcement made it clear to me that D&B has given up on Hoover’s in the critically important sales & marketing ecosystem, and that customers will need to look elsewhere to find sophisticated sales intelligence. I believe most of them will decide that InsideView is their best path to productivity, joining scores of Hoover’s customers that have already chosen to switch to InsideView.

We are looking for talent in every part of our business and in several locations.  The positions include Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Content. Locations are in the field, at our San Francisco headquarters, and for our soon-to-be-opened Austin office (I love Austin’s entrepreneurial culture, and I see the opportunity for Austin to become a main hub for InsideView).

If you have a passion for innovation, customer success and are looking for a vibrant work environment, please email us at beyondhoovers@insideview.com for a confidential conversation. We’d also be glad to have you talk to any of the ex-Hoover’s employees who now work at InsideView, where they have found new opportunities to grow and delight customers.

We have just begun in delivering our vision, one where customer intelligence makes all customer-facing employees dramatically more productive. If you share my passion, we’d love to talk to you.

Umberto Milletti

CEO & Founder, InsideView

In today’s fast changing “social” world, the success of customer workflows have less to do with automation (the realm of SFA/CRM) and more to do with employee knowledge (the realm of information).

Enter data.com, an information layer on top of automation, to provide the information that customer-facing employees need to be more relevant to customers and prospects, more knowledgeable about the customer’s business and about key events, target accounts and market dynamics. InsideView has been evangelizing the information ROI for the last 5 years, and it’s great to have the validation of a market leader like Salesforce.com.

But data is not enough. It is not enough because raw data (phone numbers, email addresses, names & titles, company revenues and employee counts) doesn’t give us the insights we need to be relevant. It doesn’t help us with conversations starters, understand the key events at that company, what the key decision makers are thinking and saying, or tell us that it’s not a company we should be doing business with because they are running short of cash. That’s the type of intelligence that our users leverage every day to decide whom they should call, and more importantly what they should say. And that intelligence requires powerful analytics and relevance filtering.

The introduction of data.com is a step in the evolution of customer intelligence, and for companies that need more than data, we are excited to continue to be unique in providing the intelligence that makes customer-facing professionals truly productive, for Salesforce.com customers as well as for those who have chosen other CRM platforms.

For those who missed it, a brief recap of the cloud marketing panel this morning at All About the Cloud – I joined Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, and Appirio CMO Narinder Singh, for a discussion about how (and why) new cloud-based technologies and services aren’t just re-inventing  old-school marketing processes to optimize sales growth, but opening up a fast-growing business category – revenue performance management, or RPM.  Jigsaw founder Jim Fowler sat in as moderator.

(Brief aside: Fowler opened by throwing a curveball at each panelist — asking each to share a haiku that best captured their vision of cloud-powered business. Outflanked by executives of competing cloud-marketing companies, I defended the sales-side perspective: Salespeople know best, It’s about the quality, Not the quantity.)

So just what is RPM and what is its potential? Payne, Fernandez, and Singh, not surprisingly, shared the bullish long view. “It really works,” Payne explained. “Companies adopting RPM are winning their markets. And you’re not doing this, you can bet that your competitors are.”

I had one caveat: For RPM services to live up to billing, they need to better integrate sales teams and processes and avoid tilting towards the marketing sides of any organization. “Sales and marketing are far from being aligned in RPM. One of the worries I have is that while marketeers love intellectual things and data, most of our B2B revenue comes through our sales team. It’s easy for marketing people to get excited about things like lead scoring and other things without ever forcing themselves to talk to salespeople. So [RPM] really does have to be not just a marketing thing. More technology coming from the marketing side has the potential of distracting from the sales side.”

So what should traditional companies be doing to optimize revenue streams using some of the new tools? Fernandez went first: “Realize that the world has changed. You need to start to see the world through the eyes of your buyer – not your vendor – and your buyer doesn’t care about the cloud. They only care about a great customer experience.”

I followed up with “We talk too much about systems and data. The key thing is, buyers have changed their behavior. Are they picking up the phone for more cold calls and emails? No. You have to focus on what you’re doing to engage buyers in a relevant conversation. Give up the idea that you’re going to succeed with more calls and email blasts – it won’t work. Coversion rates will go down and down. Engage your prospects, earn the right to have that conversation. There has to be a shift here – and a realization that the old ways aren’t going to allow you to be successful.”

Last, the panel shared predictions about how the business models in this nascent category will likely evolve – I am seeing more freemium-based services having a clearer path to growth. “Pricing is changing”. “More freemium models will emerge. People expect to try and experience with stuff for free before they make a big financial commitment, and services with models like Box.net and Yammer I think will go forward. We should all think about what that means for us.”

Social technologies are breeding a new type of savvy marketing pro, tasked with reaching a more fragmented audience of customers, prospects and brand influencers than ever before. While B2C marketers have started to significantly crack the code, established B2B companies (as well as start-ups in the space) still have to catch up and embrace the “world of social” and reach their customers through channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

For many start-ups and young companies, the real-time buyer information that is shared and accessible across social channels – aka social intelligence – is the “golden ticket.” This data source delivers valuable insight about what customers want and need, but may not explicitly state as such, in their personal or business lives.

Deeper understanding of customer requirements not only helps sell existing products and services, but also provides a new perspective into industry voids for start-ups to further develop products and differentiate from the (often more established) competition.

While the social business tactics are alive and conversation within the “social business” trade is abundant, enterprises and many B2B marketers are embracing these tools at a glacial pace. This opens a door for start-ups to quickly react to market demand, customer feedback and investor or advisor expertise by adopting new – and socially-focused – tactics to drive strong lead pipelines, customer satisfaction and overall brand success.

For early-stage companies, this social savviness typically starts with the CMO, since community managers are too expensive to bring in house, sales professionals are fully engaged in selling and the CEOs are busy driving business strategy.

Social intelligence provides a deeper understanding of prospects’ buying cycles.  These new insights increase sales team productivity by minimizing the time sales reps spend on “cold” prospects – and accelerate the sales conversion for “warm” candidates, leading to higher close rates.

Social media is moving beyond the B2C world. As big B2C brands like Southwest Airlines and Ford Motor Co. mastered the art of social marketing, B2B organizations must also recognize the fact that customers and prospects live hours of their daily lives online, conversing across social channels.

However, B2B social intelligence is more fragmented and niche than a “sexy” consumer brand, which makes the modern CMO’s job more reliant on listening and engagement tools (such as Social Media Monitoring and Social CRM), which provide the much-needed “personal” touch that notoriously lives within small businesses.

Since outbound marketing is deemed interrupt-driven and considered less effective by the customers, companies must find a way to improve the timing and the relevance of their messages. Want to know how to increase your marketing budget as a CMO? Show greater ROI through more targeted outreach.

For example, HR services firm TriNet found that talking to prospects at times of business change – i.e. new management, funding, expansion, etc. – drove unusually high response rates.  Social platforms gave the company timely and in-depth knowledge of these “times of change” windows. The result: An incredible 70 percent conversation-to-appointment rate for the sales team, simply by listening to and engaging with prospects based on social intelligence.

The social revolution is an important part of the ongoing transformation in the way marketing teams learn about, engage with, sell to and sustain relationships with customers and prospects. As savvy marketers are leading the adoption curve, recognizing social intelligence as a key driver to marketing productivity and business success is a critical characteristic to modernizing not only the CMO’s department, but also the business at large.

We’ve all heard the stories about the big deals closed on the golf course or at the steakhouse, but these tales are starting to belong more in episodes of Mad Men than in today’s business environment. Today’s sales professionals operate less from the fairway and more online and by phone. Indeed, CRM, email, and web conferencing have become the ubiquitous productivity portals for all customer-facing professionals. However, with the efficiencies and cost effectiveness of such virtual work platforms has also come a dramatic reduction in the actual relationship time needed to conduct the inherently interpersonal business of selling.

In the past few years, while sales has mostly ignored the social media revolution, the marketing and customer service functions have led the way in adopting and demonstrating the power of social media in engaging customers, especially as part of the social CRM movement.

What has taken sales so long to catch up, and what now needs to be done?

Learning From Marketing and Customer Service

Leading social CRM expert Paul Greenberg describes the socialization of business activities as “the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” Indeed, social media builds a two-way street with customers.

Visionary B2C companies like Procter & Gamble (Old Spice), Zappos and Diapers.com have executed effective strategies based on the idea of “delight” through social media, and with great success. B2B companies have learned from these B2C examples and are combining superb customer service with newly created social customer communities, resulting in significant cost savings and revenue increases.

Dr. Natalie Petouhoff — one of the top analysts in the ROI of social media in B2B customer strategies — cites everything from reduced call/email volume and SEO costs to increased customer lifetime value and lead conversion rates. And according to a recent study by Gartner, one-third of leading companies will extend their online community activities over the next two years “as customer awareness and use of social CRM for marketing as a back door to customer service increases.”

Customer service organizations are certainly leading the charge in recognizing the power of social media to give insight and measurement to their work, as well as bring their customer communities together. If social media is such an indomitable force in customer engagement, where is social media in sales?

Hey Guys, Wait Up!

While marketing and customer service have jumped on the social CRM bandwagon, the sales profession has mostly been watching from the sidelines, wondering what to do and how to do it. There are four main reasons for this lag:

• Salespeople are not techno-geeks. They view technology, at best, as an enabler — a tool for getting their job done — rather than something you experiment with on the weekends for the fun of it. Clearly, social media is more approachable and engaging than traditional enterprise applications, but a level of technical skepticism remains.
• Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them. Good salespeople are highly efficient in their use of time. It’s a benefit of years of being compensated for results. If they don’t understand how something is going to make them more productive and successful, they won’t do it, and no one has done a good job explaining why social media matters for sales. Considering the indication of some reports that sales teams generate upwards of 70% of their own opportunities without the help of the marketing department, the importance of engagement for salespeople cannot be overstated.
• Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow. CRM vendors have so far focused on integrating social media into their service and support offerings, and sales functionality has been mostly left to specialized third-party providers (see options on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Marketplace).
• Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them. If they are not being trained or given a managerial “green light” on social media, they are less apt to explore and implement it on their own. According to a recent study by OgilvyOne, while more than half of sales professionals thought that social media was important to their success, only 9% had been trained on it by their employer. As companies are starting to think about how to best leverage social media, sales training will undoubtedly be near the top of the list.

Selling Has Always Been Social

Despite these reasons for the lag, salespeople are in the business of understanding, relating to and engaging decision makers. Short of an expensive in-person meeting, what could be better than having real-time insight and intelligence into a prospect’s Twitter feed, Facebook profile, or even their music interests on Pandora?

Fortunately, the wave of social customer interaction education is starting to form, with initiatives like the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management’s Social CRM Program and Social Selling University leading the way. Just as early and effective adoption of the web gave competitive advantages to forward-thinking businesses (Amazon, eBay, Cisco) in the 1990s, in this decade, companies that effectively leverage the social media wave to improve their customer-facing business will thrive while those who don’t will stall.

Have you implemented social strategies into your sales force? If so, please let us know in the comments. If not, we’d also love to hear your thoughts, challenges and/or successes as well.

I now understand Marcel’s conflict, given today’s announcement that Salesforce.com plans to acquire his company for $326M! Congratulations to our friends at Radian6, a great team that deserves its great success (and a valued customer).

As I think about the implications of this acquisition I see three important trends:

1. The entry of salesforce.com in the marketing arena, for the first time with meaningful capabilities. Benioff referred to this as the dawn of the MarketingCloud, which I’m sure got the attention of players like Eloqua (see Joe Payne’s blog post), Marketo and the many social media monitoring players, as well as the big boys at Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
2. Salesforce.com, just like IBM and others, is recognizing the importance of social media aggregation and analytics. Social media and social networks are creating a “big data” problem for enterprises, which creates great opportunities for companies like Radian6 (for marketing), Lithium (for service and customer communities) and InsideView (for sales) to bring filtering and analytics technologies that extracts the signal from the noise. The market doesn’t want more business data, it wants more relevance extracted from the massive amount of data that is created every day.
3. The market values relevance over data. Just compare the $150M Salesforce.com paid for data provider Jigsaw, vs. the $326M it paid for technology provider Radian6 (for similar revenue streams).

This acquisition also raises a few questions:

1. What does this mean for the health of AppExchange and the Salesforce.com ecosystem? What’s the impact to social media monitoring companies that are dependent on the salesforce.com install base, or even more concerning, built on Force.com?
2. Are Microsoft, Oracle, SAP able to respond to Salesforce.com’s speed with their own products, partnerships or acquisition?

Would love to hear your take and your comments.

If you’ve read any of my other pieces on Social Media B2B, you’ll know that I live by the Listen, Connect, Engage model. It’s simple and highly effective for leveraging social intelligence to improve sales productivity and customer engagement success. Today, in the third part of the Social Selling Throughout the B2B Sales Cycle series, I will focus on the lead qualification process, where sales organizations can achieve massive productivity gains by quickly and accurately assessing the quality of inbound leads as sales-ready (or not, as the case may be!).

By tapping into social intelligence, the modern and savvy sales professionals can access more personalized prospect information, in less time. Through social selling techniques, sales teams tap highly relevant information to quickly qualify and rank inbound leads, driving a more efficient sales cycle, thanks to real-time business information. So how does this intelligence indicate hot or cold leads in order to focus the sales team and increase the relevancy of sales messaging?

Social Media: Selling’s Stethoscope
Not all leads are created equal – even inbound ones. Sales professionals have long been tasked with finding, vetting and ranking leads according to their readiness and ability to purchase. This information is the heartbeat of the sales opportunity, but has traditionally been buried in internal corporate documentation. However, social media proliferates such information as prospects’ share valuable insight through their social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Sales professionals who understand how to connect with Customer 2.0 can easily access these details to streamline the lead qualification process. The key here is to identify the right decision makers to connect with by leveraging social connections, and listen to the prospect before engaging them with a compelling message. For example, social profiles indicate where an inbound lead falls in their corporate hierarchy and qualification to make business-purchasing decisions. Other validators like corporate updates on sites, including LinkedIn, highlight news of company acquisitions, expansion efforts or product initiatives – all of which equate to vital information about purchasing readiness.

One of the common lead qualification challenges is that the inbound leads are often are not the decision makers. They are typically lower down in the organization, responsible for research on potential solutions. The trick is of course getting to the decision makers as soon as possible. Here is a step-by-step look into how social selling can expedite the lead qualification efforts:

• Determine where the inbound lead falls in the corporate hierarchy by validating title / position
• If they are not the decision maker, identify decision makers within the prospect’s company
• Leverage your social connections to identify a common SENIOR connection between you and the decision makers
• Tap into social intelligence to listen to what the decision makers care about / talk about
• Learn enough about your prospect’s current business challenges and needs to convince the common senior connection to agree to an introduction
• Convert the lead to an opportunity!

Another common lead qualification challenge is that inbound leads typically come with a single contact. By leveraging social intelligence, sales professionals can identify many additional connections into the prospect for ‘expanding communication threads’ and qualifying the prospect’s likelihood to purchase faster – and moving the deal through the pipeline faster thereafter.

Results
Lead qualification, driven by social selling techniques, improves productivity across the sales organization. As social media expedites the lead qualification process and provides real-time information about a prospect’s likeliness to buy, lead qual teams assess the quality of the inbound leads more quickly and accurately. This enables the sales teams to focus their efforts on those inbound leads that are likely to convert into opportunities, and eventually into customers. In the next post of my series, I will discuss how social selling can expedite opportunity management, driving sales productivity and ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

The impact of social media on brand monitoring, customer service and marketing is a hot topic these days, but there has been less discussion about one of the biggest areas of social media impact: B2B sales. The opportunity to capitalize on social media in sales is clear: if Customer 2.0 leverages social media to inform their purchase decisions, why not tap into the same well to inform our sales engagements? As customers evolve, so must the process through which we sell to them, right?

Engaging today’s socially-savvy customer involves far more than a grasp of the basic facts and figures about their companies, and requires a broader view that incorporates recent business events, social conversations and social relationships – in other words, social intelligence. B2B organizations have been slower to tap into social intelligence to connect with customers compared to their B2C counterparts, but this is beginning to change. Sales professionals are starting to seize the power of social intelligence to augment “what they know about who they know” with “when and where they should know” it to ensure they engage the right people at the right time with the right message.

For example, take TriNet, a successful and rapidly growing HR services firm that delivers payroll HR compliance to small and mid size businesses. TriNet has found that talking to prospects at times of change (e.g. new CEO/management, new funding, expansion, significant changes in hiring, etc.) critically drives their sales team’s success. Timely and in-depth knowledge of trigger events at their target accounts gives them compelling reasons to start conversations. With an incredible 70 percent conversation-to-appointment rate, TriNet has experienced substantial success.

So how can B2B sales professionals most effectively leverage new social selling techniques to increase sales productivity? We advocate a three step process, based on the following principles:

1. Listen to your prospects and customers, so that you can understand their unique needs and business challenges,
2. Connect with them through networks that are common between you and your prospects, and then
3. Engage with them in a relevant conversation, anchored on how you can help your prospect improve their business.

Listening to the social conversations surrounding target accounts and their decision-makers can help sales professionals determine the best individuals with whom to begin a dialogue. Tuning in to these conversations can also provide peeks into the personalities and work styles of these prospects – something that is often visible in social media profiles.

Listen to prospects: Gain professional insights into changes in buyers’ environments
Change often triggers more change. As in the TriNet example, certain trigger events, such as leadership changes, new product launches, new office openings or mergers and acquisitions, can lead to buying opportunities for new products or services. While we can observe some of these trigger events through traditional news sources, social media adds an insider’s perspective that helps sales professionals get ahead of the curve. Social insights can mean the difference between losing a deal (or not even being aware of it in the first place!) to “catching a lead in mid air.”

Once you know who to call and what to say once you get him or her on the phone, you need to find the best way to connect with the prospect. Sales has always been about who you know, but social networking now allows you to connect with a broader range of people than you were able to reach without social media. When you take advantage of Facebook or LinkedIn, you can easily discover how you are connected to influencers at your target companies, and how to initiate “warmer” introductions with them. Armed with unique insights on how your products and services can address your prospect’s current business challenges and opportunities, you have what it takes to engage prospects in relevant conversations that are likely to result in a rich engagement – and hopefully a win.

Over the next several posts, I will explore effective social selling tactics for every phase of the sales cycle. I will also share success stories from both large and small organizations. I have broken the sales cycle into four stages, both because many companies organize their sales teams around these stages and staff accordingly, and also because different social selling tactics may be more appropriate through each of these sales stages:

1. Lead generation (better known in the sales organization as prospecting) focuses on discovery of new businesses to target, as well as getting “in” existing target accounts. Knowing the right people to call, and making those calls highly relevant, certainly improves prospecting odds.
2. Lead qualification is about assessing the quality of inbound “leads” to quickly and accurately classify them as sales-ready (or not). Determining where the contact falls in the corporate hierarchy is helpful, as are any insights that validate the opportunity. Speed and efficiency are key for lead qualification success.
3. Opportunity management is about turning an opportunity into a win as quickly and as often as possible. Relationships certainly matter, as do a keen awareness of trigger events that may impact a prospect’s decision.
4. Cross-sell and up-sell are about selling to existing customers by assessing any new or increased appetite for your portfolio of products and services.

As I prepare to discuss these topics, I’m interested in listening to what you have to say about social selling. What are your success stories? How have you implemented social selling in your organizations? What challenges did you encounter in doing so?

In my last post I defined social intelligence as a new form of intelligence that delivers a much broader view of the prospect. I discussed how in-context access to this intelligence will significantly boost sales productivity, enabling more successful outreach and engagement with the socially-savvy Customer 2.0. In this post I will provide three tips for implementing intelligence into your sales workflow (more specifically, directly into your CRM) and will elaborate on the effectiveness and applicability of social selling as an integral part of a business’ Social CRM strategy.

Intelligence Tip #1: Listen before you talk
Customers have increasing ownership of the conversation, but Social CRM levels the playing field for businesses by empowering engagement with customers within their preferred channels.

Social selling technologies and methodologies allow sales reps to:

• Monitor what is being said about and by the customer
• Analyze the relevant conversations
• Automatically associate the findings with existing customer records
• Use these insights to guide customer engagements going forward.

For example, by monitoring the blog posts and/or tweets of a prospect, the sales professional will not only be informed about what matters to the prospect, but also get a glimpse into their personality and style. Rich with insights about the prospect’s urgent business needs and challenges, the sales professional can then engage the customer at the right time with the right message – either via the traditional email/phone channel, or perhaps even with a response to their blog post or tweet. Of course, there is a lot of noise out there and not a lot of time to “listen,” which makes the use of technology, to identify what’s relevant to your sales team, critically important.

Intelligence Tip #2: Find a reason to call
How do you find a good reason to call your prospect? Social CRM allows companies to aggregate both official and unofficial social information about customers and prospects without any effort from or distraction to sales reps. Relevant content from customer communities can be automatically pushed into a CRM platform, enriching static prospect data with social intelligence. Intelligent monitoring of social conversations enable sales organizations to gain visibility into potential sales triggers such as upcoming business expansions, management changes or concerns about existing vendors that would otherwise be not available through more traditional news sources.

If you’re a systems integrator, for instance, you might want to watch target companies for contract awards or planned implementations of products in your market. If you sell litigation support services, you may want to monitor for news related to SEC or FTC legal investigations. Of course, any unofficial chatter about how your prospect isn’t satisfied with a competitor’s product or service will also give a great reason to call to showcase your differentiation!

These insights may be the difference between losing a deal (or not even being aware of it in the first place!) to catching a lead in mid air. This in-context intelligence, presented within the CRM workflow, drives sales productivity and accelerates deal velocity.

Intelligence Tip #3: Power the customer community
Companies have a very difficult time standing on the sideline while others discuss their business (I speak from experience!). However, adding input or marketing propaganda into customer conversations can interrupt the conversation and cause customers not to share their opinions, or maybe even lash out at you for the sales-y pitch. For example, most LinkedIn and Google groups I engage in have a no sales pitch policy that is strictly enforced by the group leaders. And specifically because of this policy, there is a great deal of open dialogue between the members about companies, products, business trends as well as best practices.

Social CRM cultivates business and empowers the customer community by:

• Allowing customers to openly discuss a product or company – whether this includes problems, compliments or general inquiries prior to purchasing
• Uniting happy customers so that they can influence, help, and nurture each other
• Connecting the business with unhappy customers, enabling rapid response to make things right vs. have issues spiral out of control and affect the opinions of the others in the community
• Providing sentiment analysis on aggregated conversations that take place in the relevant communities – helping companies notice signals of readiness (pdf)
• Notifying when conversations are hot for engagement, or cold for simply monitoring

What will your company do to easily tap into and make sense of this highly valuable social intelligence to accelerate the sales cycle? How will you leverage new social insights to deepen customer relationships and drive business success? Hopefully these three tips will set you on the right path.