Sales intelligence can identify connections between colleagues within an organization and prospects to reveal opportunities for meaningful sales contact.
People buy from people. But how do you find, nurture, and build key referral connections? You find a quick and easy way to connect the dots between the person you want to meet and someone you know well. Easy? Not as easy as most salespeople would like.
You can save a ton of time with key sales intelligence resources. I love this post by Koka Sexton at InsideView about the importance of connections to drive referrals, create new sales opportunities, and truly engage your sales prospects and customers. (Do your homework and you can ditch the sales pitch.)
“Selling to people has not changed dramatically over the past hundred years. You have a product or service, identify a pool of prospects, and then discover how many of them you can help. Sure that’s oversimplified but boiled down, these are some of the key components. What has changed over the past few years is not so much the overall process but the details of how to sell to people.
Most sales people do not have the opportunity to walk into the offices of their prospects, see the awards on the wall, photos on the desk and bag of golf clubs in the corner. These were the details a salesperson would use to break the ice, find some common interests and start a conversation. Without these insights, a salesperson is left to his own devices and would be left with being just another sales guy with a pitch. Get beyond the contact data of someone’s business card and get to know your prospect as the person and not just a contact in your CRM.
People buy from people. Business is done not necessarily with the company with the best product, but more often with the salesperson who has found a connection with their prospect through a shared interest or a referral.
More than 90 percent of executives never respond to cold-call sales or unsolicited emails.
Sales intelligence can identify connections between colleagues within an organization and prospects to reveal opportunities for meaningful sales contact. By arming sales professionals with actionable information from social sources, media outlets, company information and changes in business dynamics they are more likely to trigger sales. Sales professionals can quickly identify relevant connection points and build profitable, trusted relationships with prospects and customers that win more business and drive revenue.
‘It’s like watching an Ancestry.com commercial’
You’ve seen the commercial, a site that starts connecting the dots between you and your family and then builds a map of your entire family tree. It lets you see your connections to people you may never have known existed just by following the trail of connections through out history.
How can that apply to B2B sales?
- What if you could identify connection across multiple social graphs and include people you may not be connected to through a social network?
- How valuable would it be to have social streams from your prospects so you could see the updates, pictures and interactions they share?
- Would it be beneficial to be able to follow these people so anytime they were mentioned in the news or online you would get an alert so you could show you are listening?
For salespeople and sales leaders, understanding how to sell to people not contacts will be the difference between hitting or missing your number.
InsideView has been a lifesaver for me. You quickly uncover insights, people connections, and relevant, current data to prepare you for every call and identify referral relationships. My team and I are freed up from hours of research and asking, “who knows whom”? Take InsideView for a trial run. I guarantee your time will be well spent.”
Free InsideView Webinar: “Get the Trash Out of Your Funnel”
Register for Joanne’s InsideView Social Selling Webinar
Tuesday, October | 10 a.m. (Pacific) Check your local time here
Learn how to:
- Calendar at least three meetings with qualified sales prospects in 7 days
- Realize what matters in getting the “right” people in your funnel
- Find out why the shape of your sales funnel matters
- Identify the damage with a clogged sales funnel
Click here for more information and registration
About Koka Sexton
Koka Sexton, Director of Social Strategy at InsideView, is one of the most recognized social experts in the technology industry. With 10+ years of sales experience and a passion for social media, Koka is the perfect evangelist for social selling, a topic that he promotes through national speaking engagements and InsideView’s newest social media endeavor: Social Selling University.
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