Sales productivity tips using Sales 2.0

1. Warm Leads in Cold Weather
Umberto Milletti, Co-Founder and CEO, InsideView
As the economy worsens, inbound sales opportunities quickly dry up and
sales teams are forced to become increasingly proactive. Just picking
up the phone and calling a sales target is generally not enough, but that
is particularly true during the economic times we are currently in. People
move around, layoffs happen and even entire companies disappear. In
order for your sales teams to strike up promising conversations in a tough
economic climate, they need to know who to call — calling somebody after
they just blogged about being laid off could lose a business relationship
permanently. Updated inside knowledge of what is going on with the com-
pany and the person you are selling to can make the difference between
beginning a relationship and ending one.
While cold calling is incredibly impersonal, and rarely successful, it is a
necessary part of the sales process. In a cold economy though, it be-
comes much more challenging, and the need for a warm lead is signifi-
cantly increased. Fortunately, social sites across the Web are hot with the
latest activity on a myriad of subjects and industries, and in the process,
are publishing enormous amounts of rich, useful content for sales teams.
In fact, much of the most insightful and timely content for sales people on
the Web can only be found via social Web sites.

2. Distilling rich, up-to-date insights from the social Web is a prime example
of how sales 2.0 solutions are revolutionizing the sales process. With the
Internet as the new business platform, now all stakeholders — prospects,
customers, salespeople and marketers — can connect, learn, plan, ana-
lyze, engage, collaborate and conduct business in ways that were not
even imaginable a few years ago. Sales 2.0 is about leveraging the wealth
of information and interactive possibilities on the Web to accomplish cus-
tomer engagement rather than just customer-data harvesting. Today’s
“smarter” and better informed prospects are requiring sales people to be
better versed both in their products and their prospects, rendering sales
2.0 a two-sided interactive process. It is no longer just who you know
that will make business deals happen but “what you know about who you
know” along with “when and where you should know it.”
By now you’re probably thinking,
“This is all great, but who has
the time to spend scouring the
social Web?”
And, you’re right — there is just too much stuff to research randomly
on your own. But sales 2.0 is also about increased productivity and
speed, and its emerging tools accomplish this by intelligently utiliz-
ing the massive amount of resources on the Web.
444 De Haro Street, Suite 210
San Francisco, California 94107 Customer relationship management is a fundamental element of success
Main: (415) 728-9340 in an economy like the current one, and the leads you have need to be
Fax: (415) 728-9350
good ones. While the world outside gets colder, remember that in a Sales
www. insideview.com 2.0 world, warm leads are waiting for you on the social Web.
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