Modernizing Your Approach to

Sales & Marketing Intelligence

Static company and industry information is losing its ability to drive engagement with today’s leads. To win, you need a modern approach to gathering and sifting timely, relevant insights that can both energize and improve the effectiveness of sales and marketing.

You need a modern playbook to win over today’s modern buyers. Here it is!

MODERNIZING YOUR APPROACH TO SALES & MARKETING INTELLIGENCE

Today’s Sales and Marketing Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Update Your Toolset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Get Insights, Not Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Modernize Your Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

TABLE OF CONTENTS

It’s a simple fact: If you don’t have a targeted, relevant, timely message for today’s busy buyer, you’re going to lose. Simple company and industry data isn’t enough.

TODAY’S SALES AND MARKETING CHALLENGE

BUYERS ARE MORE INFORMED THAN EVER BEFORE

Buyers have access to more information about you and your competitors than ever before. They don’t need salespeople to inform them, to teach them, or to help them make decisions. Instead, unbiased information is just a click away. A colleague who can give an honest review of your offering is a click away. Every news report about your company is a click away.

Buyers are smarter and faster, and have the entire Internet, social networks and professional networks, to help them find information about and help them understand the solutions to their challenges.

YOUR OLD TACTICS NO LONGER WORK

Relying on yesterday’s tactics for your sales and marketing —cold calls, blast emails, generic messaging—is becoming less and less effective. Only 10% of executives even consider responding to cold calls or unsolicited emails. Even less respond to cold approaches that use canned messages or broad pitches that may or may not even apply to them.

PINPOINT TARGETING IS YOUR BEST METHODToday’s marketing and sales pitches must be targeted, timely and relevant.

This requires a different approach from what you’re used to, and it requires new tools and modern tactics. You need more insights about specific leads, not just information about their company.

TARGETED A message that resonates with

the person who receives it.

TIMELY Using insights that are

current and top-of-mind.

RELEVANTCapturing attention with specific points that apply to the target’s

business and situation.

You’re probably already using different types of tools to help your sales and marketing teams. Tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Salesforce Automation (SFA) and Marketing Automation have been staples of the workplace for the past decade or more, and are great for tracking and executing your activities.

UPDATE YOUR TOOLSET

TIMES HAVE CHANGEDTo inform your teams, however, and give them the insights and information they need to really connect with prospects, leads, and customers, the services available have been fairly static over the past several decades. Yes, decades.

In that time, the Internet has exploded and entirely new data channels have appeared, such as:

What drives home the need for a modern approach to gathering and sifting through these modern data sources? Of the three services listed above, LinkedIn is the granddaddy, yet was just launched in 2003! That’s only one president ago!

Blogs and other non-traditional news sources have enabled information to flow like never before, and have facilitated the publishing of niche, focused content.

Professional networks, like LinkedIn, have become huge sources of insights for sales, marketing, and human resources.

Social networks, like Facebook, now provide vast amounts of contact information, from likes and affinities and relationships, to vacations and hobbies and purchases.

Social media, like Twitter, enables people to connect, learn, share news and information, and communicate in entirely new ways.

SPEED IS THE BIGGEST BARRIER

As mentioned above, there are tens of thousands of data sources that contain snippets of valuable information on leads. But, who has the time to visit them all? Who has the time to research the social media streams of dozens of contacts, then check their professional profiles, then read their last 10 blog posts, and combine and sift through everything to find nuggets of wisdom? Oh, and then do the same for their managers and colleagues?

That’s the challenge:the data is available, but it’s all separate, and not pulled together in one place for fast access of only the relevant, actionable pieces.

Again, you don’t need information, you need insights.Sources from hundred-year-old content companies with publishing legacies and infrastructures may provide reams of information, but you still need to spend hours finding the insights and turning that into an action plan.

FIND TOOLS THAT YOUR TEAM WILL ACTUALLY USE

With modern sales and marketing tools being wildly effective and widely used, it’s common for sales and marketing to live inside these resources on a daily basis. Try to find a salesperson who isn’t constantly referencing their CRM system. Try to find a marketer who doesn’t push every campaign through a marketing automation system.

They don’t exist. Or, if they do, they won’t for long.

The challenge now is not in finding and using tools that facilitate the sales and marketing process, it’s in finding tools that increase both productivity and effectiveness—and that your team will actually use.

What you need are modern tools to pull insights from today’s data sources, and those insights must be an integrated part of the systems your sales and marketing teams are already using daily to do their jobs.

Before you can get a handle on gathering insights from the myriad sources, it’s important to understand the difference between “insights” and “data.”

GET INSIGHTS, NOT DATA

In the sales and marketing context, data is vast, unstructured, and disconnected. If you’re just gathering data, you’re not thinking about what’s relevant, what’s recent, and what’s important. Data is knowing that General Electric has 300,000 employees, has interests in capital, consulting, and manufacturing, and that their second quarter earnings were up 8 percent.

That’s all recent, but is it relevant and important to you and your lead?

Conversely, insights are bits of information that increase your knowledge about a lead or customer, improve your engagement with them, and put you ahead of your competition.

Knowing the above mentioned data about GE is mildly interesting, but if you’re focused on selling turbine components to GE, you’d be better off knowing that they just announced the first sale of their new model. Knowing further that they sold it to ABC Energy, that the GE product manager used to work with your COO, and that they expect to sell 300 of the turbines before the end of the year is an incredibly valuable set of insights.

TIMELY, RELEVANT, AND IMPORTANT

The really valuable business insights these days are posted and exchanged on social networks, professional networks and across thousands of niche industry and domain blogs. If you’re still relying on business information services, nearly all of that takes place outside of your view.

So first, you need to have access to those insights, and then you need to quickly identify and take advantage of what’s relevant and important. Even more, the service you choose should put those insights directly to work marketing to, selling to, and reacting to the needs of your targets.

Teams are typically overwhelmed with data coming from various sources, killing their productivity instead of helping make them more efficient. More data isn’t the answer, but having the data boiled down to what’s important is. More analytics isn’t what you need, you need more insights to help you become better, faster, and more efficient.

Today’s business decision-makers shouldn’t be looking for just more data or more analytics to understand that data, they should be looking for more ways to actually use the data day-to-day to run their business.

USE YOUR NETWORK

Typical business information services are also very disconnected from today’s modern social and professional networks. Finding public Facebook connections or Twitter followers or LinkedIn connections is where you can really find interesting opportunities to create warm introductions. However, doing that manually for more than just a few leads is unreasonable. Tools that can do that instantly and automatically for every lead in your database is where the networks start to become immensely useful.

It can also work in reverse, where you look at your friends’ and contacts’ connections to see how you’re connected to a target or a target’s colleagues. Again, you can do this for a few leads, but it’s a productivity killer to do it manually.

Why is this so important?Because only 10 percent of executives respond to cold calls or unsolicited emails, while 84 percent will engage with a sales person when they are connected through a friend or colleague and offer relevant value.

But those insights are only useful if you can find them.

INTEGRATE WITH YOUR SALES AND MARKETING SYSTEMS

To truly increase productivity and efficiency, you have to pull all of these timely, relevant, important insights into your existing CRM and marketing automation systems so that you can create hyper-targeted campaigns and build granular lists using related triggers.

Manually identifying enough targets to create a usable list is unreasonable. You might be able to get a few dozen in a week. But creating specific filters that pull together exact target lists in seconds can really drive productivity. But having a standalone list is less than ideal. Once you know your targets, firing off a campaign via Marketo or building a call list in Salesforce should take a few clicks, not a few hours.

Modern tools that are tightly integrated with popular CRM and Marketing solutions exist. If you’re not using one, your competition probably is.

Business information sources with a publishing-industry legacy will always have a place. Like an encyclopedia, they provide a general service that offers mid-level information for research and planning purposes. You can determine, for example, how many furniture manufacturers are located in the Midwest and have revenues above $10 million, then decide how many salespeople you need to attack that market.

But that’s no longer enough to empower your sales and marketing efforts…unless you’re looking for a stale, generic, uninformed message with which to attack your target markets.

MODERNIZE YOUR APPROACH

WORK, INFORMED

InsideView provides the intelligence you need to connect with your target market and win their business.

To help you reach this insight nirvana, InsideView offers an incredible amount of business, professional and social insights using the most accurate, extensive database of companies and employees.

To help you find the best engagement opportunities, we monitor over 30,000 news and social sources to provide you with real-time insights on the news and social activity of your prospects. We even categorize the information based on relevance to you and alert you of key events.

To help you better connect, we build a comprehensive network of your connections from a collection of social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook and others. The result is a more extensive and usable network that is private to you and your colleagues, not your competitors.

START TODAY

Buyers are demanding relevance, and expecting sales and marketing people to know about them, their companies, and their needs before engaging. Otherwise, you’re wasting their time.

We don’t want to waste your time, so start now with a free trial. All you need is 2 minutes and an email address.

HERE’S JUST A TASTE OF WHAT INSIDEVIEW OFFERSTHAT BUSINESS INFORMATION SERVICES JUST CAN’T MATCH:

Do moreUse our extensive data and integrations to clean your data to improve marketing performance, identify and correct inaccuracies in your sales database, append information to incoming leads, and much more.

Access from anywhere, anytimeWith our mobile app, access data, insights, and connections while at home, on the road, or as you’re walking into your next meeting.

Connect through your relationshipsGet warm introductions to your prospects with our comprehensive network aggregated across multiple social, professional and contact databases.

List-building featuresBuild a list of quality prospects and then quickly target your list with custom filters based on business insights.

CRM integrationWe integrate directly with Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM, Salesforce, and SAP, not to mention Marketo.

InsideView AgentsBe altered to business insights that give you compelling reasons to reach out to prospects, such as company expansions, leadership changes, acquisitions, and financial updates.

You’ll always need your other business information services for finding high-level business stats, but that won’t help you close many more deals this quarter.

will.