sales intelligence « workstreamer BLOG

Archive for the ‘sales intelligence’ Category

Having the Relevant Business Information Needed to Act

By Suaad Sait December 20, 2010

Last week we talked about Sales being a team sport. They are no longer the “sales team,” they are part of YOUR team. Sales is the driving force of company – it’s how we make money. Sales awareness and acquiring and sharing business information that helps spur new business is becoming and more a priority for more than just the sales department.

It’s not just about availability of information and increased collaboration, however. Sales 2.0 is also about the ability and authority to make actual decisions at the point of insight. It’s one thing to know, and it’s quite another to act.

As a recent Gartner report projected, by 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. That’s pretty bad – just having the right information puts you ahead of the class.

But on top of that, Gartner anticipates that by 2012, collaborative tools being deployed by savvy salesforces and companies will also have enabled a shift of traditional management decisions further down the chain as cross-communication and business information becomes more targeted, relevant and useful. I’m thinking salesforce.com might have read this same report….Chatter and now ChatterFree….

What Gartner is saying is that this is an evolve-or-die situation, in no uncertain terms. Non-hierarchical processes will win. You need to have the right information, and have the authority to wield it.

But that’s scary, right?

What makes such a paradigm shift less intimidating is, again, precise, useful and readily-available information and contextual awareness not only for sales professionals, but also, importantly, for the entire openly collaborative and communicating company — across departments and hierarchies.

Well-informed roles will make well-informed decisions. The reason the kinds hierarchies Gartner critiques have existed until now is because information had always been concentrated at the top.

Now, the right business information can be made available to everyone, democratically, with one-click tools that deliver up-to-date information at the point of a decision.

For example, a sales professional may be working on successfully closing a deal with a prospective customer, but accounting could have awareness of that customer’s problematic credit history, or a recent financial filing signaling distress. As sales professionals focus on moving the flood of productive leads through the funnel, that kind of information which may not be available to them directly is crucial in indentifying the deals that can most doggedly pursued, and it needs to be communicated across the company.

Likewise, a sales professional could be courting a customer that HR realizes a new employee used to work with, a connection that may valuable in closing the deal. An awareness of the activities across departments becomes essential, a shared business intelligence that isn’t confined to individuals but made useful throughout the company.

The right listening and business information platforms are key to establishing and effectively fostering a culture of sales as team sport, with informed and empowered roles that are authorized to make real decisions and thereby meaningfully move the needle on closing deals.

Do you know who is one the “HOT” deal list at your company right now? Are you sitting on information that could accelerate a WIN?

No Comments »

TOPICS: business intelligence, new information economy, sales intelligence, social business

Sales is a Team Sport – Everyone Has to Be In the Game to WIN

By Suaad Sait December 16, 2010

The most important aspect in sales used to be lead generation, which meant identifying and connecting your prospective customers by any means necessary.

Thankfully, the tools and technologies of today’s “sales 2.0” environment have largely alleviated the most burdensome and inefficient methods of casting the lead gen net, killing the cold call (thank goodness) and allowing sales professionals to effectively target the most promising new customers through better information and communication.

Information empowers, cuts inefficiency, and increases the relevancy of sales professionals’ efforts, likewise increasing their effectiveness and the company’s customer base.

The growth of technologies to enable marketing to do a better job of lead generation has enabled a better top of the funnel effect for both inbound and outbound marketing. We need to apply that same level of innovation and information empowerment to the rest of the sales funnel and its various touchpoints, increasing communication and awareness across the company to help close deals and share relevant information. In the same way we have increased precision and relevance for lead generation, we now need to foster the necessary analytical and coordination culture to secure the follow-through and victory.

What does that mean?

It means giving everyone in your organization the information to understand and help by enabling them to proactively listen to the target prospect, customer or partner.

Such is a shift in understanding to recognize that within the company, sales is a team sport. It used to be that marketers brought volume to the top, sales vetted and sold through to TQL’s, and management came in for a bit of superhero work at the very end (a combo of POC and glad-handing).

Today, as a prospective customer begins to move through the sales channels and further down the funnel, a wide variety departments and roles beyond the sales force necessarily need to be aware of the acquisition. This is not only because they may have valuable insights and potential relationship networks to help close the deal, hedge any potential conflicts or identify possible synergies within the company’s activities, but also simply to better serve the customer, whose needs and expectations have themselves changed.

Sales, of course, doesn’t end with lead gen identification, or even the acquisition of the new customer, but is rather a continuous effort to best serve.

“Sales” is now a core competency across any organization, no matter the department.

At workstreamer we believe that all business professionals need a holistic view into the companies with which they interact, because all functions – whether that’s marketing,sales, bizdev or customer service – now permeate across traditional lines.

Is Sales a team sport in your company? If so, we’d love to hear how you are teaming up to WIN!

1 Comment »

TOPICS: business listening, sales intelligence, social business

Listen Up! The number of the day is 20,847

By Amy Hawthorne August 11, 2010

“Greetings! I am the Count. They call me the Count because I love to count things. Today I’ve been busy counting the number of companies workstreamer users are listening to. I’ve been counting for hours now and I’m finally ready. The number of the day is 20,847.”

WOW, workstreamer users are now listening to more than 20,000 companies! Did the Count count your company today? Are one of your prospects or competitors listening to your company for an edge?

If you are already using workstreamer, are you listening to your customers? Your competitors? Your own company? If you have not yet created your workstreamer account, get to gettin’! It’s FREE and you’re missing out. You may just find your next conversation starter, information you need to position yourself against a competitor or insight into your customer’s new strategy (opportunity for an upsell).

Think we’re missing something? Not getting everything you want? Add the missing pieces. Once you are in workstreamer, click on a company you want to contribute information to. In the right sidebar you will see a ‘Contribute’ link, click it. Add anything we’re missing and within a business day or 2 you’ll start to see updates from what you contributed.

No Comments »

TOPICS: @workstreamer, business intelligence, business listening, sales intelligence

The Art of Listening

By Suaad Sait August 5, 2010

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.” – Bernard M. Baruch

In my mind, Listening is both an art and a science. We have tools-a-plenty that provide the “science” of listening. Yammer, LinkedIn, Workstreamer and Quora are all excellent platforms for listening for insight of one type or another to name just a few.

Recently, I’ve been focused on trying to develop a set of behaviors that will allow me to get maximum value from the time I spend listening.

Time spent Listening

Although I consume lots of information during the day, I don’t consider most of it “Listening”. Listening means tracking a stream of information flow that can yield high value insight – but only when that insight is non-obvious in the context of that information stream.

For example, content directed at me specifically (emails, conversations, phone calls, texts) do not represent listening opportunities. In those scenarios, I’m explicitly supposed to get the context. If I can’t figure it out, it is the fault of the sender. I shouldn’t have to be artistic in my interpretation.

Another example of non-listening is one-way mass media. Television is a terrible place to try to listen for insight. If everyone is hearing it, it’s not worth listening to.

Listening to understand what matters

The Art of Listening certainly revolves around understanding what matters. I have a twitter feed for references to my company. The other day someone by the name of Jarrett tweeted a complaint about content on our home page. My first reaction was to restructure the content to remove the offending video. But I’ve heard how much people like the introductory video before. What’s going on? Looking at the Jarrett’s twitter feed, I discovered that he was a frequent user of our products but that he did not realize that there was a better way to log into our site rather than making his way through the splash page each time. Link provided – problem solved.

Listening for the scoop

There is nothing better than finding a diamond in the rough through the Art of Listening. So much that passes by is old news or fluff. But occasionally you can catch a scoop before the crowd discovers it, and use that to your advantage. The key is to be sure you are listening to the feeds that insight might originate in. Call me geeky, but I like to listen to job postings from prospect companies and from competitors. At my previous company, I saw a job posting advertising for someone with a skill set in our company’s product. And we hadn’t sold anything to that company yet. Bingo! I also like to see what kinds of job requirements are listed on our competitor’s job postings. Just a little window into their product, technology and strategies.

Listening for the back-story

One of my favorite listening posts currently is a website called Quora. While Quora falls into the Question and Answer site genre, it has done a fantastic job in attracting extremely knowledgeable experts around many subjects that I am interested in. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn about the key decisions that successful software company executives made early in their companies. Quora is a perfect place to listen for those kinds of back-stories. A recent question posted was: What was PayPal’s most important strategic decision early on in achieving widespread customer adoption? And sure enough, several answers we provided by some of the earliest and most successful Pay Pal executives.

Understanding where you can hear the real back-story, find the scoop, or figure out what really matters are all key aspects of the Art of Listening.

Where and what are you listening to? And, how much of it is noise vs. information you can act on?

No Comments »

TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, sales intelligence

Honk if You Love Google Alerts

By Amy Hawthorne July 8, 2010

Imagine this – you’re driving down a busy street and you hear someone honking their horn. Are they honking at you? Or is the teenage girl next to you on her phone texting and having a hard time staying in her lane? Or maybe it’s the old man driving 30mph in a 45mph zone with his blinker on? Whoever the target is, you’re all looking around to see what’s going on.

That’s how I feel when a Google Alert arrives in my inbox. Has something just happened? Is it me (my company) or about me? I must stop what I’m doing and look for it. Turns out, its not always about me. And actually it seems like my alerts were less about me and more about…I’m not sure what…

So for the month of June I collected all of the Google Alerts about workstreamer to see how many REALLY were about us. Here’s what I found -

22 Google Alerts for workstreamer
9 were actually about workstreamer (our company)
13 were not
at least 2 things were not picked up (Inc.com and Forbes.com)

That means about 59% of the alerts that come in are just unrelated noise, like the random horn honking for someone else. YIKES! Here’s a few that got sent our way…

UK Operations Development – Project Manager for Packaging Pet Food …
By knowledgebase
the role entails Delivering the Pet Food Pilot workstream of the wider packaging change programme, which involves: • Facilitating ongoing NWT meetings to track progress • Facilitating ongoing supplier interactions with NWT • Refining… …
CREW VACANCIES.COM – http://www.crewvacancies.com/

EASi Adds Drill-Down Link to Reports Making Audits Easier
FOXBusiness
Equity Administration Solutions, Inc. www.easiadmin.com set the standard in stock plan … IFRS 2, Performance Awards and WorkStream process automation. …

So while it definitely is cool to be alerted when something new goes online about you, do you want to be honked at when its not? I guess that’s up to you.

My new experiment for July – workstreamer vs. Google Alerts.

P.S. For those of you who have ever been in the car with me you know that most of the time the honking is really for me!

1 Comment »

TOPICS: business listening, sales intelligence

NOW STREAMING: Facebook Posts and Website Traffic Data

By Jason Morio July 6, 2010

In our eternal quest to provide you with a one-stop shop for business-related news and information, I’m happy to announce that we have two new post types available, fresh off the barbeque grills from the holiday weekend.

The first is a daily capsule of wall posts from a company’s official Facebook page. We filter out all the noise and randomness from comments and other users so you only see posts coming from the actual company. Here’s a quick screenshot of Monday’s post for National Instruments:

Keep in mind, not every company has an official Facebook page (yet) and those that do have pages do not always update them every day. On the other hand, some companies are very active on Facebook and post multiple times a day. Stay tuned for more insight later this month on which companies are “tone-deaf” in social media land. In the meantime, if you are following a company and we don’t seem to have their official Facebook page in our Company Summary section, feel free to help us out and fill it in via the Contribute link on the right hand side of the view for that company. Then we’ll start picking up Facebook posts as they become available.

The second new post type is a chart of website activity via compete.com. These posts will show up on a monthly basis and provide you with a year-long snapshot of the volume of web traffic to each company’s website. Here’s a sample post showing the growth in traffic to Hubspot’s website over the last year:

So how does this information help you? Well, it’s anyone’s guess as to what types of information a company will divulge on Facebook. But you may be able to get ahead on upcoming product announcements, events and customer service-related ongoings. For the website activity posts, the old “up and to the right” trend is generally a good indicator of a company’s interest/relevance/traction level. But depending on your company’s value proposition, you may be more interested in finding companies with spiky, erratic or declining trends in web activity.

Enjoy, and as always, let us know what you think. We heard your requests in the survey responses over the last few weeks and more of your requests will be showing up very soon.

1 Comment »

TOPICS: @workstreamer, business listening, its all about the data, now streaming, sales intelligence

Jobs Data: For More than just the Unemployed

By Jason Morio June 23, 2010

If you could track, understand, and correlate every bit of information emanating from a corporation, you would have a huge advantage when it comes to figuring out the prospects of that company.

On Wall Street, certain hedge funds are known to employ computer science geniuses for the sole purpose of developing algorithms that help cut through the news and data to find the most salient bits of actionable information. These “black box trading systems” make inferences on the fly and suggest trading strategies based on the context of the data they discovered. If you are a data geek like me, this kind of stuff is fascinating.

Imagine putting that kind of power in the hands of every corporate decision-maker and sales executive.

In Econ 101, we learn that jobs data is a leading indicator of economic strength or weakness. The stock markets gyrate with every jobs report issued by the government. And while we all appreciate the macro-economic implications, rarely have we had the opportunity to understand the power of jobs data at the micro-economic level. In fact, jobs data is a gold mine for those of us trying to figure out the strength, stability and even strategy of a company.

Listening for business growth
One of the easiest things to correlate from hiring data is business growth. Looking at the number of job postings for a specific company will provide you with trend insight as to when they are ramping up, where, and what kinds of resources they are bringing on board.

Another interesting aspect of business hiring is to look at the data from a regional or industry vertical perspective. For corporate strategists who need to make decisions about what region of the world to target, or which industries are the most desirable, aggregated and segmented jobs data might just provide the necessary insight.

Listening for corporate strategy
Even more insightful than the quantity of jobs can be the specifics listed in certain job postings. Consider this excerpt from a recent posting for Apple:

The applications division is looking for an engineer … tasked with creating the next generation application for manipulating media. … creating new user interfaces and allowing the user to manipulate content in new and exciting ways. … focused on helping to implement new and creative user interfaces.

Or how about a Director role at Netflix that points toward an international expansion strategy. The job posting includes the following revealing description of the position’s primary duties:

•   You will develop a deep understanding of the international considerations for Netflix, and will drive the Netflix team to clearly understand what work must be done, and in what order, to achieve international scale most quickly.
•   You will provide product leadership to the broad cross-functional team delivering the Netflix experience internationally.
•   You will work with your engineering, operations, marketing, customer support, and business development peers to develop, communicate and execute a high quality international Netflix service.

For a competitor, consultant, or potential vendor to these firms, knowing about their strategies well before they become officially public is a huge advantage.
Using workstreamer, and our partnership with Indeed.com, you can begin to listen for hiring from the companies that matter most to you.

Good luck … and good listening!

No Comments »

TOPICS: business listening, its all about the data, sales intelligence

A Tree Just Fell in the Woods… Are You Listening?

By Amy Hawthorne June 15, 2010

A tree just fell in the woods. No one is around to hear it. Does that mean it didn’t make a sound? Do you care?

Now imagine this.

A new key influencer has just been ADDED to one of your target accounts.
The top sales person at your biggest competitor just moved to another company and you are up against him in 2 big deals.
The guy getting in the way of you closing a deal has just been REMOVED from the company.
Your contact’s title at a key account has changed. With this new promotion your contact is now a decision maker.
A re-org has just happened, your decision making team inside the company has just changed.

If you are selling to, marketing to or competing with a business that has experienced any of these changes, you care.

Today workstreamer announced it’s partnership with Jigsaw. You can now get contextually relevant contact updates in workstreamer. Sign up and invite your friends.

No Comments »

TOPICS: @workstreamer, business listening, sales intelligence

Your competitors are talking – 6 things you’re missing if you’re not listening

By Amy Hawthorne June 10, 2010

You think you’re working hard? You better believe your competitors are working just as hard. Wouldn’t you love to know what they are saying AND what is being said about them.

It’s probably not your job to keep up with your competitors every move. Your product manager or someone on your marketing team is likely responsible for keeping you informed? But do they update you daily? If not, you’re missing opportunities.

Here’s 6 things you could be missing by not regularly listening in on your competitors:

Your biggest competitor made a game-changing announcement. You know you are up against them in a couple of big deals. Are you prepared to answer to their announcement with the appropriate message?
One of your HOT prospects has gone to the Twittersphere asking for feedback on your product/service vs. your competitor’s. You have the opportunity to participate. How will you respond?
A blog post from an analyst discusses how best to sell to a large enterprise you are targeting. You can definitely benefit from their tips. Do your competitors know these tips exist?
A company you are targeting has hired a new decision maker. Do your competitors know?
Your company (or your competitor) is mentioned in an article or blog post. Good or bad, don’t you want to know what’s being said? Your competitors definitely do.
An industry analyst just released a new report and it is being picked up and redistributed by bloggers and other market leaders. Did you make it into the magic quadrant? And what’s being said about those that did? Are there opportunities to leverage the new report? If so, you can count on your competitors striking soon.

How are you keeping up? Jump in and share. If you need help keeping up, (shameless promotion ahead) check out workstreamer.

No Comments »

TOPICS: business listening, sales intelligence

One Man’s Journey to Stop Searching and Start Listening

By Hank Weghorst June 1, 2010

It’s Thursday evening, April 29th, and the closing bell has just rung on Wall Street. Executives from Austin based Convio exhale a collective sigh of relief and then hoist their glasses of champagne to toast a long-in-coming milestone. Convio has just listed on the NASDAQ, and the company and its investors have $46 Million new reasons to celebrate.

But what about it’s customers, competitors, and business partners? Is this IPO a great step forward that will drive the firm to new heights? Or will the company get bogged down in public reporting requirements? Is the sentiment positive or negative, and how will that affect the success of their ecosystem?

1:30 am Friday morning: Questions like these can drive a sales guy to stay up way later than he should looking for a few needles in a haystack.

“Convio public offering” About 39,400 results (0.19 seconds)
“Opinion on Convio public offering” About 39,200 results (0.22 seconds)
“Customer opinion on Convio public offering” About 39,200 results (0.18 seconds)
“Customer opinion on Convio -analyst –stock” About 18,300 results (0.32 seconds)

Don’t you wish that Google would take a little longer and give more insight. I am happy to wait 0.5 seconds for some answers. Seriously – I’d wait 5 minutes if Google could answer something like: What do Convio customers think about their recent IPO?

Lets face it; search is not the right tool for busy professionals to get relevant, timely answers to their business research needs. Conversations have moved to the real-time, socially distributed web and traditional search technologies aren’t designed to compete there.

:: Some Stats ::
Insight is everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, news sites, pretty infographics, random blog postings that you stumble across, and yes even occasionally on big media websites. According to Technorati there are 133 million blogs and nearly 1 million posts are created every day.
Twitterers (or is it Tweeters?) create content at a prodigious rate. 300,000 new users per day sign up for that system on top of the 100 million current users. But that’s nothing compared to Facebook where 400 million users create and share 25 billion pieces of content every month. Add in a million new users for LinkedIn every week and you get the picture.

Compare the half a billion of us English language speaking content creators to the traditional news and information sites that consistently rank highly on search results. Most relevant content is being created in real time by “long tail creators” across the social web – and Google is not going to successfully, consistently surface the needle in the haystack from that content.

:: Where Search Fails Today ::
The challenges with search are accelerating. In 2009, the planet’s digital content grew by 62% to 800,000 petabytes. This year we will break through the zettabyte barrier- a million million gigabytes. With this kind of prodigious information creation coupled with search algorithms that tend to prioritize legacy websites with lots of content and links over trending topics from distributed sources, it is no wonder that search fails business professionals.
In addition, the tricks needed to tease the most relevant information out of search are an art in itself. You have to know the best keywords to get accurate results. You have to sift through hundreds of results to find the relevant nuggets. And search results rarely cross all media types – leaving some content types completely unexplored.

:: It’s time to start “Listening” ::
At workstreamer, we’ve dedicated ourselves to reduce my dependence on search for business success. Our products are going to provide users with a set of “listening” stations in an effort to have more relevant content automatically delivered to them.

As we develop our products, we have some simple goals:
1) Have relevant content pushed to proactively rather than having to seek it out.
2) Only spend time on the good stuff – deliver content pre-screened for accuracy and relevancy.
3) Bias our results towards fresh content from high impact yet lesser-known sources
4) Generate easy to digest nuggets of content, rather than having to consume large documents.
5) All else being equal, favor non-traditional content including video, podcast, tweets, posts and social content shared inside of tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Salesforce.

We’ll keep you updated on our progress. We hope you will “listen” to us, and also share your thoughts and techniques on how you plan to stay on top of your business.

No Comments »

TOPICS: business listening, sales intelligence