Umberto Milletti kicked off the first Insider Summit 2012 yesterday - this is the beginning of one big conference! Just baby steps now . . . but before you know it, it will be like Dreamforce. Pow!
If you are curious about the future of selling in today's world, this was the place to be. InsideView has become a "must-have" sales intelligence tool that has changed the face of prospecting. The formula is simple: sales intelligence + the right people + the right message + the right time = relevance.
The first day kicked off with some great keynotes and presentations. I can't wait to get some slide decks because there are some killer stats there.
Here are a few highlights from the conference:
Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView, is the Social Intelligence leader. Now he says that we must be relevant with all this intelligence. He's right. After all, if 92% of our prospects do not respond to cold calls or email, we must learn to be smarter about it.
Kim Celestre, Analyst with Forrester, hosted a live and interactive TweetJam with the audience asking some great questions. Among them: "How will social media impact the lead generation and nurturing process?" and "What are best practices to engage customers with social media?" and "What are your top social media priorities in 2012?"
Forrester has surveyed customers' online behavior and found the following:
- 24% Creators: They create web content.
- 33% Conversationalists: They post updates.
- 37% Critics: They respond to others' content.
- 20% Collectors: They organize available content.
- 59% Joiners: They connect via online social networks.
- 70% Spectators: They consume social network content.
- 17% Inactives: They don't create or consume any kind of social network content.
The cool thing about these conferences is that you can dare to be different and try something new. Leave it to charming Gerhard Gschwandtner from Selling Power to add an improvisational component to his PowerPoint presentation. He randomly selected audience members and had them interpret six of his slides. It was cool!
A few take-aways:
- Geography is dead; social proximity is in. I have written about this in my Inside Sales 2012 Trend Report: "Geographic Territories Are (Almost) Over because in today's social world, geo regions may not have as much meaning as they used to. Salespeople work virtually now - from home or from satellite offices."
- Social doesn't have a hierarchy anymore. Gerhard gave examples of open-space office environments where the CEOs sit in the center of their teams.
- You can improve the top 20% of the sales team if you provide them with better tools. Absolutely true.
Don't bother being social if you aren't going to be relevant!