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March 29, 2010 [ 3 Comments ]

Inbound Marketing Videos

Posted by: Sonja Fridell
Tags: Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, SugarCRM, video, YouTube

Dharmesh Shah wowed an audience of 100 at BrainSell and SugarCRM’s Social Media and CRM event last Tuesday outside of Boston.

BrainSell’s recorded the entire event and the frist two installments of Dharmesh’s talk are ready for consumption. Check our YouTube channel, BrainsellTechnology, for more posts. Thanks again to all of our wonderful speakers!

View more on BrainSell’s YouTube Channel, BrainSellTechnology.

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March 24, 2010 [ 0 Comments ]

3 Reasons to Use Inbound Marketing for Events

Posted by: Sonja Fridell
Tags: facebook, Inbound Marketing, linkedin, Social Media, SugarCRM, twitter

BrainSell and Sugar’s CRM Acceleration event went off without a hitch yesterday. 100 people attended at the Hilton Woburn. Thanks to all for braving the rain!

We learned a few things from all of the planning and marketing.

1. Inbound marketing WORKS!

Over 75% of our registrants found out about the event through social media outlets. That would be re tweeting, messages on linkedin and facebook, and a few facebook and linkedin advertisements. People spread the word for us!

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March 21, 2010 [ 3 Comments ]

CRM Acceleration Event Nears

Posted by: Jim Ward
Tags: Inbound Marketing, qualified leads, sales improvement, Salesview, Social Media, SugarCRM

The event takes place this Tuesday, March 23rd. This has been one of the most exciting and dynamic events I’ve ever been involved in. We’re very lucky to have great presenters who are focused on delivering “remarkable content”. From Dharmesh Shah, co-author of Inbound Marketing, Umberto Milletti, CEO of Inside View, Mitch Lieberman, VP of Strategic Solutions at SugarCRM, Martin Schneider, Director of Marketing at SugarCRM and Chip Meyers, Sales Operations Manager at Insource Performance Solutions who pulls the whole story together as Inbound Marketeer and user of technology that allows his sales staff to take advantage of qualified prospects that his Inbound Marketing efforts identify.

What’s been so remarkable is that we have 190 sign ups. Which reinforces the power of Inbound Marketing. The bulk of those who’ve signed up for the event have done so by Inbound Marketing efforts through Social media.

In preparation for the event for those who have signed up, pick up Dharmesh’s book, Inbound Marketing. He’ll be signing books post event. What you’re going to find is genuine and authentic information. I fully expect attendees to walk out with information they can use.

It’s not too late to sign up though our space is now limited.

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March 18, 2010 [ 0 Comments ]

$100 in Twitter to Produce 300 Sign-Ups

Posted by: Sonja Fridell
Tags: brainsell, contest, crm, CRM Software, money, Social Media, SugarCRM

The countdown is on – 5 days until our big social media event at the Woburn Hilton. Close to 200 people are signed up already and we’re setting our goals high. 300 sign ups! Almost all of the sign ups have come from social media. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

We needed to step things up in the final sprint. So one of our fine colleagues from SugarCRM, @mjayliebs, suggested running a Twitter contest. After a little research, I found that short and easy is the best way to get traction with a contest.

Social Signal has a great post about 14 tips for Twitter contests. I took their advice and ran with it.

@brainsell hyped about http://bit.ly/brainsellevent and giving away $100 in GC today! RT this to be eligible to win 1 of 4 $25 GCs

That’s it! Re-tweet our message about re-tweeting and you can win one of 4 $25 gift cards. To where? Who cares! It only takes one click for a chance at free money, I’m down. Are you? Starbucks anyone?

I’ll let you know how it works out.

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March 14, 2010 [ 0 Comments ]

If the pizza man can, you can too!

Posted by: Jim Ward
Tags: bam, business alerts, crm, erp, sales improvement, virtual business management

It was a cold rainy day when I went to my favorite cigar shop (my occasional vice) and got to chatting with another patron enjoying a rainy day cigar. Just so happens this fellow owned a few Domino’s pizza franchises. We got to talking about business and technology. He was quite enthused with a technology that allowed him to take time to relax outside of his demanding business.

I never really thought about the issues “the pizza man” faced in order to make sure his locations run a peak performance. Things like on time deliveries to clients, employees giving away too many freebies also known as theft, pizza waiting for delivery and so much more.

While we sat talking he received a few text messages that he explained we automated alerts. For example, if there was a pattern of pizza’s waiting too long for delivery (thus a hungry and annoyed customer) he receive a text that included pertinent information like the manager on duty and average time pizza waiting to get to a driver. Turns out that this technology is monitoring conditions in their franchise software. Any condition that exceeds store standards causes an alert in the form of a text. As a owner of mulitple stores and managing many people, “the pizza man” was able to monitor mutiple locations all while not being onsite. The result, proactive management. Better customer service. Theft reduction. And more.

Although my clients are not retail shops typically, we have found that this type of Virtual Business Managemet to be just as important. Take a Vice Presidnet of Sales for example and her need for alerts. What conditions cause poor sales perfomance? Lack of lead follow up? Large deals with lack of activity? Why wait till you receive historical reports (e.g. Proft & Loss, Sales reports, Win/Loss reports, etc). Why not monitor these conditions and receive your own alert proactively so you can re-write history.

Solutions like Vineyard Software’s KnowledgeSync provide the ability to monitor cross platform databases. As an example KnowledgeSync can monitor your CRM database and your ERP data for conditions and send appropriate texts, emails and reports automatically. For small and mid sized business who work hard to keep costs down yet need very proactive management for peak performance Virtual Business Management is a must have. We’ve developed a number of Business Alerts for Virtual Business Management. Many are free. So, if the “pizza man can, so can you!”

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March 10, 2010 [ 0 Comments ]

Top 3 Reasons to Eat Your Own Dog Food

Posted by: Sonja Fridell
Tags: crm, CRM and social media, Inbound Marketing, sales, Social Media, SugarCRM

That’s right, at BrainSell we’re eating our own dog food, and loving it!

This whole social media thing has got us buzzing. After we read Inbound Marketing; it was clear that our marketing methods needed to change. We planned our Accelerator event with SugarCRM around Social Media. That was step 1. We’ve been pumped about the agenda for months!

Step 2: PROMOTE

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March 9, 2010 [ 2 Comments ]

CRM’s New Frontier for User Adoption

Posted by: Jim Ward
Tags: bant, crm adoption, Insideview, lead generation, mashup, sales improvement

For years Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has been about tracking interactions with clients, prospects and leads. Sales people have (sometimes begrudgingly) created sales forecasts through opportunity management. Customer support creates tickets for problem resolution and marketing might use the tool to track campaigns. All tasks are extremely useful to an organization. As time has progressed, I’ve seen CRM go from simple contact management to fully automated work-flow systems. The results and information generated can either be amazing or frustrating.

Some companies have struggled to get users to adopt CRM applications (specifically sales people). Sales people tend to be independent and just can’t be bothered with systems that don’t have a clear personal benefit thus the resistance to use CRM software. And clearly good sales people have different personalty types than someone in accounting or finance. I’ve often said that when you get an accounting degree, it’s a Bachelor of Science degree for a reason. And sales, well- it’s more of an art.

One of the key reasons sales people resist CRM software is that the carrot approach is lacking. There’s been nothing to date that drives sales people to use the software.

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March 6, 2010 [ 1 Comments ]

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like Proactive Communication

Posted by: Jim Ward
Tags: Blogs, customer relationship management, facebook, linkedin, sales improvement, Social Media, twitter

We all know how important communication is in any relationship, be it personal, professional, or business. However it cannot be over stated how important in business that we use proactive communication, though it seems I state the obvious – I find the rule of proactively communicating to be under used.

First, how do I define proactive communication? Simply stated, communicating before or immediately after being asked by your client for information relating to a sale, project or any “ping” you receive by the client. Your relationship with your client’s can only grow if you communicate openly and often.

Proactive communication is somewhat of a instinctive reaction. One has to sense if your client needs more information than you’ve provided. Remember, because your intentions are good and the information sits in your head doesn’t mean that the client may not need to hear what may seem to be the simplest of details.

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March 4, 2010 [ 1 Comments ]

Rule 15: How to improve Lead conversion to Sales

Posted by: Jim Ward
Tags: crm, lead generation, sales

Rule 15 It’s all about timing!

Rule 15 is all about timing. Both sales and marketing must be on the same page when it comes to lead management. In order to effectively take advantage of Rule 15 it’s likely that your organization will need the support of technology (CRM & Alert Messaging, or BAM as Gartner calls it, would be a start).

Here’s the basis of Rule 15. Use it and leads will convert to sales on an increasing basis. Marketing efforts will be rewarded and sales people will find greater value in leads provided by marketing.

Rule 15 – it seems so simple, yet it’s so powerful!

Concept: Call all leads within 15 minutes of receipt. That means that Marketing needs to identify work flow processes to make sure the lead is delivered to sales within 15 minutes and Sales needs to be ready to make the follow up within 15 minutes.

Four Supporting Pillars of Rule 15: The point in which a lead has its highest value is the point in which the prospect raises her hand and says, “I’m interested”. Every minute that passes after that, starts lead depreciation.

Why 15 minutes?

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March 2, 2010 [ 2 Comments ]

3 Things a Social Media Nerd Can Still Learn

Posted by: Sonja Fridell
Tags: advertising, facebook, Inbound Marketing, leads, linkedin, Marketing, sales, Social Media, SugarCRM

We’ve been working hard here at BrainSell to promote our headline social media event in Woburn, MA on March 23 (sign up here). We’re now TOTALLY SOLD on social media as a means of marketing, advertising and networking.

I’m a whiz at everything Facebook, or at least I thought I was. I’m only now uncovering the marking potential of the social media outlets I grew up with. Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m a recent college grad with 600 Facebook friends (no big deal).

1. Facebook and LinkedIn ads are easy and relatively cheap

Facebook pay per click ads are easy to create and the targeting methods are very detailed (you can choose which college the target went to, their relationship status, age, all imperative sales information of course). And a major plus, Facebook ads are much cheaper than LinkedIn ads, about $0.60 per click vs LinkedIn’s $3 per click (ouch). LinkedIn ads work the same way, but you can’t segregate people by relationship status (-= You can manage your ads through your account settings too.

2. Twitter stalking is easier than you think

We all know how you can find pepple on Twitter. But it’s not easy to find people by more than one criteria. Say, for example, interest, geography, age, profession. All of that can be done on Twellow, the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Try it out, it’s awesome, and a great way to up your numbers tactfully.

3. Use your friends!

Virtual or not! Your friends are a valuable resource. Send out a message to your FB friends who may have interest in your venture or event. People generally like to help out. Create an event on LinkedIn and invite your connections. Scan through your Facebook and LinkedInFr and post a link to your event on the comments page.

Even a seasoned user as myself can learn new tricks!

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