Guest Blog! This week, Koka Sexton, Director of Social Strategy at InsideView graces the BrainSell Blog with his social wisdom. Later this week, Sexton will co-host a webinar with BrainSell on Social Media in SugarCRM. Sign up for the Nov. 30 webinar here. 

In order to be an effective sales person you have to be leveraging the Internet and social media to keep you connected to prospects. Sales intelligence is a driving force for sales teams trying to leverage all of the data about prospects and turn them into opportunities.

Social media and sales intelligence increases companies win rates of new business. Since driving more revenue is a cornerstone for companies, it shouldn’t be overlooked as a tool to enable your sales teams.

Social Media is the Key

There is too much information available online these days that a sales person is walking blind if they are not using it in some way. Sales prospecting lists for contact data is fine but it’s not very effective on a large scale. Gathering contact information is only the first step in an effective sales process. The real intelligence comes from contact data and the relevant information about that contact.

When a sales person understands the impact of having relevant information on their prospects being handed to them on a daily basis, they are able to decrease the amount of time spent researching information that can help. When acted on with social selling best practices, prospects will be highly engaged and you will close more deals.

What’s holding sales people back?

When it comes to doing pre-call research and getting some background on a prospect or company you are calling into, there is a lot of information gathered by just doing a Google search. The problem with this is there is very little context around the results. You can spend an hour digging through search results and other resources to get an idea of who the person is and what challenges their company is facing but you’re busy too and can’t justify a large amount of time to research to make a call that may only take 10-15 minutes. “Typically, there is a lot of knowledge out there,” says John Aiello, CEO of SAVO, in a video interview with Selling Power magazine publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner. “The gap is that people can’t find it.”

Sales Intelligence Drives the Conversation

As a sales person, there is no excuse any more for not knowing more about your prospects and the company you are calling into. Sales Intelligence tools enable you to have relevant information at your virtual fingertips that can be used to know in many cases exactly how to position your product or service. There are even free sales intelligence tools available that can help.

Sales people need intelligence to close more deals. Making that intelligence available in a way that sales can capture quickly and easy to find is a necessity. In an Accenture study of more than 1,000 managers in the United States and the United Kingdom, nearly 60 percent have to go to numerous sources to compile the information they need to do their jobs well. About the same number reported that information as poorly distributed across the organization.

Building your sales pipeline and increasing win rates is not magic. There is no secret code that needs to be cracked for success. All you need is more information and a better way of identifying what matters when you start making connections.

If you are interested in knowing more about how social media is being leveraged by sales people to build their pipelines and drive revenue growth, you shold register for the upcoming webinar on Nov. 30 at 1 pm est, Leveraging Social Media in SugarCRM.

About the author: Koka Sexton, Director of Social Strategy at InsideView, is one of the most recognized social experts in the technology industry. With ten+ years of sales experience and a passion for social media, Koka is the perfect evangelist for social selling, a topic that he promotes through national speaking engagements and InsideView’s newest social media endeavor: Social Selling University. Koka’s expertise extends beyond his endless knowledge of social networks into his skill at employing them to drive lead generation, create new opportunities, and engage customers