Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

As Dave Brock had aptly pointed out earlier this year, controversial titles are bound to get lots of attention. In writing the seemingly controversial blog post ‘CRM, The Biggest Productivity Drain in 10 Years!’, Dave set out to illustrate a subtler point. His aim was to highlight the importance of listening to and really understanding our customers. The point was that we are tuned to pick up on trigger words and phrases. Once we hear them, we too often “immediately launch into our pitch or presenting our point of view.”

Taking Dave’s wise words to heart, I was bound not fall into this trap when I came across Lauren Carlson’s post, SFA 15 Years Later: Now Every Rep’s Best Friend. Lauren makes the case that SFA/CRM has come such a long way from its difficult beginning 15 years ago:

“Despite its increasing ubiquity, however, SFA quickly developed a bad reputation among sales reps, many of whom suspiciously viewed SFA tools as a way for management to track their every move. They were also frustrated by the kludgy user interfaces, slow data entry processes, and long ramp-up times.”

Lauren cites four innovations that transformed CRM/SFA into a tool “that most sales organizations are singing the praises of”:

1. SaaS made implementation cheaper and faster

2. The Cloud made SFA more accessible

3. Analytics and marketing automation turned SFA data into gold

4. Process improvement compressed sales cycles (i.e., newer SFA/CRM applications make process mapping and process improvement a lot easier)

To be clear, there is no doubt that CRM/SFA applications have improved over the past 15 years. The question is whether these improvements have yielded more benefit for the managers or more benefit for reps. Remember that the primary beneficiary of CRM/SFA from its origins has been the manager, not the rep. CRM/SFA was and continues to be a managerial tool to maintain and store contact data (i.e., to ensure that valuable contact data would not leave the company when the rep left), enable forecasting, and track rep activity. So, CRM/SFA certainly has provided benefit, but the benefit has accrued largely to managers, not the reps themselves.

Our sales intelligence software, salesPRISM, is often embedded in a CRM system precisely to provide a benefit to the rep (vs. the manager).  We have tens of thousands of reps using our app, and we interview hundreds of reps a year as part of our product development activities. The vast majority are not fond of CRM because they don’t see tangible benefits coming their way, and often see it as just another administrative hassle. The question they ask is: “How does CRM help me close more business?”

I discussed the four innovations above with Lauren and shared the following perspective.

1. SaaS certainly has made implementation cheaper and faster, enabling SFA/CRM to reach a much broader target market of sales organizations. Yet, this fact alone has not made the systems any more useful to reps.

2. The Cloud has made SFA more accessible. This is also true, and it could be viewed as a benefit in terms of reducing the existing hassle of entering activity information. Still, this point does not add net new value to a rep in terms of identifying and targeting companies that are more likely to purchase or helping the rep figure out how to contact and communicate with the decision-makers.

3. Analytics and Marketing Automation turned SFA data into gold. It is certainly true that companies like Lattice Engines provide analytic applications that enable sales organizations to ‘go beyond CRM.” As an example, our salesPRISM sales intelligence software is often embedded into a CRM platform and delivers account-specific recommendations on which accounts to target, when to target, and how to target. However, 90% of the source data that’s used in these analytics is not in CRM. The trick is to be as comprehensive as possible in sourcing data from internal, external and social media sources. SFA/CRM data is a small portion of the overall data pie.

4. Process improvement compressed sales cycles. Indeed, SFA/CRM applications have become more flexible and make it easier to integrate the workflow related to other downstream systems (e.g., order management, billing). This benefits the organization in terms of creating a standardized and disciplined process, and can benefit the rep in terms of time savings. To realize this benefit in practice, however, often implies a significant investment in technology and change management.

I thank Lauren Carlson for writing on this topic, and hope she will continue to explore it further. If you have a point of view on the benefits of SFA/CRM for reps, we’d love to hear from you.

Related: What is Data-Driven Selling?

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Infoworld 2011

Big Data is big news these days as companies are recognizing its dramatic potential to enhance decision-making across industries and business functions. McKinsey & Company’s MGI group recently released a timely report “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” which maintains that leveraging big data will become a key basis of competition and growth, enhancing productivity and creating significant value for the world economy.

Lattice Engines, founded by several McKinsey alumni, is riding the Big Data wave, developing sales intelligence software that enables B2B sales and marketing teams to ‘predict’ their customers’ next move and engage purchase decision-makers with compelling, contextual messaging.

The McKinsey Alumni site recently published a feature article on Lattice Engines to better understand its mission, culture and aspirations. Click here to read the full story.

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Photo Credit: Gian Fiero 2008

Recently, I attended the RMA/American Banker Small Business Banking Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. One of my takeaways from the conference was the imperative for bankers to develop a much better understanding of their customer and their businesses. What are their goals? What concerns do they have? What’s important for them?

Knowing your customer is critical for any sales-person, but it’s especially important in this specific banking context. First, small businesses have the lowest satisfaction score out of all the segments that J.D. Power tracks in their annual financial services satisfaction surveys. Moreover, small business satisfaction has not budged in several years (Figure 1), driven in part by the inability for bankers to understand their customer’s needs and objectives. Yet, the surveys also show that there is a potential for massive upside. J.D. Power has indicated that satisfaction scores rise by 139 points when the banker demonstrates a ‘complete’ understanding of the customer’s situation and pathway to success.

The conference presentations allowed me to gain a much deeper appreciation for why small businesses care so much about the banker’s ability to understand them. Owners are incredibly vested in their small businesses professionally, emotionally and financially. Consider these facts presented at the conference:

• 1/5 of small business owners use the equity in their homes to finance their business. As one executive put it aptly, “they’re all in.”
• Small business owners derive enormous satisfaction from their businesses. In a survey, 41% of small business owners defined success as satisfaction in terms of ‘doing what I love’, ‘having happy customers’ and achieving ‘work-life balance.’
• Small business owners find that they have ‘the most in-common’ with others in the same industry. They are immersed in their business and expect their service providers to share their passion and provide relevant advice.

No wonder that nearly every presentation at the conference emphasized how important it is for bankers to understand their small business banking customers. Yet, what surprised me was the virtual absence of concrete, practical perspectives and tactics for how the bank can help front-line business bankers do that. I was also surprised by the fact that only one bank raised the possibility of identifying and acting on customer insights drawn from data (i.e., internal banking data, external data, social media data). Banks are sitting on goldmines of internal data about customers that could shed insights on behavioral patterns. And, the internet and social media are generating reams of contextual information about companies and decision-makers.

If you’re a small business banker or executive already applying data and analytics to develop actionable customer insights, we’d like to hear from you.

If you’d like to learn how to implement an operational, data-driven capability to help your bankers demonstrate a complete understanding of their customers, I invite you to click here to read our whitepaper: “Banking on Predictive Sales Intelligence: Six Steps to Data-Driven Selling in Business Banking.”

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Today’s blog post was originally featured on socialmediab2b.com.

A social approach does not alter the fundamental ingredients for B2B selling success: building trust and cultivating relationships. However, it does enable new selling tactics along the sales process that align more naturally to the changing behaviors of customers and prospects in a networked world.

1. Create the Foundation for Social Selling
A prerequisite for social selling is identifying your target accounts and contacts. Do you know the full set of customers and prospects in your sales territory? Can you find those accounts in the CRM system? Do you have at least one relevant contact associated with each account? Even leading sales organizations leave money on the table because of an inconsistent and incomplete view of their sales universe. One B2B organization, which prided itself on sophisticated CRM and sales workflow processes, was able to increase its sales universe by 60% by identifying eligible accounts not entered into CRM, removing inactive and duplicate accounts, and ensuring that the right reps were assigned to the right accounts (e.g., Hunters assigned to Prospects).

2. Connect with Your Target Contacts on LinkedIn and Twitter
LinkedIn profiles are chock-full of rich context (e.g., schools attended, prior jobs, LinkedIn Groups) and predictive business triggers (e.g., event updates, conferences attended). What percent of your active contacts in CRM are you linked to? Start by connecting to your closest relationships first, adding a thoughtful and contact specific note in the invitation. Going forward, invite contacts to link after your first meaningful meeting or call. LinkedIn profiles offer a direct gateway to Twitter handles. This is a major benefit as Twitter handles are otherwise difficult to obtain and often do not clearly indicate a person’s full name (e.g., Lattice Engines CEO Shashi Upadhyay goes by @shashikup on Twitter).

3. Profile Your Contacts with Social Data
The key is to focus on the five most important profiling elements that matter most for your business (e.g., industry group participation, recent promotion) or selling style (e.g., buyer’s favorite sports team). This information should be captured in your CRM contact record. Create alerts to track profile changes and update your records on a monthly basis.

4. Account and Contact Targeting
Successful reps align their selling time to the account opportunities with the highest likelihood of conversion and/or highest likely deal value. Listening to posts (e.g., in LinkedIn groups) from employees at your target customers and prospects can surface customer needs and sales opportunities. Reps can do this on their own, but companies can help automate this process and help prioritize the most important insights.

In addition, B2B companies can apply technologies that synthesize activity on social media networks. For example, companies with stronger social media footprints (e.g., more connections, more postings) are typically more likely to be in growth mode and are often more open to technology-based solutions. Data culled from social networks should be an essential component of the full array of internal and external data sources that companies should analyze to help their reps align selling time to the top account opportunities. Laser-focused on the highest-priority accounts, reps now need to identify and connect with the right decision-makers and influencers.

Social networks, like LinkedIn, are rapidly becoming sales staples for generating new connections and warm referrals. Sales Intelligence solutions extend the power of social networks by enabling a sales team to pool together each rep’s connections into one collective network on an opt-in basis. Reps benefit by accessing more contacts at their target accounts, connected by their trusted colleagues.

5. Gaining Access to Purchase Decision-Makers
Once accounts are ranked, the toughest part is actually getting through to decision-makers. Your buyers are highly busy professionals, inundated by meetings, projects, email and endless to-do lists. On top of their work priorities, they are solicited daily by a myriad of vendors seeking a sliver of their precious time. So, when your contact finally picks up the phone, you have 30 seconds to pique her interest. A sure way to blow the call is to drone on about how great your company’s products are. What does work is immediately demonstrating a thorough understanding of the customer’s business goals and how you can help them achieve success. Set aside one hour weekly to review what your contacts are saying in their social updates, in their tweets and in groups.

6. Building Trust-Based Relationships with Each Customer Interaction
Social networks make it so much easier to stay top-of-mind in between formal phone calls and meetings. It’s as easy as sharing a weekly update on an important event in your industry or liking a post from one of your contacts. The subject matter should be educational and informative with no trace of a sales pitch. In addition, nothing accelerates sales cycles like demonstrating how similar companies have succeeded with your solution. The power of social selling stems from the ability to help reps demonstrate peer success. Sales intelligence software automatically identifies these peer reference cases. Reps benefit because they can apply proven tactics and collateral used by their colleagues to close similar deals and because they quickly and automatically share the most relevant and compelling success stories with their customers.

These six steps are an excerpt from the whitepaper Social Selling: What’s Really In It for B2B Sales. Download it to learn more about social selling.

What has your experience been using a social approach to B2B selling? Please share your thoughts below.

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There are few movies that manage to be highly entertaining and remarkably insightful. Moneyball is one of those movies.

Based on Michael Lewis’ book, the movie tells the tale of how the Oakland Athletics– under the direction of Billy Beane – managed to achieve extraordinary performance relative to their meager financial muscle. In the late 90’s, the Athletics were near the very bottom of the league in terms of their financial capacity to spend on acquiring talent. Yet, they were able to consistently make the playoffs over a number of years.

So, how did the Athletics manage to achieve this highly improbable feat?

The story focuses on Billy Beane – a lackluster ballplayer who becomes the visionary GM of the Athletics – and his Harvard-educated quant whiz kid protégé Paul DePodesta. Together, they turn the conventional wisdom of baseball upside down. Through detailed analysis of every imaginable baseball statistic, the duo uncovers the true underlying drivers of success for a baseball team.  They uncover the massive inefficiency in how baseball talent is priced and are able to exploit this inefficiency to their advantage. They acquire players that every other team has rejected, and rejected for all the wrong reasons (i.e., conventional wisdom on what a great baseball player ‘looks like’). Billy and Paul discover data-driven insights about how to gauge and price the true worth of every ballplayer.

Moneyball, Sony Pictures 2011

Moneyball is a great book (and movie) for anyone who loves baseball and numbers. But it’s an exceptional must-read for B2B sales leaders. Moneyball shows that data-driven decisions result in significantly better outcomes than gut feel and intuition. B2B selling is undergoing the same transformation that baseball went through 10 years ago.

We’ve entered the age of data-driven selling . Thanks to the exponential growth in data about companies and prospects, and the ability to extract actionable customer insight through predictive analytics, it is now possible for a sales-person to achieve dramatically higher sales productivity. True sales intelligence can enable reps to know exactly whom to contact, when to contact and even how to engage.  As selling time becomes a scarce resource, selling activities are all geared to maximize the return on that time.

I was heartened to see Gerhard Gschwandtner’s blog on the topic and I look forward to speaking about data-driven sales intelligence at the next Sales 2.0 conference.

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In our last post, we discussed how B2B sales professionals are increasingly applying social media techniques to generate sales activity and opportunities. Since LinkedIn has become a social media standard for sales, we decided to conducted original quantitative research on LinkedIn network activity. The objective was to highlight findings that would help reps use LinkedIn even more effectively.

To generate a dataset, we created a composite LinkedIn user by aggregating actual LinkedIn network activity across multiple, real-life LinkedIn users on a confidential and anonymous basis. This enabled us to analyze and identify insights from hundreds of network updates over a 34 day period.

These were some of our findings:

• Sales reps can get a lot more value from LinkedIn as network updates have become more diverse.

The LinkedIn interface has evolved over recent years to make the creation and viewing of network updates more prominent (e.g., sharing an update box at the top left, more real estate for the Update feed) incorporating elements from other networks like Twitter and Facebook. You can see this evolution by taking a look at what LinkedIn looked like back in 2008. These changes have had real impact on how frequently users come back to LinkedIn and the range of network activities.

Our data indicated that the ‘Connection Update’ (i.e., Andrew is now connected to Peter) accounted for less than 50% of all updates for our composite user, and in some cases only 30-40% for individual users in our sample. This means that there is a broader range of updates in the feed, and as our research showed, a lot of the updates are proactive posting and sharing of content. The implication for the B2B sales person is that LinkedIn has become a lot more useful. Not only can it help identify new network connections for warm prospecting, but it can also reveal much more contextual insight into how customers and prospects are thinking.

Here’s a practical tip. If you want to view just your recent network connections, click on the More tab to the right of All Updates and choose Connections.

• Your customers and prospects are a lot more likely to post content to the Update feed that reveals needs, goals and attitudes.

We used our data to evaluate what kinds of updates are being posted. Since the traditional ‘Connection Update’ is such a large share of the overall posts, we decided to strip it out of the analysis. For the remainder, we found that Twitter Tweets syndicated to LinkedIn accounted for 34% of the updates. This is important for sales reps because it’s a quick way to identify which of your contacts also have a Twitter handle and actually use it. The next biggest bucket – - at 30% – was adding content directly on LinkedIn (e.g., adding a new comment or link). Coming in at 18% was Group-related posts (e.g., Andrew joined a new group), which is a great way of identifying topics of interests to your prospects. The remaining 18% consisted of a variety of other update types including sharing content, liking content, etc. The bottom line is that the top two buckets — covering 64% of posts — are proactive content posts that reveal insight into what your network connection finds interesting and compelling. (After all, if they’re willing to share their comment with their entire network, they must feel strongly about it.)

• Focus on the active posters in your network.

While proactive posting of content and comments is accounting for a larger share of overall network activity, a small share of your total network accounts for the lion’s share of posts (once again, excluding the generic Connection Update). Our data indicated that just 14% of the entire composite network posted anything over a 1-week timeframe. This means that there’s still a way to go before the majority of LinkedIn users feel comfortable and/or compelled to post updates. The upside for sales professionals is that this fact will enable you to identify and listen to the vocal minority in your network who are posting. In fact, you may want to consider reaching out to them proactively to help increase the reach of your own posts.

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences in using LinkedIn for B2B Social Selling.

<< Part 1 Part 2 >>

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Social selling is a hot topic. In a recent post, we discussed some specific ways B2B sales professionals can apply social selling to achieve real results. We had also conducted original research on why Twitter is becoming an integral part of social selling.

While Twitter is still somewhat uncharted territory for some sales professionals, LinkedIn is fast becoming a staple for social selling. In her recent eBook “Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?” Jill Konrath discusses how LinkedIn can support and often help accelerate the entire sales lifecycle.

To push the thinking on social selling further, Lattice Engines conducted original quantitative research on LinkedIn network activity. We created a composite LinkedIn user by aggregating actual LinkedIn network activity across multiple, real-life LinkedIn users on a confidential and anonymous basis.

The resulting composite LinkedIn user has on average 185 1^st degree connections (where average means the total number of unique 1^st degree network connections across our sample users divided by the number of sample users). We analyzed the network activity — the Update feed — of all the connections over a 34 day basis to glean insights into how sales reps can gain incremental benefit from their social networks:

• How often do people post updates? Do they generate update in spurts? Should reps be monitoring LinkedIn activity more frequently?
• Do people in your network update with roughly the same frequency? Or, are there a handful of connections that account for the lion’s share of your network activity and, therefore, merit more of your time?
• What are the most popular types of updates (e.g., sharing content, adding new connections)? Can you segment your connections based on update behavior? Do some people post lots of valuable industry insight? Who are the most active networkers?

We’ll share results from our research in Part 2 of this series. In the meantime, let us know what techniques you’re using for social selling on LinkedIn and the other social networks.

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What is Sales Intelligence?

So far in this blog series, we reviewed various data sources that sales reps can access to research their customers and prospects. Part 2 highlighted internal data sources that sales professionals could harvest for customer insight and meaning. We made the distinction that ‘internal’ data refers to data generated by a company’s systems, employees and partners about its customers and prospects. In Part 3, we turned to external data, which emanates from outside the company (e.g., 3^rd party databases, company websites, social media, etc.)

Photo credit: Juan Jose Velasquez, November 2009

By now, I hope you’re getting a feeling for how much data is out already out there. There’s certainly no shortage of ‘homework’ that sales reps could be doing to shine in their next customer interactions. And the magnitude of data will continue to grow, in terms of new sources and better coverage of companies and decision-makers within each source (e.g., just imagine when LinkedIn really goes mainstream with millions of SMBs and their employees actively participating in the network).

So, let’s be clear. Sales Intelligence does NOT mean providing even more raw data to reps, not even if it’s of the much-hyped social variety.

Sales Intelligence enables sales professionals to connect individual data dots into a cohesive picture about underlying customer needs. It weaves the challenges and opportunities facing your customers into a broader story about their business journey. Take, for example, the story of a precision-tool manufacturer that has enjoyed an annual growth rate of 17% over the past three years. A significant driver of this growth has been exports to European markets. The company secured a round of growth capital and is now about to open its first international office. The journey is making the transition from a domestic winner to an international competitor.

If you’re a bank, Sales Intelligence would advise you to avoid a generic pitch on credit, and instead, focus on describing how your trade finance and international payment solutions will accelerate the customer’s expansion. If you’re providing business services, you would want to engage in a discussion on how the customer plans to staff and support their international employees (e.g., recruiting needs, office needs, payroll solutions).

Sales Intelligence not only signals when to engage with each account and but also guides your sales team to articulate how and why your company is best positioned to help each of your customers reach their destinations.

Beyond connecting the data dots into an overall customer narrative, Sales Intelligence needs to be relevant for the day-to-day activities of sales professionals. It must fulfill at least the following operational requirements:

• Customer-specific: Suggests sales approaches to specific accounts and contacts. In the context of Large Enterprise sales, it identifies buying centers for different types of products and services

• Actionable: Makes specific recommendations on when, how and with whom to engage. As opposed to just providing a lead, the recommendations provide context and guidance on approaching customers and decision-makers with timely, relevant and compelling messaging. The secret sauce is the ability to digest massive amounts of data and transform it into something intuitive that a sales rep can execute.

• Comprehensive: Integrates the reams of internal and external data about customers and prospects. For example, it’s great to know that someone downloaded three whitepapers from your website, but it’s much better to know who that person is and how this information will help their company succeed with an important business decision.

• Prioritizing: Makes calculated trade-offs (i.e., incremental sales X likelihood of close) on which accounts/contacts to engage now and which ones to leave for another day. Selling time is a precious resource which must be aligned to the best account opportunities.

• Justified: Provides data-driven justifications as to why a sales rep should pick up the phone and call a high-likelihood account. One of the biggest advantages that Sales Intelligence provides is the context behind each customer’s unique story and underlying needs. Sales reps are far more likely to engage on data-driven recommendations if they know the ‘why’ and ‘how’, not just the ‘what’ and ‘when.’

• Social: Connects people and to help sales reps engage with new contacts (i.e., through warm referrals across social networks), reduce meeting prep time (i.e., by sharing knowledge and sales collateral/presentations), and maximize the chances of closing the deal (i.e., by referencing the most relevant and comparable similar selling situations).

• Mobile: Delivers intelligence within the evolving mobile workflow of field sales. It almost seems like companies are leap-frogging handheld devices and migrating straight to iPads. Mobile delivery is an essential ingredient for Sales Intelligence.

Sales Intelligence is fast becoming a ‘must-have’ for B2B sales organizations, and has enormous potential to foster data-driven decision making at the front lines.

Is your team benefiting from Sales Intelligence? We look forward to hearing your story.

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The previous post in this series on sales intelligence highlighted internal data sources that sales professionals could harvest for customer insight and meaning. We made the distinction that ‘internal’ data refers to data generated by a company’s systems, employees and partners about its customers and prospects. In this post, we turn to external data, which emanates from outside the company’s walls. As you might expect, external data is instrumental for new customer acquisition, as the company does not yet have a commercial relationship that would generate much internal data (e.g., no billing records). Sales reps are familiar with some of the sources below either because their company has granted them access (e.g., weekly lead list on new company formations, company information presented in CRM account record) or because they’re accessing the data on their own as part of account research (e.g., visiting the company website, setting-up Google Alerts). The overall story on external data is growth. The amount and variety of external data have grown dramatically over the past 5 years. The good news is that there’s a lot more that can now be known about your customers and prospects. The challenge is that it takes a lot more research time to connect the dots. This is an overview of some traditional and new external content sources and how sales reps use them:

• 3^rd party databases: Companies like D&B and infoUSA publish company and credit information for practically the entire U.S. corporate landscape: over 10 million ‘marketable’ companies. Sales reps would be most familiar with company attributes like revenue, employees and SIC code, and with the various lead lists created by these vendors (e.g., weekly list of new company starts). The value of these databases is breadth. They aspire to cover millions of companies. The challenge is accuracy and breadth, especially at the low-end of the market. Information is much harder to gather for companies with less than 10 employees – - which represent the vast majority of companies – - because they tend to go out of business much more frequently and simply don’t have all that many corporate events to report (e.g., your local Pizza shop most likely will not be doing a merger any time soon). While these databases have been around for some time, many companies are surprised to learn about the full extent of company data available, particularly the credit attributes. Any company purchasing this data should ask for a data dictionary and review the full extent of data fields available for purchase.

• Traditional Media: Looking for information in the traditional press is not new, and it’s useful especially if you cover larger companies that are much more likely to issue PR releases and engage in the kind of activities that would merit mention in the press (e.g., Merger & Acquisitions).

• Public Records: You may be surprised to learn about the breadth of public records kept at the local, state and federal levels about companies (and individuals). Information about transactions between a government agency and individuals and companies are kept as a record for public retrieval. Examples include litigation activity (i.e., was one of your accounts recently sued), import / export data (i.e., a great proxy for growth as well as needs for international services), credit activity (i.e., a Uniform Commercial Code records lending activity between a lender and borrower, as well as the basis of collateral), government contract wins, labor law violations, and many others.  The enterprising sales professional can glean deep insight about her accounts from public records. The main downside is research time. The records are not centralized, and without aggregation, you would need to inspect numerous government and agency websites to access the records.

• The Web: While there is such an immense amount of data that can be culled from the Internet, the key is to focus on elements that will shed real insight on your customers and prospects. A diligent sales professional should, of course, visit the company web site and learn about the company and its employees. Better still, reps should be looking for predictive insight. For example, company growth as indicated by an increase in job requisitions on the company website or on job boards, is a powerful predictor of purchase likelihood. The chart below indicates Lattice Engines research showing that companies that have posted for jobs are at least 80% more likely to make a near-term purchase of your products and services versus the average (and even more likely if they’re posting for executive job positions). Various aggregation sites are a great source for identifying other purchase predictors, including funding activity (i.e., did one of my accounts recently complete a funding round with a venture capital firm?) and awards (i.e., did my customer just win an award for a major product innovation).

• Social Media: Yes, social media does belong under the Web category. Yet, given the buzz surrounding it, it’s worth mentioning it as a separate topic. Sales reps are already using social media networks like LinkedIn to identify organizational connections and establish warm referrals. There’s a lot more that can be done. For example, our research indicates that just quantifying the social media score of your customers and prospects leads to a powerful segmentation.  Think of the social media score as the quantity and strength of social connections that a company and its employees have on the networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Another piece of Lattice Engines research in the chart below indicates that companies with higher social media scores are much more likely than others to purchase a technology-enabled product. Social media reveals underlying customer attitudes that translate directly into customer insight. Another example is tuning-in to the Twitter handles of your customers and their decision-makers. We recently conducted research on the Twitter activity of companies with 100-250 employees, and found that the overwhelming majority of Tweeting companies discussed key business events – - like awards and product releases – - in their Twitter streams.

While this blog post shows just how much external data exists to discover and mine for insight, this is not an exhaustive list; each category above contains significantly more examples for deriving customer insight. I invite you to add-in external data examples you’ve been using to profile your accounts. Next week, we’ll share the final post in this series, which will cover what it takes to connect all these dots and generate real sales intelligence.

<<Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 >>

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I wonder if Stephanie Rosenbloom, a style reporter for the New York Times, had read Gary Shteyngart’s superfunny 2010 novel ‘Super Sad True Love Story’ prior to writing her recent article ‘Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored’. Shteyngart’s novel takes place in a not too distant post-literate future, where practically everything and anything is scored about everyone (e.g., credit rating, sex appeal) and it’s all visible for the world to see. It’s not an entirely crazy premise if you extrapolate what’s already happening today.

Rosenbloom’s piece highlights how services like Klout and PeerIndex are ranking our influence on popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Its early days: the algorithms are imperfect, and the signals exclude offline influence. But already, consumer marketers are jumping to target and influence these highly-ranked social influencers. Here are some examples from the article:

“Last year, Virgin America used the company to offer highly rated influencers in Toronto free round-trip flights to San Francisco or Los Angeles. In Las Vegas, the Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to Cirque du Soleil.”

This got me thinking about the possibilities for B2B sales, where sales cycles are longer and complex and where decision-making is a collective endeavor undertaken by a web of influencers and decision-makers. Successful sales professionals map and navigate these webs, identifying and nurturing the centers of power. So, I can imagine how social networks will in short time enable B2B sales reps to laser-focus on the real influencers in the organization, who can create the momentum to make a deal happen.

Already today, it’s possible to measure the influence signal of employees at an organization by assessing the frequency, content, sentiment and engagement with LinkedIn messages. Now imagine if it would be possible to link activity on external social networks with activity on emerging internal messaging services like Salesforce’s Chatter and Yammer.

We may not all like the prospect of ubiquitous scoring, but it’s certain that it will enable forward-thinking sales professionals to leap ahead in terms of productivity. But for those who regard all this scoring with unease and trepidation, read Super Sad True Love Story. You’ll appreciate the ending and lessons on human nature in the face of technological advancement gone awry.

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