Sales Blog

Using LinkedIn to boost sales is not a secret. With over 238 million users in over 200 countries and territories, “LinkedIn is the defacto social network for business”, said Joel Marans from TheSocialWhat.com.  Many salespeople use LinkedIn to warm up leads, avoid the dreaded cold call, and collect intelligence that can help them sell better! Harvard Business Review ran a study on 54 top salespeople who sell to IT departments of mid to large size companies; asking them how they use LinkedIn to research accounts, prospect for leads, and generate sales. Here are their results:

Most outside salespeople wake up in the morning with only a rough idea of how to make best use of their day. They have several customers they would like to visit, and perhaps some others along the way they do not know about, but may not have a good schedule planned out. This shortcoming ending up in either backtracking or simply running out of time. The fundamental lack of sales route planning leads to missed customer visits and lost opportunities. This problem has long been studied by mathematicians who know it as the “traveling salesman” problem. The problem calls…

There is a lot of talk about mobile customer relationship management (CRM) becoming a big trend in 2013.  It is already a dominant trend in some industries such as pharmaceuticals .  However, there is no consensus on what “mobile CRM” means.  Is it simply giving the user all of the CRM functionality on their phone or tablet that they have on their laptop?  That seems like a lot of information to digest on a pretty small screen.  And it’s a lot of functionality to sift through to find the few features that you rarely use when you’re out of…