A Smart Selling Tool - Right Inside Your Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As a sales professional, you’re faced with an exploding social Web that equates to a wealth of insight into your prospects. But it's also a huge time-sucker, and as it keeps growing, your ability to keep a clear view of your pipeline becomes more and more difficult. SalesView, an award-winning sales intelligence application from InsideView, serves this very need – leveraging the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies to increase sales productivity and velocity (a movement known as 'Sales 2.0'). SalesView provides account executives real-time access to relevant news alerts, relationship analysis and company information on prospects, and is the first sales intelligence application to be natively available within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so sales people access this insight at the point of need. Whether it's list-building, prospecting, lead qualification or account planning, SalesView blends the information living in traditional data sources and across the Web into a single snapshot so you can drive sales forward.

At its core, SalesView offers access to a ‘companies and contacts’ database that captures its rich intelligence from more than 20,000 content sources, including traditional data providers including Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ, Cortera, and emerging social media content including Jigsaw, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, one unintended consequence of data proliferation has been conflicting data between providers, or worse yet, incorrect and incomplete information about your prospects. SalesView’s Smart Cloud™ platform resolves this issue and delivers the most complete and accurate profile information possible by comparing similar profiles from multiple sources, and reconciling any conflicting data points.

You can search, build and export lists, and mine this raw data for specific leads or prospects. However, where SalesView really shines is in its seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. SalesView lives as a mash-up on Account, Lead, and Contact page layouts. It automatically searches for Company or People matches when the record is being viewed, and allows the user to make a selection if multiple matches are returned.

The Account mashup displays, in a tabbed format, a summary of the account with key data points such as its SEC code, annual revenue, # employees, corporate address, competitors, etc. The application also offers a tab that displays all available Key Contacts known at the account – and delivers some of the most comprehensive list of ‘director and above’ contacts you will find anywhere. A feature dubbed “Smart Connections™” surfaces any hidden relationships that exist between sales reps and their prospects through colleagues, previous employers, board of directors, and existing customers. SalesView also integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn and Facebook, letting salespeople tap into their relationships on these platforms. Additionally, SalesView grabs data on open jobs at the Company using SimplyHired, making it a great tool for a headhunter on the lookout for new business opportunities.

Another key feature is the access to all press releases and news articles that mention the selected account; and alerts – available through the “Smart Agents™ feature – that can be set up at the user level to notify oneself of events such as leadership changes, product releases, IPO announcements, bankruptcy, etc. These notifications serve to motivate your Sales reps to make well-timed and prepared calls to customers and prospects with something relevant to discuss – hopefully increasing the overall quality of interactions.

Common uses of SalesView include:

• List building: SalesView compiles information from multiple sources and identifies relationships that are critical to selling at all levels of an organization, from the CEO and board members down to line-of-business directors and managers.
• Prospecting: SalesView removes the hassle of searching traditional contact databases and instead connects the dots for you so you can connect and engage with the most targeted and researched prospects at any given time.
• Lead qualification: Because SalesView works within Microsoft Dynamics CRM to bring all of this synthesized information right to you, it improves both the quality and speed of lead qualification efforts.
• Account planning: SalesView finds and alerts you on key events which inform your sales strategies. While conventional tools produce many irrelevant results and miss too many critical events, SalesView spots the best opportunities and supplies just the intelligence you need to act on opportunities immediately
• Data accuracy: Smart Cloud™ platform enables content validation by cross-checking information across data sources, identifying likely matches, reconciling any conflicting data points, and then generating a single, composite Smart Record™. This delivers the most complete and accurate profile possible.
• CRM adoption: SalesView helps drive CRM adoption by delivering sales intelligence where the sales reps need it most, directly within their CRM. SalesView turns Microsoft Dynamics CRM into a one-stop-shop for all prospecting and selling activities, making CRM an actual productivity tool for the rep, rather than just a reporting tool for managers.

All in all, the Web is becoming an increasingly valuable - but also time-consuming - place to gather what you need for sales success.  From subscription-based, structured databases (e.g. Thomson Reuters) to freely available, unstructured social media (e.g. Twitter), SalesView does all of the aggregation and analysis for you.

SalesView is available in three flavors:

1. SalesView FREE, which as the name implies is a free version, and provides light account research and qualification capabilities.
2. SalesView PRO, the full featured sales intelligence solution, is designed for the solo sales professional.
3. SalesView TEAM, the enterprise version, is designed to promote a collaborative sales process.

SalesView is used by over 15,000 sales professionals and 1,700 companies worldwide, including Adobe, BMC, CapGemini, IBM, Polycom, and VMWare.

Go to www.InsideView.com/Microsoft for more information.

This is a great solution that works in both OnPremises and Online deployments.

- Eric Boocock