InsideSales.com Releases PowerText, PowerSocial Tools

InsideSales.com has announced a series of updates to its PowerSuite sales automation and predictive analytics platform, including gamification and social elements, as well as SMS messaging for sales reps.

"We said, 'Salespeople don't care about analytics or tracking trends—they just want to talk to somebody,'" comments Ken Krogue, president and cofounder of InsideSales.com. "We already learned that voicemail was better than email. But we thought 'What about LinkedIn? How can it be [used more effectively] than email?'"

PowerSocial, available for Salesforce.com or its PowerDialer platform users, enables reps to gain a better understanding of prospects via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and comes with embedded analytics and reporting capabilities. PowerSocial for Salesforce provides an automatic capture, log, and report of social interactions.

When a Salesforce.com contact page is opened, an automatic LinkedIn search window comes up in PowerSocial, enabling the user to send an In-Mail, view public and company information, or send an Invitation to Connect without logging in a second time. According to Krogue, "With a single click, I can reach out and connect to you, and with another click, I can send you a LinkedIn message, which gets a 700 percent higher response rate [than traditional email]."

For Twitter, the sales rep can send a Tweet and view recent Twitter feeds from his or her PowerSocial tool. The same goes for message postings and public profiles within Google+ and Facebook.

InsideSales.com's launch of PowerText taps into the immediacy of SMS messaging, providing a way to schedule appointment reminders between sales reps and prospects with an automatic capture and log of the initial exchange in the CRM record.

"Research has shown that thirty-seven percent of appointments get missed from the prospect point of view…and using a text message right before [a meeting] bumps the show rate up twenty percent," Krogue says. He adds that in "thirty percent of appointments, the salesperson is late too or misses it, so we're building a tool now to send a text to the sales rep as well."

InsideSales.com has also introduced PowerStandings, which brings gamification elements like leader boards, achievement tracking, badges, and challenges to PowerDialer for Salesforce 5.0 users.

"We're finding it's popping [sales] productivity somewhere between eight to ten percent," Krogue observes. "But the bigger deal is it's boosting usage and adoption [of CRM usage] by almost fifty percent."

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