I knew this day was coming. Linkedin is a resource professionals have been using for several years to keep in contact with old coworkers as well as build their networks for business use. LinkedIn has been rolling out some new features over the past year hinting that major changes were in the works. It looks like the next phase of LinkedIn features was released last night in the form of LinkedIn Applications. No longer will LinkedIn be seen as a boring text based log of who you have in your network and what career changes they have made. They now have opened the interface to allow for robust interaction with your network by adding applications like WordPress blogs, Box.Net, TripIt and others. I was most interested in the WordPress application but it seems that you need to have your blog hosted on WordPress. For those of us that have self hosted WP blogs, we are out of luck. It looks like LinkedIn didn't think this one all the way through since many professionals have self hosted blogs and now we are kept out of using this functionality. TripIt With today's myriad of travel sites, even the most experienced traveler has their hands full managing ...

It's the comment heard more often than not in sales. "I need more leads." is how most sales people excuse the lack of deals they have or the the explanation for what they need to grow their territories even more. Marketing can run all the campaings they want and you can spend hours searching the web for companies that have been missed by them, or you can do what I have done and sign up for a free email newsletter that send new leads right to your inbox. ProspectsDaily is a site anyone in sales should take a look at along with their parent site JustSell, they seem to have what every sales person needs. sales tips, motivation and additional leads. I was passed along the link several months back by a manager that I keep in contact with and immediately signed up for the newsletters they offer. Since BACN is the new industry term for email you want - But not right now, this falls with in that realm. Loaded with news and industry contacts, this site can give you a fresh set of leads that you would not normally find in LinkedIn or Hoovers. Where do you get the news reported on ...

A friend passed this article along to me knowing that I stay on top of these types of stories. Little did I know that they mentioned NetSuite as a pioneer of the Sales 2.0 era. Thanks Jake! ------------------- It's a question almost as old as commerce itself: Is selling an art or a science? For years, technology companies have been trying to transform the former into the latter. And for years, the results have largely been disappointing. Think of those days as Sales 1.0. We're now in the era of Sales 2.0. Your bottom line may never be the same. Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on. Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force--with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with ...

If you are a professional and trying to network with other people in your industry or get back in touch with past coworkers, LinkedIn is the tool you need. CNN Money wrote about this earlier in the year talking about the growth of the site and how it is used by some of the 8 million plus users. LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It's not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done. LinkedIn as I have said in earlier posts is an account that everyone in a professional environment should have and more importantly, something everyone should want to look its best. Think of your LinkedIn profile like your personal Hoovers page where people that find you should be given quality data.

Maybe you're new to the job market, need a change of pace or maybe your empty wallet is beginning to depress you. whatever the reason, you are looking to get into the highly lucrative position of sales. I say lucrative because how much you make is really up to you. Sales typically pays you a base salary and then you get a commission for the sales that you make, sometimes up to 10% of every deal depending on where you work. I have been with some companies that pay you a commission based on how close to your target you get and some that have a set target, but will pay out on every deal closed. either way, you will make more money than just a regular paycheck if you do well. I have been writing a lot about specific selling techniques and tips for sales people, and I have gotten many emails asking about how a person gets into a sales job and what to look for, so I figured I'd dedicate an entire post to it. First and foremost you need to decide what you want to sell. How do you decide on that? That's the easy part. Ask yourself ...

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive 20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively «

As a sales person, I live in my CRM. It's the primary tool for my profession second only to my phone. Another sales tool I use is a social networking site called LinkedIn. Here is how they discribe themselves "LinkedIn is an online network of more than 10 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries". I call it the MySpace for professionals. I have put together a way to bring the two tools together and make my Salesforce CRM work for me in new ways. When prospecting or in the course of general due diligence, the more you know about your lead the better. LinkedIn has over 10 million registered users. Chance are if you are dealing with a company executive, they have a LinkedIn account. Searching LinkedIn can give you some interesting facts as well as give you better insight to 'who they really are." I used to pull my lead in the CRM that was either uploaded from a trade show or a person asking for more information and cut&paste the name into another tab that had LinkedIn up already. (Yes, tabbed browsing is much ...

This domain will be use for the development of tweaks and modifications to Salesforce.com that a company can use to customize the Salesforce CRM to help drive sales. These posts will be grow over time and will be primarily focused on the sales person and how to use your CRM to gather better information on your accounts, contacts and leads. Since a CRM is supposed to empower the sales person let's make a few adjustments in your Salesforce CRM that will drive better decisions and make your daily sales grind a bit easier the SOCOM way.Many companies use Salesforce, they are the leader in the CRM market. The most obvious appeal for companies to use a hosted CRM as a sales tool is mainly the on demand nature of the system and the ability to give executives a view into the company with special reports and dashboards.But what about the account manager on inside sales person? Besides having a basic listing of leads, contacts and opportunities, what can they do with such a great tool? How many dashboards are available out of the box for them? How customized are the fields in their records? Chances are like most companies you ...

Mean-spirited morons are still running much of the workplace, and it’s time to take a stand. Most nastiness is directed by superiors to subordinates; so before taking a job, do your homework and screen them out in advance. (After all, avoidance is the easier than curing.) To do this, I propose that you check your prospective boss’s references just like she’s checking out yours. I’m not suggesting that you ask your prospective boss for a list of references (you can try, but it may mean you don’t get the job). Read the entire post here.

I am a huge fan of LinkedIn as many of my colleagues can tell you. I found this post from another blogger that explains why LinkedIn is such a great tool. I have listed the top 5 reasons. Go to his blog to read the others. The original poster has the largest LinkedIn network known of. The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven. The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes. People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five. All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees. According to my inside sources, the person with the most pending LinkedIn invitations is...Guy Kawasaki. (Though I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of this factoid.)Most people use LinkedIn to “get to someone” in order to make a sale, form a partnership, or get a job. It ...