The blog from the folks at Glance Networks -- the quick-connecting screen-sharing tool designed to help Sales pros make the greatest impact on every call throughout the sales cycle.
Drinks are on Glance, as we celebrate the launch of Glance for Salesforce, along with our partners CodeScience and GearsCRM. Glance for Salesforce is a version of the service that’s fully integrated with Force.com, Salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform. Glance for Salesforce will be available in early December; Glance will publicly demonstrate the solution for the first time at Dreamforce (booth #1107).
Glance for Salesforce enables sales representatives to launch demos instantly from within Salesforce, while behind the scenes Glance’s Cloud Service automatically tracks and stores each rep’s activity enabling real-time reporting. Glance for Salesforce dashboards provide critical insight into how sales demos impact rep productivity and the corresponding bottom line.
At the party, we'll be giving away our famous "Quota Killer" tee-shirts, and trying out B Bar's and Glance's signature Quota Killer cocktail (that's right, ask for it by name!)
Glance is a finalist in the Annual Top Sales Awards 2010 in the Sales 2.0 solution category. Between November 24 and December 1, you can show your support for Glance by voting for us (see below)!
Glance is an extremely light weight, fast connecting sales and support tool which differs vastly from traditional web conferencing applications like Webex and Gotomeeting. Our service is engineered for impromptu conversations, rather than large scale, cumbersome, pre-scheduled events.
And, if you're a Salesforce user, you can soon start up a Glance sales demo right from within Salesforce, as we launch Glance for Salesforce on December 6.
If you've never used Glance, you can try it free for 7 days.
Want to be a Quota Killer? (Who doesn't?) Give us 3 minutes at Dreamforce, and we'll show you how...
The Glance team is gearing up for our annual trip to Dreamforce - and if you are too, we'd love to meet you! Stop by Glance's Booth 1107 in the Cloud Expo, and in 3 minutes we'll show you how to kill your quota by using Glance for Salesforce to:
Launch demos instantly from within Salesforce;
Track and store each sales rep’s activity; and
Gain critical insight into how sales demos impact rep productivity and bottom line.
Hey, and just for stopping by our booth, we'll give you our exclusive Quota Killer tee-shirt.
Even better, if you wear your Quota Killer tee-shirt at Dreamforce, we'll give you a $15 iTunes card or Killers CD on the spot! (If you've been under a rock, The Killers are an indie rock band whose music is guaranteed to get you amped for your cold call sessions.)
Glance differs from traditional web conferencing and webinar tools in that it’s engineered for impromptu conversations, rather than for pre-scheduled events. Glance sessions can be initiated with just one click. With no software to download, participants are instantly connected. Glance solutions are already used by thousands of companies worldwide to enhance productivity, shorten sales cycles, reduce costs and close more business.
The reason? Its got a title that's heavily searched on during the holiday season. And our blog post is #2 on Google when you type in the phrase "cook a turkey in the dishwasher". See, apparently there's an old urban legend running around the US (and I've heard the UK, too) that claims you can steam-cook a turkey by wrapping it in tin foil and running it through the long cycle of your dishwasher (why you'd want to is another story...)
Unfortunately, that blog post is not actually about your Thanksgiving menu, but about the idea that cooking a turkey in the dishwasher is adding gratuitous complexity to a simple tradition -- good, ole' oven-cooked Thankgiving turkey. Analagously, we here at Glance feel that we don't want to heap superflous and complex features onto software that's engineered to be elegantly simple for our users.
But the real point of this post is that we've got proof that writing (relevant) SEO-friendly blog posts will draw leads to your site via organic search results.
And to make the most of that fact, here are 5 tips for writing SEO-friendly content:
Pack your title with SEO keywords (blog titles are given significant weight from search engines);
Link to your previous blog posts (creates a search engine push)
Incorporate relevant and compelling images in your post (including images helps your post appear on Google, Bing or Yahoo image searches, and hey, why not use all possible doors to your content?);
Tag your post (adds weight to the discussion topics throughout your post);
And finally, use relevant keywords throughout your post (and give them more weight by bolding them and using them in subtitles).
(By the way, I guarantee we'll get more pageviews on the dishwasher-cooked turkey post(s) due to the number of times I've used the phrase in this post!)
Tom Scontras, VP of Sales and Marketing at Glance presents tips to help you succeed, with special guest appearance by well-known Second City Improv actor, Alex Fendrich (otherwise, known as Glance's own "Don't Be That Guy" - Steve from Synthasaurus Software).
Tips I learned from the Tom and Alex's presentation:
Today's customers are totally overloaded and don't have time for you;
Sales pros need to "stand out from the pack" of all the OTHER sales calls;
Having a call plan is good, but...what happens when your prospect throws you a curve ball?
That's where the art of improvisation comes in - become skilled at it;
Plus...having industry knowledge gives you real confidence to improvise when needed.
We've all experienced them, whether we want to admit it or not - those awkward moments in a sales call when we realize things haven't gone quite as we had planned. At the recent AA-ISP conference, Inside Sales Boston 2010, sponsor Glance asked colleagues in the Sales industry "what's been your most embarrassing sales situation?"
Watch and enjoy! (And watch for our cameras and mic at the next inside sales conference you attend - its your turn next!)
Including Insights From Ray Kurzweil, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Jeff Han, and Patti Maes...
Earlier this year, Andrew Davis invited me to put together a presentation about emerging technologies that I felt might impact the rich media communication industry. He wanted me to present it at his Wainhouse Research Futures Summit in July 09.
In truth, I think any talk about the future is pretty presumptuous -- even silly. I doubt anyone has much of a clue about what will drive future innovation -- certainly not me. Having that insight liberated me from worrying about having to say anything "profound" or "right". I felt it just had to be fun. Fun to give and fun to watch.
Even better, I realized I could design the presentation so that I wouldn't even have to "give" the talk itself. I could let others give the talk for me. Here's how...
I spent some late nights scouring the web for talks given by thinkers and innovators and researchers that I felt had some really great ideas. I intentionally focused on people completely outside the rich media industry, as I think the best ideas come from "outsiders".
I narrowed my list down to a few particularly pithy talks, edited them for length and strung them together into a narrative.
I looked to Hollywood for inspiration as well -- because I think some of the most creative ideas come from screenwriters unencumbered by the mundane constraint of having to worry about building their creations.
I include some clips of Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrating one of his innovations (called Seadragon), which lets you effortlessly zoom in and out of big data sets of super-high resolution imagery. I think it has tremendous potential for the publishing and rich media industries.
I also take time to admire some of the futuristic motion-sensing UI to manipulate massive amounts of video content, made popular in Spielberg's 2002 Minority Report. I learned that Tom Cruise's frantic hand gestures were in fact guided and inspired by real-world gesture-based work pioneered by MIT Media Lab researchers, who have since founded oblong.com and managed to implement many of his motions in a real product, which I briefly preview.
I also include parts of a fabulous live demo from 2006 by Jeff Han (NYU), showing just how intuitive (and fun!) a brilliantly intuitive multitouch lighttable can be when manipulating massive amounts of visual data. Witness the inspiration behind the stunningly popular iPhone that appeared a few years later...
I also have fun showcasing original and modern versions of the Pepper's Ghost illusion, invented back in the 1800s. A monstrous new display based on that illusion makes for a great show in front of a big audience, but it's such a totally fake experience for the presenters that I find little real-world value in it.
FYI, I built my talk in Keynote. I recorded each clips on my Mac using Screenflow, an elegantly intuitive screen capture and editing product that I highly recommend.
Our intern Scott then used Screenflow to capture the streamed video of my talk. Then he imported my original video clips into ScreenFlow, positioning and overlaying them, then re-rendered everything with ScreenFlow into the video you see above. That way, you get to enjoy the clips in this video at a nice high quality level. (Make sense?!)
For information, contact: Michelle G. Faulkner Big Swing Communications michelle@bigswingcomm.com +1-617-510-6998
Glance launches new integrated, on-the-fly-demo tool for Salesforce CRM Sales reps will be able to launch demos instantly from Salesforce
ARLINGTON, Mass. – November 8, 2010 – Glance Networks, the Sales 2.0 thought leader known best for its on-the-fly-demo tool, announced today Glance for Salesforce – a version of the service that’s fully integrated with Force.com, Salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud computing platform. Glance for Salesforce will be available in early December; Glance will publicly demonstrate the solution for the first time at Dreamforce 2010 (booth #1107).
Glance for Salesforce enables sales representatives to launch demos instantly, while behind the scenes Glance’s Cloud Service automatically tracks and stores each rep’s activity enabling real-time reporting. Glance for Salesforce dashboards provide critical insight into how sales demos impact rep productivity and the corresponding bottom line.
Glance solutions are already used by thousands of companies worldwide to enhance productivity, shorten sales cycles, reduce costs and close more business. Glance differs from traditional web conferencing and webinar tools in that it’s engineered for impromptu conversations, rather than for pre-scheduled events. Glance sessions can be initiated with just one click. With no software to download, participants are instantly connected. Glance for Salesforce can also be used for customer support sessions.
Glance for Salesforce turns sales reps into quota killers According to Tom Scontras, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Glance, Glance for Salesforce was developed to address the fact that customers and prospects are increasingly harried, and less and less likely to spend a lot of time on the phone with a salesperson. Instead, they gather information in sound bites, in a series of dynamic conversations, leveraging technology to gain access to what they want, when they want it. “Customer expectations have changed so much in the past few years, and the smartest companies are adapting their sales processes to match those expectations,” said Scontras. “People don’t have the time for lengthy phone conversations or online meetings. They might give a salesperson two minutes to make their case. Glance for Salesforce equips sales reps with the ability to make the greatest impact even in the briefest phone conversation and helps them kill their quotas.”
Current Glance user Trish Bertuzzi, President of The Bridge Group, Inc., said, “We are already using both Glance and Salesforce CRM as core components within our sales process and are eager to implement the integrated Glance for Salesforce service. I am confident that it will make a significant impact in productivity by enabling reps to launch demos directly from Salesforce. The innovative reporting and management dashboards will allow us to accurately measure the impact these sessions have within any stage of our sales cycle. We’re excited about rolling this out to our team as well as our client base in December.”
Scontras noted that many of Glance’s existing users were already on the Force.com platform for sales and support. “When we asked how we could help make their teams even more productive, Salesforce integration was at the top of their wish list,” said Scontras. “We’re really pleased with the outcome, and think it will give us a great advantage when selling into a company that’s already using Salesforce CRM. Our delivery models, in terms of ‘no software,’ are very well aligned.”
Glance for Salesforce will be available in early December through the Salesforce.com AppExchange 2 marketplace at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/. For a free, 7-day trial of Glance, visit glance.net.
About Glance Networks Glance provides the first on-the-fly-demo tool that enables users to launch impromptu sales and support sessions instantly with one click. Designed to foster relationship building in a Sales 2.0 world, Glance solutions are used by thousands of companies worldwide to enhance productivity, shorten sales cycles, reduce costs and close more business. Learn more and sign up for a free trial at www.glance.net.
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Glance Networks and Glance are trademarks of Glance Networks Inc. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
