Social Proximity Sales

Cold Fact:

“50% of social CRM initiatives will have zero ROI in 2012. Fan pages and tweets do not contribute in any meaningful way to business objectives” – Gartner

Five Key Business Trends:

– mobile
– global
– social
– distributed
– social media

BUT, business is still all about people. Developing relationships with people is still key to business success. Sales is about relationship management. People buy from people they know, like and trust. Establishing networks of trust, knowledge and shared sentiments are key to sales success. Individuals typically have large networks of trust built up over decades (typically 3-4000 individuals). COMPANIES also have large networks, however they are usually siloed in email, LinkedIn accounts, work-history, corporate databases, contracts, CRM, etc.

Be aware of the “curse of the casual connection”. Only connect people who can help you (and who you can help) with networking.

Social Proximity:

Allows enterprises to share network data the same way individuals do, by:

– Aligning sales territories by networks rather than geographically. Do business with clients online using tools such as Skype, Yammer, Jive, WebEx, etc.
– Ranking leads by social score (e.g. whose phone-call will this lead return)
– Assigning accounts by social reach. Who has the best connection into the target account?
– Managing territories and evaluate new markets by social reach
– Determining strategic reach by social network analysis.
– Using tools to determine the private graph (corporate social links) and then combined this with the public graph (D&B, Jigsaw, etc); then rank the *best* connections into the client

Social Analytics:

– measure revenue growth
– manage information
– quantify pilot projects
– measure “cloud time to value”
– determine value of replacing legacy apps

A special form of social analytics is proximity analysis – determining the “best” relationship to differentiate between what you think you know and who you know prior to engagement with the client.