Over 17,000 people gathered in San Francisco last week to hear how forward thinking organizations are becoming Social Enterprises. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff introduced the idea of a Social Divide – the gap that exists between companies that have not adopted social communication practices and their customers and employees who have.
The shift by individuals is evidenced by the fact that in 2011 there were more social messages than email messages. Benioff stated that the 1990s was the decade of Impressions (remember “monetizing eyeballs”?), the 2000s was the decade of Connections (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter all launched), and the 2010s will be the decade of Engagement. A Social Enterprise fully engages internal audiences (i.e. employees, shareholders,…) and external audiences (i.e. customers, suppliers,…).
On the selling front, a new term was added to the list of increasingly narrow terms; Social Media > Social Business > Social Selling and now, Social Prospecting. This refers to using tools like LinkedIn to identify and connect with prospects.
Speaking of LinkedIn, I saw a demo of Sales Navigator, the LinkedIn Premium subscription for salespeople. Sales Navigator includes specialized functions like Lead Builder and Team Link. Team Link lets salespeople see who else in their company is connected to a prospect on LinkedIn, thereby increasing the changes of getting a personal referral.
If you want to leverage your network beyond LinkedIn information, check out Reachable and IntroRocket. Reachable demonstrated how their application gathers your personal email contacts (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Apple Mail and others) and social network connections from Facebook and LinkedIn and consolidates them into your own network of “people you know”. Reachable then enhances your network by comparing it with a database of over 65 million business people to help you uncover business relationships among your social contacts that you never knew about.
Along with leveraging your own connections in a similar fashion, IntroRocket takes your co-workers’ connections into account to make connections between people and companies. Both Reachable and IntroRocket work as standalone browser applications and as Salesforce plug-ins.
All of these social connection applications draw upon a solid LinkedIn network. As a result, companies reap the highest rewards when they take a strategic approach to LinkedIn training rather than leave it to the inconsistent initiative of individual salespeople. By training sales teams how to leverage these new tools, companies make progress toward becoming profitable Social Enterprises.
