Facebook is Catching Up to LinkedIn as a Professional Network

Editor’s Note: This article by Reachable CEO Al Campa was originally published on PandoDaily.

LinkedIn has done a masterful job of establishing itself as the professional network — the top place to post résumés and connect with business colleagues. The network has done an even better job of monetizing its 175 million members’ résumés into a $1 billion-dollar business with $10 billion in market capitalization.

There is just one problem: Facebook is catching up.

As CEO of Reachable, a social business application that leverages information from both networks, I have had a front-row seat for the LinkedIn vs. Facebook battle in the professional contacts arena. Reachable builds out the professional network for an entire company including all its employees, and with permission, accesses data from numerous sources, including email systems, CRM systems, and social networks. As a result, we can track where our customers store their professional contacts.

Over the last year, I have noticed an interesting trend: Facebook is gaining as a source of professional connections. Last year, about 95 percent of new Reachable customers uploaded their LinkedIn connections, indicating that LinkedIn was their default professional network and the primary source of their professional contacts. In March of this year, only about 48 percent of our users uploaded Facebook friends, meaning they considered the network a less valuable source of professional connections.

However, over the last nine months, I have seen Facebook steadily increase as a source of professional connections: Now, 65 percent of Reachable users upload Facebook friends as professional contacts, a 35 percent increase over that period. Total LinkedIn uploads have dropped to 88 percent. The percentage is still very high, but the trend is clear: Facebook is catching up as a source of professional connections.

I think this is an inevitable trend. Facebook has become the center of many people’s online existence and their primary communication platform; user stats show they spend hours each day on Facebook. LinkedIn is a place where people post their résumés and make a few business connections, but they only spend minutes per month there. This difference in time invested on the sites is why Facebook will ultimately displace LinkedIn as the default professional network.

We have heard from many of our customers that LinkedIn has several shortcomings as a source of connections. Due to the limited time users typically spend on the site, their LinkedIn networks can’t possibly represent everyone they know professionally. Most people don’t aggressively connect with co-workers and associates unless they are actively looking for a job. And those who do aggressively connect with others and accept every connection request wind up with a network of people they don’t really know — which does not help them when they attempt to use it.

We call this the “Curse of the Casual Connection.” By connecting to someone they don’t really know or accepting a request from a stranger, LinkedIn users may feel like they are “building a professional network.” But all they are really doing is polluting the network of people they really know with strangers. These casual connections rarely develop into a significant relationship because users spend so little time on LinkedIn.

Most users track and curate their Facebook friends much more carefully because they spend more time on Facebook, are more engaged with their friends and share more information there. Facebook users are less likely to share photos and life’s moments with complete strangers, which is why the bar for friending is typically higher on Facebook. With LinkedIn, there is little risk to connecting with a stranger since there really isn’t much interaction or sharing taking place. LinkedIn users don’t curate their connections as carefully because they rarely visit the site. The bar, and hence the quality, of connections is lower.

Another factor is that Facebook users have finally realized that their Facebook friends are professionals too, with jobs and connections that can help them find a new job or introduce them to business opportunities.

Looking ahead, Facebook will continue its rise as a legitimate source of professional contacts. It is the center of many people’s online lives and they will continue to spend a tremendous amount of time on Facebook. LinkedIn will continue to serve as a place where users publicly post résumés when looking for a job, but due to limited user engagement and interaction on LinkedIn, Facebook will ultimately surpass it as the go-to site for professional networking and contacts.

Reachable Brings Social Proximity Selling to Salesforce.com

Today, at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce event, we announced a new version of Reachable that delivers social proximity selling features for Salesforce.com users.  Here’s the press release…

Reachable Brings Social Proximity Selling to Salesforce.com

 SAN FRANCISCO, CA— September 19, 2012—At Salesforce.com’s [NYSE: CRM] Dreamforce conference, Reachable today announced a new version of their solution that delivers new social proximity selling features for Salesforce.com users.  The new version gives organizations additional capabilities to use the strength of professional and personal connections – or “social proximity” – to driver higher sales productivity.

“Business is all about personal relationships.  People like to buy things from people they know and trust,” said Al Campa, Reachable’s CEO.  “Innovative sales organizations realize this and are starting to use social proximity as a way to improve their sales productivity.  Assigning key accounts to the sales reps with the best relationships to those accounts is a no-brainer.  Reachable now makes this possible across large sales teams.”

New Social Proximity Selling Features

The new version of Reachable enables Salesforce.com users to:

• Compare sales reps and accounts. Reachable enables sales managers to see which of their sales reps have the strongest relationships to target accounts and lets them re-assign accounts within Salesforce.com with just a single click.

• Include customer relationships in an organization’s enterprise social graph.  Reachable automatically imports the contacts of an organization’s customers into their Reachable enterprise social graph.  Each imported person is added as a Reachable contact for the account owner, greatly expanding their reach to more people and companies.

These new features complement the other social proximity capabilities already in Reachable that enable Salesforce.com users to rank their Leads and Opportunities based on the strength of personal relationships.

About Reachable, Inc.

Reachable is the developer of a social enterprise solution that enables organizations to leverage their collective relationships to reach more people and close more business faster. Reachable helps sales reps close more deals, recruiters find more talent, and professionals establish new business relationships. Reachable is backed by Rho Ventures, Signal Peak Ventures, and Parkview Ventures, and is based in Palo Alto, CA and Salt Lake City, UT. For more information, please visit www.reachable.com.

Marc Benioff for President

Today, in conjunction with this week’s Salesforce.com Dreamforce event, we launched a marketing campaign to elect Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff President because “anything is Reachable”.  As our ad in USA Today states,

Reachable can make this and other amazing things happen by leveraging the power of your network for social selling. In fact, Reachable can leverage your entire company’s network to determine the “social proximity” of everyone in your organization to anyone you’d like to reach. Close that huge deal. Break into that new market. Blow out your numbers. Elect Marc Benioff for President in 2012!

Place your vote for Marc Benioff for President by going to www.BenioffForPresident.com.  And tell your friends to vote so we can see social proximity in action.

Here’s our ad that was in today’s USA Today…

Social Discovery of Business Relationships

Enterprises big and small are realizing that the capabilities introduced in consumer social networks can add immense value and productivity to the corporate world.  The growth in adoption of enterprise social networking tools like Yammer, Chatter and Jive is evidence that the way companies communicate internally among employees and externally with customers and partners is changing dramatically and permanently.

One of the fundamental reasons for this change is the benefit of social discovery.  Social techniques like groups, feeds, @mentions, and hash tagging enable employees to effortlessly discover content, expertise and information from across the company in ways that email just can’t touch.  There is a 2-day conference going on right now in San Francisco dedicated to this topic of social discovery.

So why don’t CRM systems to a better job of allowing Sales Professionals to discover social relationships?  Companies spend an incredible amount of effort, time, and money getting their sales professionals to enter Contacts, and update Opportunities.  Shouldn’t there be a reward for the teams on the front line driving revenue for inputting data into CRM?

After 10 years in sales & sales management at Salesforce.com having seen SFA implementations big and small, simple and complex, I believe there should be much more reward and insights available to the selling professionals, and it should come from a company’s enterprise social graph.  The enterprise social graph simply stated is every relationship of every employee, customer and partner your company has, on line and off.  With all the efforts being invested in social media, one of the most valuable assets a company has, it’s collection of relationships, is being overlooked.  Layering your enterprise social graph into CRM can add powerful social discovery into the simplest of tasks that can answer important questions during a sales pursuit, and can drive significant sales productivity:

1. What if a brand new Sales Rep at your company, by simply viewing an account in CRM, could immediately discover which company executives have meaningful relationships in the account?
2. What if a Sales Rep could enter a new contact in a key account, and immediately discover colleagues that worked with that person at previous companies?
3. Or one of my favorites, what if you could pull up an account and discover people in the account that used your product at a previous company?

Your enterprise social graph can tell you exactly those things and so much more!

Stay tuned!

In Sales, “Location, Location, Location” is Not Always Everything

Editor’s Note: This article by Reachable CEO Al Campa was originally published on Business 2 Community.

With all the changes in business, one thing remains the same: business is about people. Despite globalization, technology revolutions, social networks, and razor-thin competitive margins, business is still about people working with people. People who can’t connect effectively with others rarely do well in business.

Consider sales, for instance. We buy things from people we have a positive relationship with; people we like and trust. And if those relationships stay positive, we keep buying from them, even if they switch companies and sell something different.  The relationship and trust endure.  Recent research indicated that a prospect is five times more likely to return a sales call if they have some type of personal connection to the sales person.  This results in a 243% increase in effectiveness throughout the sales process.  Sales managers would die for a 24% increase in effectiveness, let alone a 243% increase.

So one would assume that when companies assign sales territories and determine which sales reps will sell to which accounts, they would consider the strength of social relationships – or “social proximity” – in their assignments, particularly since there is a goldmine of relationships they can leverage, from their employees, customers, and partners.  But most don’t.  Most sales territories are still determined by geographic boundaries and physical proximity. Sales reps are assigned to nearby zip codes or area codes, or they are assigned by state boundaries where they live.

Here are three reasons why you should consider social proximity selling for your organization:

Increase productivity for outbound prospecting.  The recent research I mentioned earlier showed that for every 1000 prospecting calls made, only 345 are returned if there is no personal connection but 849 are returned if there is a personal connection.  That is a 243% increase in productivity.

Improve conversion rate for inbound leads.  Inbound leads can be prioritized by the strength of the personal connection somebody in your organization has to a prospective account.  This enables you to focus your sales resources on opportunities where you have an inside edge.

Get deeper penetration into target accounts.  Target accounts can be assigned based on who has the strongest personal connections to them.  This will allow you to leverage established relationships with key influencers and decision makers in order to extend your presence within key accounts.

In the past, it would have been difficult to determine who had the strongest connection to a particular person or account.  But now, solutions are available that can mine social networks, email address books, and CRM systems for connections between your company’s expansive network of contacts and your target customer.  Incorporating this social proximity into your sales process could significantly increase sales productivity and drive top line revenue growth.

Reachable’s Enterprise Social Graph Tops 100 Billion Business Connections

Today, we announced a new version of Reachable, which features an upgraded enterprise social graph with over 100 billion business connections.  Here is the press release…

Reachable’s Enterprise Social Graph Tops 100 Billion Business Connections

Solution fuels “social proximity selling”, a new approach to increasing sales productivity

 PALO ALTO, CA – (July 19, 2012) – Reachable, Inc., a leader in social enterprise solutions, announced today that a new version of its enterprise social graph has topped 100 billion business connections.  Reachable’s enterprise social graph consists of public connections derived from the profiles of millions of business professionals and companies, which is then customized for a company with the private connections of their employees, customers and partners.  Reachable enables organizations to leverage all of their relationships to drive much higher sales productivity.

“Companies are sitting on a goldmine of under-utilized social assets – the relationships of all their employees, their customers and their partners,” said Reachable CEO, Al Campa.  “Reachable gathers all of these relationships and combines them with the over 100 billion connections we generated so companies can leverage their social assets and sell more effectively.”

Reachable’s Enterprise Social Graph

Reachable’s enterprise social graph primarily consists of connections derived by intelligently analyzing the profiles of millions of business professionals and companies, which are aggregated from a number of sources.  Connections are determined by looking at various attributes, like work history and educational background, among the profiles.

The enterprise social graph also includes the private connections of a company, enabling organizations to leverage Reachable and its 100 billion business connections.  A company’s connections include employees – and their contacts – customers and partners.  These connections are kept private and are never shared.

Enabling “Social Proximity Selling”

With Reachable, sales organizations can leverage the entire enterprise social graph from within their CRM system and can see the leads, opportunities and accounts where they have strong personal connections.  This enables a new type of sales strategy – social proximity selling – where leads and opportunities are managed based on the strength of personal connections, and not on geographic proximity.  Research recently conducted showed that a prospect is five times more likely to return a sales call if they have some type of connection to the sales person, versus a cold call where they have no personal connection.

Reachable’s new version is now live and is available at www.reachable.com.

About Reachable, Inc.

Reachable is the developer of a social enterprise solution that enables organizations to leverage their collective relationships to reach more people and close more business faster. Reachable helps sales reps close more deals, recruiters find more talent, and professionals establish new business relationships. Reachable is backed by Rho Ventures, Signal Peak Ventures, and Parkview Ventures, and is based in Palo Alto, CA and Salt Lake City, UT. For more information, please visit www.reachable.com.

What the Yammer Acquisition Says About Microsoft – and Enterprise Social Networking

Editor’s Note: This article by Reachable CEO Al Campa was originally published on PandoDaily.

Much of the recent analysis on Microsoft’s $1.2B acquisition of Yammer focused on the slick application Yammer had built, their rapid viral adoption, and how it represented the assent of the social enterprise as the next hot category. Certainly all this is true, as Yammer is a very simple and intuitive application, and had a devoted following of several million users. And Microsoft’s $1.2B speaks volumes about the value of the social enterprise to an established industry leader.

But this acquisition also says a lot about Microsoft and their current state of mind. Something drove them to merrily pay $1.2B for a company with less than $20M in revenues. $1.2B might be pocket change for Microsoft, but it is still an incredible amount of money.

For that amount of money, Microsoft could have hired 1,200 developers and paid them a handsome salary for 10 years to build a social application on an unprecedented scale.  Anything Microsoft built would be backed by a well-funded marketing machine and an army of Microsoft sales reps and channel partners capable of selling it worldwide in massive volumes. But the company chose instead to pay that fortune for an existing application with a relatively modest user base and revenues.

This suggests three things about Microsoft:

First, the company didn’t think it could replicate Yammer’s success – even with a virtual mountain of money to spend on it. Building a social application is a tricky thing right now. Some companies harness the magic and some don’t. Luck and timing play a huge role in adoption. Yammer had figured out how to virally spread within the restricted walls of large enterprises. And how to monetize this adoption, albeit modestly so far. To Microsoft, this represented solid gold.

Second, the move also suggests that Microsoft was desperate to get into the social enterprise game now – not next year or the year after. The company missed out on consumer social media and watched Facebook, Twitter, and others establish dominant positions. Determined not to let the social enterprise revolution pass it by, Microsoft purchased Yammer to compete with established leaders like Salesforce.com and newcomers like Jive. The social enterprise train is leaving now and Microsoft didn’t want to get left at the station.

And lastly, Microsoft’s acquisition shows they realize SharePoint needs a big-time makeover. Microsoft has long touted SharePoint as an all-in-one collaboration platform that serves as the focal point for enterprise content and communication. Yammer’s success shows that this in fact was not the case, and that Microsoft likely took a long hard look in the mirror and didn’t like what it saw staring back at them.

This deal highlights one of my favorite things about the technology industry and business in general: For every new startup that finds success, and for every new market created by the relentless innovation in technology, there is some established company somewhere that is missing out.

One company’s success always comes at the expense of another company. A new market almost always replaces an older more mature market. Google’s success comes at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft. Facebook’s success comes at the expense of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Twitter’s success will probably come at the expense of Facebook and Google. It’s the natural order of business and in particular the technology business.

In this case, Yammer was not a threat to Microsoft as much as the rise social enterprise was a threat to their enterprise franchise. Microsoft felt compelled to move aggressively to grab some beach-front property on the social enterprise gold coast before someone else did.

The question is whether it will pay off. With a current market valuation of 3.5x trailing revenues, Microsoft must sell $350M of Yammer annually to justify the $1.2B expense.  It undoubtedly hopes to sell much more than that. And it’ll need to, in order to maintain that beachfront property because the rise of the social enterprise will shake up the established players. It’s the natural order of business.

A Q&A on Social Proximity Selling

Editor’s Note: The Q&A below was conducted between Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing and Reachable CEO Al Campa.  It was originally published on the Heinz Marketing website.

Many forward-thinking sales professionals have built their own social selling platforms and strategies, but more and more start-ups are attempting to systematize and scale the execution and impact of relationship-based selling. Reachable is doing some particularly interesting things in this regard, and CEO Al Campa below shares some of his perspective on what social selling means and how to scale it.

What does social proximity selling mean to you?
It means better leveraging the social connections of your sales team when assigning leads, allocating accounts and dividing up territories. We all have networks of people that we know and have established relationships with over time. Sales people leverage them when they can because it’s more effective than cold-calling.

Research shows that if you have a connection inside an account, meaning you know someone, or know someone who knows someone, there is a 5 times better chance you’ll get a call-back than if you know no one at all.

Social Proximity Selling takes these social connections into account when assigning opportunities. It’s more about who has the best chance to get in the door and close this account, rather than who is the closest geographically.

Why is it so hard for sales organizations to recognize and adopt this more actively?
Sales people recognize the value of their network and use it all the time. To date, it’s never been possible to evaluate social connection strength across an entire sales force against a set of targeted accounts. We’re now able to deliver this capability.

How do you scale social selling beyond the Jill Rowley’s of the world? How do you make it less manual, less individualized, and more integrated for sales organizations?
Jill Rowley is like the Michael Phelps of social selling. She makes it looks so easy because she’s a natural at it. Most swimmers are not Michael Phelps, but can still swim. And most sales people are not Jill Rowley, but can still social sell. It’s as easy as leveraging the connections you already have, which most sales reps already do.

Reachable institutionalizes this across an entire sales force, integrates it directly into their CRM system and makes it a core function that their CRM systems deliver. It’s like rolling a ball downhill. It takes off on its own momentum.

How should sales leaders get started with this? What are the first steps to start integrating social selling into their organizations?
Take your top target accounts and see who on your sales team has the strongest social connections to those accounts. Compare this to the social connection strength of the current account owners to see if there is a large discrepancy. You might find that the Sales Rep in the best position to close the account is not assigned to that account and you may need to reassign your target accounts to better optimize your resources.

Social Proximity Selling is all about putting your best foot forward and leveraging all the social assets your team brings to their job to maximize sales effectiveness.

Leveraging Social Proximity to Sell Smarter

Editor’s Note: The article below by Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, was recently posted on Business 2 Community.

Every good sales professional knows that leveraging personal contacts is a fantastic way to generate leads and close deals. A recent study by Reachable places numeric values on this common knowledge: The Value of Connections infographic illustrates the findings of the study, which took a look at a random sample of 300 business professionals involved in the purchase process at their companies. It found that:

• Calling on an account where there is a personal connection makes it five times more likely to receive a return call than those without any connections.
• More returned calls means more deals in the pipeline and results in an increase in sales productivity of 240%
• Callers with direct connections were about 11 times more likely to get a call back.
• For every 1,000 sales calls made, 345 were returned if the caller didn’t have a connection; callers who did have personal connections received 849 calls back out of 1,000 made.

Common sense tells us that personal connections enhance sales effectiveness. But the study shows that it’s not only direct personal connections that make a difference: A 2^nd degree connection, or knowing someone who knows someone in an account significantly increases the likelihood that a sales call will be returned.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means companies are sitting on a goldmine that they haven’t yet fully begun to explore. Right now, most companies aren’t completely leveraging their connections. If they’re savvy sales people, individual employees use their connections to generate leads, but most businesses aren’t proactively taking advantage of all the connections – direct and indirect – within the organization and its partners, vendors and other stakeholders.

Given the incredible ROI companies can gain by leveraging their collective social graph, it makes sense to identify all the connections within an enterprise and capitalize on them. Fortunately, new technologies and new data sources have made this possible.  Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great sources of connections.  Email systems and other enterprise systems yield corporate connections to customers, partners and vendors.  And powerful new analytics can now collect and score the connections to find the strongest links to any person or any account and extend the company’s social reach.

In light of these new tools, it also makes sense for company leaders to rethink the way they divide sales opportunities and pursue leads. Geographic or vertical-based sales divisions are traditional ways to manage sales territories. But since connections can drive a five-fold increase in responses and more than double productivity, businesses looking to revitalize sales or expand into new territories should consider a new strategy: social proximity, in which sales teams are organized around the social graph. By harnessing the power of social media and designing a sales approach based on the key driver in closing deals – connections – companies can improve ROI and generate new revenue.

The Value of Personal Connections in Sales

Today, we are releasing the results of research we recently conducted to understand the value of personal connections in the sales process; in particular, when it comes to the returning of sales phone calls.  The detailed results can be seen in the infographic below but here are the two key takeways:

• Personal connections have a big impact on whether people return sales calls.  When a salesperson has a personal connection to the person they are calling, the person being called is 5.2 times more likely to return the call than if there is no personal connection.
• Personal connections trigger a large increase in productivity through the sales process.  The increase in likelihood that a sales call will be returned because of a personal connection leads to a 243% increase in sales productivity, which ultimately results in significantly more closed deals for the same number of prospecting calls.

Salespeople have always tried to leverage their personal connections to gain the upper hand.  Now, however, since a lot of a person’s connections are documented in a digital form – whether it is in social networks or email contact lists – there is an opportunity to take advantage of this and use a different approach to selling.  We call the approach Sales Proximity Selling and it involves using the strength of personal relationships, rather than geography, to assign leads and accounts.

The bottom line is that our research demonstrates the significant impact personal connections have in the sales process so every salesperson should do whatever they can to leverage their networks.

Here’s the infographic…