Our Take on Privacy

Recently a number of companies have come under fire for taking information from their users without their knowledge.  Path, Facebook, Twitter and others were all exposed to be actively taking information from an iPhone user’s address book without their knowledge.  Google was found to be actively subverting the web privacy capabilities of Safari in spite of promising the opposite.

All guilty parties apologized and promised to do better next time.  But we are left with the uneasy feeling that we are in a “whack-a-mole” situation where the default privacy policy by many companies has become “take what you can get” and “apologize when necessary”.  It makes you wonder what else is going on that you don’t know about and will be exposed next week.

PandoDaily went so far as to say that your address book isn’t really yours anyway since it consists of other people’s information.  By this logic, are emails someone sent me not mine?  Is a document or photo that someone sent me free game?  The whole issue has become both complicated and disturbing.

I remember a speech I heard Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, give many years ago, well before Google went public.  In the Q&A after his speech, someone asked him if you really wanted to keep something private, how would you do it.  His response was perplexing to me at the time.  He said, “Don’t put it on a computer.”  That raised more than a few eyebrows in the audience, who expected him to say things like: don’t email it, don’t put it on a web page, have a secure network, etc.  Nope, he said, “Don’t put it on a computer,” because nothing digital is safe.  Now that comment looks prescient.

At Reachable, we believe that privacy is paramount and we have two fundamental tenants:

1. What’s yours is yours.  Anything you have is by definition yours. Your address book, your emails, your web visits.  You may let us use it as part of our application to make Reachable more useful for you.  But it’s still yours and we’ll never sell it to anyone else or let anyone else use it without your knowledge and consent.  And if you ever decide to stop using Reachable and deactivate your account, all your data will be deleted from our system.  Simple as that.
2. Total transparency.  Reachable will be 100% transparent about what we are doing and how we are using the information that you give us.  We’ll say what we do and do what we say.  We’ll never pretend to be doing one thing while really doing something tricky and malicious.

This whole privacy argument is really about transparency and trust.  Our users put their trust in us by using our service, and we’ll honor that trust and be transparent on our practices.

 - Al Campa, Reachable CEO

Reachable and Social Selling

In our last couple blog posts, we introduced our take on Social Selling and how it is impacting Sales and Marketing.  In this blog post, we will discuss how the Reachable solution supports Social Selling.

Reachable is an online solution that helps business people leverage their personal contacts, and the contacts of others in their organization, to broaden their professional network and reach people they need to know.  Reachable has a number of capabilities that make it ideal for Social Selling…

• It is not easy these days for a sales person to leverage all of their personal contacts, primarily because they are spread out all over the place – in their email address book, in social networks, etc.  Reachable brings together the various contacts a sales person has so they don’t have to check different places to see if they have a connection with a lead or within a target account.  Once a user has imported their contacts, they can be assured that Reachable is scouring all of their contacts to find potential connections.

• Leveraging one’s personal network is important but also being able to leverage the networks of others can extend one’s reach dramatically.  Reachable’s ShareGroup feature lets sales people leverage the contacts of trusted associates on their sales or executive teams.  Users opt-in to be a part of a ShareGroup and are able to leverage each other’s collective network as it if was their own.  Contact info (email, phone numbers) are not shared but can be requested from the contact owner.  This lets users take full advantage of the collective network within their company, while maintaining contact privacy.

• Many sales people spend much of their day working within their CRM system.  Reachable is tightly integrated with popular CRM systems, like Salesforce.com, so sales people never have to leave their CRM app to take advantage of Reachable.  Within CRM systems, Reachable uses proprietary algorithms to automatically rank leads, contacts, and opportunities by the strength of a user’s relationship to them.

These are just a few of the Reachable capabilities that enable Social Selling within an enterprise.  To find out more about the Reachable solution, check out our website.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable

Social Selling’s Impact on Sales and Marketing

In our last blog post, we talked about how the Enterprise Social Graph enables Social Selling.  At Reachable, we think of Social Selling as the ability for sales people to not only leverage their personal contacts, but also the contacts of others, such as fellow employees, customers, and partners, during a sales process.  Uncovering a connection within a target account can turn a cold lead into a warm introduction, which could make the difference between a win and a loss.  The ability for organizations to leverage the personal connections within their business is having an impact on how sales and marketing professionals are doing their jobs.  Here are some examples…

• Lead Scoring – Lead scoring has evolved over the years and has become more sophisticated.  Historically, it just involved assigning a score based on the responses to sales qualifying questions.  Recently, it has incorporated the behavior of visitors on a company’s website.  Social Selling takes lead scoring to another level by taking into account the personal connections an organization has to a particular lead.  The better connections to a lead, the higher the score.

• Lead Distribution – Leads are typically distributed geographically, or sometimes based on vertical segments.  Social Selling introduces the notion of distributing leads based on the personal connections sales individuals have to a lead.  The person with the better connections to a lead gets it assigned to them.  This is one of the “5 Key Sales and Marketing Trends” in 2012 according to Caitlin Roberson in a guest blog post she did for SellingPower Blog…

Geographic territories will become extinct.  If your Chicago-based sales rep has a closer social connection to your San Diego-based prospect, it doesn’t make sense to assign that lead to your San Diego-based sales rep. Social proximity beats geographic proximity, hands down.

• Target Account Management – Social Selling changes the way target accounts can be managed.  Target accounts can be assigned based on which sales person has the best personal connections to a particular account, and they can use their connections to penetrate the account more effectively than a sales person who doesn’t know anybody within the organization.

These are just some examples of how Social Selling is impacting sales and marketing.  If your organization is using Social Selling in other ways, please let us know by adding a comment below.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable