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.