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…

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…