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…

The Strength of Weak Ties

At Reachable, we think it is important for sales people to be able to leverage their entire network, not just those people they interact with regularly.  Fast Company recently published an interesting article, “The Unexpected Way To Use Your Social Network Strategically” by Don Peppers, that talks about a principle, “the strength of weak ties”, based on this notion…

Almost 30 years ago, a landmark study showed conclusively that the best leads for job opportunities are more likely to come from your more distant colleagues and friends, as opposed to your closest ones. This isn’t because your close friends don’t give you good recommendations, but because you and your other close friends are more likely already to know about the same job openings, while the job openings known to your more distant colleagues–those with whom you don’t interact very often–are not as likely to be known to your own friends, or to you.

Peppers also talks about how this principle can be applied to B2B selling…

Or consider the question of generating new business in the B2B space, or with regard to expensive, considered purchases. If you use a straight-ahead business-development plan, you’ll develop a laundry list of leads and opportunities to be followed up. While this can be useful, the truth is that a great deal of such business comes in via the referral of others. And how can you increase your access to such referrals? You guessed it–by concentrating on your weak ties, rather than on your strong ties.

We completely agree.  Reachable helps sales people leverage their entire network – strong and weak ties – to uncover valuable connections that will let them close more deals.  It is impossible for a person to keep track of everybody they know, whether it is a former colleague they haven’t talked to in years, or a friend in the neighborhood who they don’t know much about their professional background.  Reachable takes care of all this and we call it Social Selling.  To find out more about the Reachable solution, check out our website.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable

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

The Social Graph Meets the Enterprise

Welcome to the Reachable Blog!  In this space, we’ll share our thoughts and engage in conversations about leveraging social and professional relationships within the workplace.  New technologies have made it possible to greatly extend our “network” of contacts into a much larger and more powerful “social graph” that can help us reach well beyond our current contacts.  Reachable was founded to bring this social graph to the enterprise.

In the Spring of 2011, I heard about an interesting startup that would better leverage social and professional network connections in the enterprise.  I was immediately interested and checked out their product, which showed how you knew people and how those people were connected to other people.  Within a few minutes, I could clearly see the power of this application, and how it could have a tremendous impact on how businesses operated.  I joined as CEO shortly afterwards.

One of my fundamental beliefs is that business is about people.  Working with people, leading people, serving people.  It’s all about people.  And if we can better leverage the people relationships that we have already established, and have a way to better maintain and manage them over time, that would be a tremendous asset to virtually any business function.

The Real Social Graph

We live in a highly connected world.  I am always amazed at how my friends and colleagues know my other friends and colleagues even though I am not aware of it.  It’s a tangled web of thousands of people that we know from former companies, schools, clubs and other associations.  And yet, the average number of Facebook connections is only 130, LinkedIn connections only around 100.  What if we could find all the connections from the thousands of people we know, and keep track of where they are working now and what they are up to?  This concept was the genesis of Reachable – making it possible to better leverage the network of everyone you know.

We started to show the early Reachable application to prospective customers and an interesting thing happened.  They said, “This is great.  We can totally use this.  But can you also add our customers to the social graph, or our prospects, or potential candidates we want to recruit, or our employees?  Because we want to see how all of them are connected together.”

The Birth of the Enterprise Social Graph

It quickly dawned on us that this uber social graph with enterprise data would be incredibly powerful.  It would be not just a map of everyone you know, but also an extended map that could show you how you know your customers for example.  And which customers know the prospects you are trying to sell to.  Or which of your company employees know the candidates you are trying to recruit, or know the executives at a potential strategic partner.

Some have referred to this as the ability to “connect the dots” between you and anyone in the workforce.  We think of it as ability to put anyone in context with:

1. How you know them within your personal network
2. How anyone in your company’s ecosystem knows them (employees, customers, partners, etc.)
3. Delivered within the workflow of an enterprise application, like Salesforce.com for CRM or Taleo for Talent Management

Effectively utilizing a larger network can greatly speed many aspects of business.  No longer do sales reps need to make cold calls.  Now they can scan through their prospects and see where they have strong connections that they can leverage to open doors.  Account managers can better leverage their existing account contacts into new contacts and expand account penetration.  Recruiters can more clearly find critical talent and how to get introduced to them.  Executives can better leverage their contacts for developing new partnerships.

Reachable sheds light on the tangled web of connections and relationships that make up our business world.  We help our customers extend their reach and better leverage these connections to get business done faster.  We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the enterprise social graph and other topics discussed in the Reachable Blog.

- Al Campa, Reachable CEO