Business is All About Relationships

Editor’s Note: The article below by Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, was just posted on Startup Beat.

Social Proximity Selling

Editor’s Note: The article below by Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, was just posted on the Selling Power blog.

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 positive relationship with, people we like and trust. And if those relationships stay positive, we keep buying from them over many years. 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 in their assignments.

In reality, however, most sales territories are 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. Yeah, who cares about whether they have good connections, solid relationships, and reliable networks? If the zip code matches, well, anyone can see that’s what’s important, right?

Yet in the age of conference calls, WebEx presentations, and Skype, social proximity becomes a far more important tie to an account or prospect than geographic proximity.

To make the best use of this social proximity, Reachable has created an online solution that helps businesspeople leverage their personal contacts and the contacts of others in their organization, to broaden their professional network and reach people they need to know – people to people, rather than area code to area code. Our research shows that having an existing relationship with an account or prospect makes the likelihood that you’ll be able to engage that prospect or account three to four times higher.

At Reachable, we believe that social connections and relationships are solid gold for a sales organization and should be leveraged as much as possible. We make it possible for a company to leverage and manage the connections of all its employees, as well as its customers and partners. And we integrate these connections into the sales process. Assigning leads and accounts by social proximity, rather than geographic proximity, will increase account engagement and account knowledge and increase close rates.

Social Selling

Reachable offers a number of capabilities that make leveraging social selling easier for reps who have contacts spread all over the map. Considering that reps probably have contacts in one or more email address books, social networks, databases, etc., Reachable brings together these contacts so reps 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 his or her contacts, Reachable scours all contacts to find potential connections.

In addition, being able to leverage the networks of others can extend one’s reach dramatically. Reachable’s ShareGroup feature lets salespeople 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 one another’s network as if they were their own. Contact information (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 salespeople spend much of their day working within their CRM system.  Reachable is tightly integrated with such popular CRM systems as Salesforce, so salespeople 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.

Sales Insight

Salespeople now have much more information at their fingertips than they had even a few years ago. Company information is available via Hoover’s, Thompson Reuters, or Google. Information about people is available via LinkedIn. Facebook and Twitter provide social information. But in spite of this deluge of new information, close rates may not be improving. Cycle times are not decreasing. Sales teams are not getting more productive, because critical insight, rather than background information, is the key to engaging prospects and closing sales.

Insight is a window into company goals, key business problems, and the critical initiatives a company is launching to achieve its goals, as well as the key people internally who are assigned to make it all happen. The insight on a company’s business problem can come from only a trusted internal source, not Twitter. If you don’t have relationships in an account, you are never going to find out what its key initiatives are and how you can help solve them. It’s all about the people you need to reach, the information you need to have at your fingertips, and the ability to engage with those key people to help solve the problems they deem critical.

These are just a few of the Reachable capabilities that can help salespeople become more people-to-people effective. To find out more about the Reachable solution, go to www.reachable.com.

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

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

Leveraging the Enterprise Social Graph to Enable Social Selling

In our introductory blog post, Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, talked about the emergence of the Enterprise Social Graph.  He defined it as an uber social graph that connects various elements within a business – employees, customers, prospects, recruits, etc.  Al also touched on a number of different use cases within a business that could benefit from an Enterprise Social Graph…

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.

In this post, I am going to focus on one of those use cases – eliminating the need for sales reps to make cold calls.  In his Mashable article, “8 Ways Digital Will Improve B2B Sales in 2012”, Totango CEO, Guy Nirpaz, predicts that “Social Selling Will Go Mainstream”…

Ninety-two percent of prospects almost never book a meeting from a cold call or email, according to a study by UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business. In 2012, rather than make cold calls, sales executives will first seek connections through social media networks, and then increase response rates with warm introductions.

Aside from personal networks, sales managers will also find ways to leverage the networks of colleagues, partners, customers, executives and former employees during the sales process.

We think this prediction is going to be spot on as we already see many of our customers using Reachable for Social Selling.  As Nirpaz points out, the key success factor is for an individual sales person to leverage more than their own personal network; it is also important to for them to take advantage of a broader network – fellow employees, customers, etc. – in order to turn cold calls into warm introductions and increase the probability of success.

In a future post, we will expand on how the Reachable solution supports Social Selling but in the meantime, we would like to hear how you have used Social Selling to be more effective.  Let us know by leaving a comment below.

- Perry Mizota, a marketing guy at Reachable

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