Social Discovery of Business Relationships

Enterprises big and small are realizing that the capabilities introduced in consumer social networks can add immense value and productivity to the corporate world.  The growth in adoption of enterprise social networking tools like Yammer, Chatter and Jive is evidence that the way companies communicate internally among employees and externally with customers and partners is changing dramatically and permanently.

One of the fundamental reasons for this change is the benefit of social discovery.  Social techniques like groups, feeds, @mentions, and hash tagging enable employees to effortlessly discover content, expertise and information from across the company in ways that email just can’t touch.  There is a 2-day conference going on right now in San Francisco dedicated to this topic of social discovery.

So why don’t CRM systems to a better job of allowing Sales Professionals to discover social relationships?  Companies spend an incredible amount of effort, time, and money getting their sales professionals to enter Contacts, and update Opportunities.  Shouldn’t there be a reward for the teams on the front line driving revenue for inputting data into CRM?

After 10 years in sales & sales management at Salesforce.com having seen SFA implementations big and small, simple and complex, I believe there should be much more reward and insights available to the selling professionals, and it should come from a company’s enterprise social graph.  The enterprise social graph simply stated is every relationship of every employee, customer and partner your company has, on line and off.  With all the efforts being invested in social media, one of the most valuable assets a company has, it’s collection of relationships, is being overlooked.  Layering your enterprise social graph into CRM can add powerful social discovery into the simplest of tasks that can answer important questions during a sales pursuit, and can drive significant sales productivity:

1. What if a brand new Sales Rep at your company, by simply viewing an account in CRM, could immediately discover which company executives have meaningful relationships in the account?
2. What if a Sales Rep could enter a new contact in a key account, and immediately discover colleagues that worked with that person at previous companies?
3. Or one of my favorites, what if you could pull up an account and discover people in the account that used your product at a previous company?

Your enterprise social graph can tell you exactly those things and so much more!

Stay tuned!

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.

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