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…

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!

In Sales, “Location, Location, Location” is Not Always Everything

Editor’s Note: This article by Reachable CEO Al Campa was originally published on Business 2 Community.

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 a positive relationship with; people we like and trust. And if those relationships stay positive, we keep buying from them, even if they switch companies and sell something different.  The relationship and trust endure.  Recent research indicated that a prospect is five times more likely to return a sales call if they have some type of personal connection to the sales person.  This results in a 243% increase in effectiveness throughout the sales process.  Sales managers would die for a 24% increase in effectiveness, let alone a 243% increase.

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 – or “social proximity” – in their assignments, particularly since there is a goldmine of relationships they can leverage, from their employees, customers, and partners.  But most don’t.  Most sales territories are still 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.

Here are three reasons why you should consider social proximity selling for your organization:

Increase productivity for outbound prospecting.  The recent research I mentioned earlier showed that for every 1000 prospecting calls made, only 345 are returned if there is no personal connection but 849 are returned if there is a personal connection.  That is a 243% increase in productivity.

Improve conversion rate for inbound leads.  Inbound leads can be prioritized by the strength of the personal connection somebody in your organization has to a prospective account.  This enables you to focus your sales resources on opportunities where you have an inside edge.

Get deeper penetration into target accounts.  Target accounts can be assigned based on who has the strongest personal connections to them.  This will allow you to leverage established relationships with key influencers and decision makers in order to extend your presence within key accounts.

In the past, it would have been difficult to determine who had the strongest connection to a particular person or account.  But now, solutions are available that can mine social networks, email address books, and CRM systems for connections between your company’s expansive network of contacts and your target customer.  Incorporating this social proximity into your sales process could significantly increase sales productivity and drive top line revenue growth.

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.

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.

Leveraging Social Proximity to Sell Smarter

Editor’s Note: The article below by Reachable’s CEO, Al Campa, was recently posted on Business 2 Community.

Every good sales professional knows that leveraging personal contacts is a fantastic way to generate leads and close deals. A recent study by Reachable places numeric values on this common knowledge: The Value of Connections infographic illustrates the findings of the study, which took a look at a random sample of 300 business professionals involved in the purchase process at their companies. It found that:

• Calling on an account where there is a personal connection makes it five times more likely to receive a return call than those without any connections.
• More returned calls means more deals in the pipeline and results in an increase in sales productivity of 240%
• Callers with direct connections were about 11 times more likely to get a call back.
• For every 1,000 sales calls made, 345 were returned if the caller didn’t have a connection; callers who did have personal connections received 849 calls back out of 1,000 made.

Common sense tells us that personal connections enhance sales effectiveness. But the study shows that it’s not only direct personal connections that make a difference: A 2^nd degree connection, or knowing someone who knows someone in an account significantly increases the likelihood that a sales call will be returned.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means companies are sitting on a goldmine that they haven’t yet fully begun to explore. Right now, most companies aren’t completely leveraging their connections. If they’re savvy sales people, individual employees use their connections to generate leads, but most businesses aren’t proactively taking advantage of all the connections – direct and indirect – within the organization and its partners, vendors and other stakeholders.

Given the incredible ROI companies can gain by leveraging their collective social graph, it makes sense to identify all the connections within an enterprise and capitalize on them. Fortunately, new technologies and new data sources have made this possible.  Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are great sources of connections.  Email systems and other enterprise systems yield corporate connections to customers, partners and vendors.  And powerful new analytics can now collect and score the connections to find the strongest links to any person or any account and extend the company’s social reach.

In light of these new tools, it also makes sense for company leaders to rethink the way they divide sales opportunities and pursue leads. Geographic or vertical-based sales divisions are traditional ways to manage sales territories. But since connections can drive a five-fold increase in responses and more than double productivity, businesses looking to revitalize sales or expand into new territories should consider a new strategy: social proximity, in which sales teams are organized around the social graph. By harnessing the power of social media and designing a sales approach based on the key driver in closing deals – connections – companies can improve ROI and generate new revenue.

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…

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.