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Altimeter Group Report on Social Customer Technologies Highlights InsideView
March 16, 2010 in Prospecting, Sales 2.0, Sales Intelligence, Social CRM, Uncategorized | Tags: Altimeter Group, industry reports, sCRM, Social CRM | by insideviewblog | 1 comment
The Altimeter Group’s recent report, “The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management,” highlights use cases to show businesses how to finally put social customers first, and the technologies to do so. Sales intelligence leader InsideView was named as one of only four companies as a ‘vendor to watch’ in the Rapid Social Response category, or as Altimeter explains, a technology to “catch a lead in mid-air.” The recognition, in conjunction with the report, exemplifies one of the first attempts to clarify the role of social media in the enterprise by segmenting business functions – in this case, sales.
How to Finally Put Customers First
Rapid Social Sales Response Explained
As Altimeter states, social sales enables seamless lead opportunities, emphasizing how being “social” allows companies the opportunity to reinvent business workflow, thus bringing new technologies to existing business functions like sales. As business-productivity technologies evolve, recognizing providers and detailing solutions are among the first steps of social adoption by enterprises, and we applaud Altimeter for their work in helping organizations map their route into the developing world of social technologies.
Why Companies Will Manage their Social Relationships
A few key takeaways from the report:
- For companies, real-time may not even be fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say, so they can be prepared and preemptively engage.
- Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers a company hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. So they need tools, and they need them now.
- Customers don’t care what department you’re in; they just want their problem fixed.
When it comes to social selling, so many of these tenets are key to the process. If you know your lead and prospect inside and out, you’ll have a productive and engaging interaction no matter what. If your sales team has the right tools in place, they’ll be “first responders” when opportunities arise, and will be able to do so without wasting hours of time researching.
You can see the report in its entirety here; we’d love your comments and thoughts on what you think!
Social CRM – Don’t Forget the Sales Reps!
August 25, 2009 in Social CRM | Tags: dion hinchcliffe, Enterprise 2.0, michael krigsman, sCRM, Social CRM, Web 2.0, zdnet | by insideviewblog | 2 comments
To follow-up on our last post on the ongoing discussions about social CRM (sCRM) we thought we would offer more of our take on sCRM and how we see our role in this emerging field. Much of the sCRM thinking and product development to-date has been around increasing collaboration and communication channels for customer management and support. (If you are curious to read a very cogent article on the evolution of sCRM, check out Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post on ZDNet ‘Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship.’) Dion does an excellent job covering how Web 2.0 technologies have been increasingly integrated into CRM platforms and concludes that “Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.”
So is Social CRM mainly a way for companies to interact faster and in more ways with their customers? We think it can be more. Making the social Web accessible and useful to sales and marketing teams, not just customer management groups, also fits into our vision of the benefits of sCRM. For example, our sales intelligence application enables sales and marketing professionals to receive relevant and timely information from across the social Web and traditional news and information sources directly in their CRM application — should this type of integration of social media and CRM be considered something outside of sCRM?
As Michael Krigsman’s recent post on Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 notes, “In today’s social environment, the greatest threat of failure comes from standing aloof and not becoming engaged.” And we would argue that this sentiment applies to all aspects of the CRM process – not just tracking the conversations of current customers across the social Web, but prospective ones as well. The common thread is the need to locate the right conversations for your business that are occurring across the social Web and engaging in them intelligently and quickly.
Getting the lingo down — Social CRM, CRM 2.0, Sales 2.0
August 14, 2009 in Uncategorized | Tags: bill band, Brent Leary, crm 2.0, paul greenberg, Sales 2.0, sCRM, Social CRM, socialtext | by insideviewblog | 2 comments
There has been some great content posted to the Web over the past few weeks discussing the definitions of industry terms that are increasingly being used, such as CRM 2.0, Social CRM and Sales 2.0, but whose meanings are still evolving. As a company that aims to deliver many of the benefits recognized in these emerging industries, we found it particularly interesting to hear from some of the experts in the field about what these new terms mean to them.
1to1 Media recently posted a very thoughtful discussion among three experts on Social CRM (sCRM), which discusses the strategies and conceptual framework behind the emerging sCRM market. The conversation is between Bill Band of Forrester Research, Brent Leary of CRM Essentials, and author Paul Greenberg, all of whom bring great insights into where Social CRM is headed and what it means for businesses today. Give it a listen here.
As evidenced by this discussion, there is a lot going on now in the field of sCRM, but it is also an industry that will continue to grow and mature. Russ Mayfield recently noted on the Socialtext blog “When it comes to sCRM, we have only discovered the tip of the iceberg.” In this post, Russ also gives a very interesting overview of Web 2.0′s evolution, which has driven much of the sCRM movement. He references Eric M. Johnson of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy who was quoted as saying that the State Department had shifted from a “need to know” to a “need to share” culture”, and thus had created a Wiki community post-911. In many ways this quote also sums up how people at large have begun to approach information sharing differently with the advent of Web 2.0 technology.
While our culture has become increasingly driven to share information on the Web, the result is more organized and unorganized data being available to us than ever before. The core issue is how does one efficiently find the information that they need? That challenge is what we are focused on. No matter what industry term our technology falls under, at the end of the day we want our users to remember us as giving them the ‘right’ up-to-date information at the ‘right’ time.
