Fresh off of Dreamforce (see Benioff’s Shoes), we’ve started to dive in what will be the industry-changing announcements they made during Dreamforce 2012. One of those releases was Social Key: salesforce.com’s new social selling platform.
The Need for Social Key
It’s growing more important to be where your customers and prospects are. Outside of email, all of our customer prospects are on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. This provides immense value on new opportunities to connect and build meaningful relationships. With so much data available, opportunities are vast in ways to connect.
The Background of Social Key
There are two types of data in our professional world: primary and secondary. Primary data includes information such as name, number, address, email. Secondary data includes items such as: what are your prospect’s and customer’s interests, how are they performing, what goals do they look to achieve professionally, what motivates them, etc. To maximize sales opportunities, it’s in the sales reps’ best interest to know as much about their prospects as possible so they can connect with them.
Primary data can be found in your CRM and through databases such as Data.com.
Secondary data is scattered all over the web and a good sales rep will find some it to help connect with the buyer in a sincere way.
The Goals of Social Key
There are 3 goals of salesforce.com Social Key.
- Unlock insights from across the web about your customers and prospects
- Take your primary data and merge it with secondary data
- Know and understand your customers like never before
When these goals are achieved the benefits of Social Key are outstanding: you actually save time and increase productivity.
The Features of Social Key
Social key merges primary and secondary data pretty well by going out and finding the social profiles of the people in your CRM. Look at the right hand side of the screen below.
Diving deeper on one contact, you can see that Social Key has pulled someone’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Klout Score. All of this information provides phenomenal context.
There three different components to the details of Social Key: Snippets, Influence, and Trust Status.
Snippets is definitely the most valuable because it provides all sorts of information on your prospects that would take a lot of time finding manually.
The Influence monitor shows how influential they are almost as importantly, who influences them. Take a look:
Lastly, is the Trust Status. This feature will probably improve the most over the year. The status provides a gauge on how much your prospect trusts you. Take a look at the graph below.
The Conclusion of Social Key
Trust is the new brand currency. Sincerely connecting and engaging with buyers where they are is the best way to do. We love where salesforce.com is going with Social Key and think it’s the start next generation of sales technology and there still scratching the surface with sales intelligence. What are you thoughts? Let us know in the comments.
Take a look at the entire Social Key keynote video here.
test