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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!