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Is Socialprise just a Meatball Sundae?
On the back of Adam’s post about Socialprise, I read the white paper from InsideView. Like Adam, I was attracted to the term Socialprise. Unfortunately, after reading the white paper, I’m a little less enthusiastic. Here’s why.
I believe that social media and social networking are about engagement. More than anything, they provide the opportunity for conversation. In many cases, the true value lies in the fact that these conversations can now happen between people who would never have been able to converse before. Boundaries have disappeared: geographical; earnings levels; skills levels; subject matter. To name just four.
Engagement in social media is always two-way. You give; you recieve. Receiving may be take a number of forms, from learning through to making a sale. To approach it solely from an ‘I want’ point of view, however, not only leads eventually to talking to yourself in a closed room but is also a wasted opportunity. For you. For your company.
So where does InsideView’s Socialprise application SalesView fit in? Well, for a start, it’s an application, which doesn’t bode well for engagement. It sits on top of a company’s CRM system, too, which immediately rings alarm bells. Why? Because CRM is an interruptive database. (Many individual sales people will tell you that CRM is not a sales tool; that CRM is something imposed on the sales process by company financial departments. Colin Wilson at FirstBorder writes often and well about how CRM is actually part of what he calls the ‘Sales Prevention Zone’ in many companies. Disclaimer: I used to work with Colin.)
So, you have an application doing something with social media interacting with a CRM system. That smells like a Meatball Sundae to me.
I think the fundamental problem is that InsideView have started at the corporate level and don’t see sale people as indivdiuals. They use an individual sales guy in their white paper but he’s presented really as a face for CRM. He’s also called Bob, which will bring back memories of a misguided application created by Microsoft some years ago. If Bob was a real salesman trying to make his number - treating every sales period as a new start-up - he would understand that the value of the social aspect of ’socialprise’ was paramount: the social prize.
I get the feeling that SalesView is a territory management tool that gives the sales person one more reason not to engage in the conversation. It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme for sales professionals: “You know social media is out there but you don’t have the time or the wherewithal to get involved. Plug in our magical bots and alerts and you’ll be making bigger sales more often. Buy one today.” Snake oil.
If the interactions of social media were static and consisted merely of people posting their needs and wants, a Socialprise application could work. But then social media would not be social media but simply a collection of web-based wish lists that sales people could plunder for opportunities. Either InsideView is missing something or I am.
For a rather more positive outlook on Socialprise applications and SalesView, I think it’s only fair that I point you to Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb.
Tags: CRM, InsideView, Meatball Sundae, SalesView, socialprise
Graham,
Thanks for taking the time to read through our Socialprise white paper and the exciting things happening with SalesView. I appreciate your feedback – wanted to connect and also share my point of view as CMO of InsideView.
Have you tested InsideView, Graham? If you haven’t already, I think it would be worth your while to try it out. You say Socialprise and our application isn’t about engagement … but it really is.
Here’s the deal:
It’s about sales and marketing people connecting to more than 20,000 sources on the Internet in an helpful, intelligent manner that lets them jump-start connections found through Facebook, LinkedIn and more traditional sources like press releases.
Instead of depending on CRM and cold-calling alone (talk about engagement – calls are great, but what happens when there’s no insight into whom you’re calling up?), sales and marketing people can lean on applications, such as SalesView, that help them form a better idea about whom to target.
The idea of Socialprise – the mash-up of rich data found on social groups and media for use in the enterprise – does not aim to replace or substitute for live calls, interactions and discussions. Nope. Instead, it’s something people can leverage to find the best information possible, the best contacts possible … So that when they pick up the phone or shoot an e-mail – they’re truly engaging, listening and learning. Some of our customers would spend hours searching for the right company or person to target, but thanks to InsideView – they’re reporting drastic reductions in the amount of time their staff spends “wandering” on the phone, aimlessly. With a weapon like SalesView that fits together (not against) their existing CRM tools, sales teams are able to actually use their staff’s time efficiently by quickly finding the most meaningful information .. And then connecting with it in a very real way on the phone or in person.
I would definitely like to chat with you more about this, Graham, in a briefing. Hope to connect soon, that is, after you recover from the sleepover.
Cheers,
Rand
Rand,
Thank you so much for taking the time to leave a comment and start to engage with the points I made in my post. Your casual reference to something I added to Twitter makes it clear that we both agree on the benefits of social media and the importance of being part of the conversation.
In a spirit of honesty, I think it’s fair to admit that I haven’t tried SalesView. I attempted to register for the free version but, as a UK resident and a non-CRM user, I was redirected to a form that only let me fill in my details to be alerted when I could use a version in the future.
So, unaware of the full potential of the application, I cannot justifiably criticise its workings or its possible results. However, that was never the intention of my post. The application may do exactly what it says it does and make many more sales people reach their number with less effort. My ‘beef’ was really with the idea of making it sound like an extension of social media. It may make the targets for calls more likely to say ‘yes’ but that doesn’t mean that the calls are no longer interruptive.
Surely, using social media in the manner that many of us working in that space consider to be true to its function, would be to engage with those ‘targets’ in a number of different networks and interactive forums and be the person they approach when they have a need - or when a latent need is pointed out to them. That this method of working is obviously unsuitable for a sales person working for a sales team under pressure to meet quotas within rigidly defined sales periods does not invalidate social media but says something about traditional corporate sales practices. I said that I believe social media engagment is two-way and, although you say your users will be “truly engaging, listening, and learning”, you also say they will be doing this via e-mail and telephone. I’m sorry, but that sounds like direct selling to me, not engagement.
I think it’s also telling that you describe your customers reporting that “their staff” are experiencing reductions in what they would consider ‘wasted time’. This reinforces my opinion that this is probably a tool that will gain favour - much like CRM itself - with the company finance department more than the individual sales people. It very much sounds like a valuable addition to traditional CRM but I remain unconvinced that applying the social media label is warranted. Sorry.
Graham