Social CRM Study: How to Double Your Sales

Each day, companies interact with customers and prospects through a flood of channels including email, phone and social media platforms. The number of cumulative interactions with our contacts can be daunting at a small company, let alone at an enterprise. It’s no wonder that companies of all sizes are embracing customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce.com with increasing fervor. And while traditional CRMs offer increased visibility into leads across the sales cycle, do they go far enough?

According to a new report from BI Intelligence (Business Insider’s research service), the answer is no.

Though the report discusses the importance of using social media to improve customer service, it also reveals that social customer relationship management (SCRM) can revolutionize sales. The report reveals that companies that incorporate social media into their CRM process are simply more effective.

How much more effective? According to BI Intelligence, SCRM doubles the percentage of sales leads that result in actual sales, relative to using a traditional CRM approach.

What Is SCRM?

According to Business Insider, SCRM is more of a strategic stance than a tool that comes out of a box. But here at Revenue.io, we’ve always believed that adopting the right tools is integral to improving the sales process. For example, we know that closely monitoring leads’ feeds in social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can help inside sales reps have more successful phone conversations. Sales prospects use social media feeds to share content that’s important to them. The professional and personal details that prospects share can help sales reps gain a better understanding of each prospect, and have more successful conversations as a result.

From talking to our customers, however, we know that inside sales reps are often reluctant to incorporate social sales techniques due to the sheer amount of time it takes to look up leads in various sites. Let’s face it: switching between those multiple browser windows can get tedious. That’s why we developed apps for iPad, iPhone and browser that can automatically deliver data from Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Chatter in the same app that sales reps use to make and take calls. When data is delivered in the right context, it is most likely to drive results.

Studies such as this one make it clear that the right social sales strategy has the power to separate your company from the pack. By enabling your reps to quickly access contextual data from social media sites in the same app they use to talk to leads, your sales team can gain an instant and powerful edge over your competitors.