Social Sales Models Get More Validation

It’s amazing how quickly perceptions change. When we showed early versions of Revenue.io’s ability to integrate a contact’s social streams from Twitter and Facebook and news sources, the value from a sales perspective was immediately apparent. Still, there were lingering worries that this whole “social media thing” might still be fleeting.

Salesforce.com’s declaration of the Social Enterprise at last year’s Dreamforce validated the model further. The upcoming Facebook IPO can be seen as nothing short of a sweeping validation for social business models. According to Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, “Social business is going to be really heavily embraced now. The conversation around, ‘Is Twitter, is Facebook here to stay?’ is now over. We now know this is an amazing business model and not just a fad.”

“At a very basic level, Facebook is the most popular application ever, with a billion people who know how to use it,”said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

As Facebook’s success with consumers is due to its relative ease of use and omnipresence, its success as a viable business model owes much to its ability as a platform to help brands target a wide range of users based on interests and preferences that they have communicated via the social network.

Salesforce has understood the importance of social networking for some time. Their Chatter application—built in the image of Facebook—is a social network designed to improve internal communications within a business.

Though many enterprises have been slow to embrace social media, viewing it as a fad or a time-vortex, this must change. Everyday, consumers and businesses alike use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to communicate various needs and other data that is relevant to sales. The businesses that are best at leveraging social streams will be ahead of the curve. We feel it’s only natural that social media will continue to have an ascendant role in enterprise.

David Sacks, President of Yammer agrees. “Big ideas always move from the consumer market into the enterprise market.”

At Revenue.io, we’re invested in creating technology that helps sales, marketing and customer service professionals leverage social media data in real time in order to generate more leads, make more sales and provide better service.

Our app will help Salesforce.com users do a better job of managing customer relationships by introducing more social elements to the Salesforce CRM experience. We look forward to sharing it with you.