Salesforce, the leader in cloud CRM, announced recently the acquisition of Radian6, a social media monitoring company. Radian6 monitors hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, delivering real-time information.
What does this mean in practical terms? In my opinion this means that social media will eventually become integrated to every major CRM system and every salesperson’s work in a way that – when done right – does not interfere with the basic selling. Instead, social media integration right into CRM will improve the efficiency of every salesperson in a big way.
Hoiw? By tapping into various social networks, the CRM can eventually provide information about events, contacts and changes in the customer and prospect companies without the need to go looking for them on the internet. I believe this can be one of the water-shed events in the history of CRM systems – where the CRM actually starts bringing value to the individual sellers in their daily sales efforts.
Can’t wait to see the results Salesforce can provide and whether other major players such as Microsoft and Oracle follow suit. Old school sellers (such as yours truly) and social media are currently like oil and water, but this doesn’t have to be forever – the way things are developing in the CRM field. We’ll see…
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