Frontline Perspectives

On March 30, 2001, Salesforce.com, the leading cloud-based sales and CRM solution, announced it would acquire Radian6, a popular social media monitoring service.  “What’s this mean to me,” you might say. We’ll tell you. But first a little refresher.

Good CRM practices depend on understanding your customer’s issues and addressing them. Increasingly, these issues — good and bad — show up in social media channels. A growing number of companies realize the value of monitoring these conversations, understanding what customers are saying, and turning that understanding into insight that’s actionable across the entire enterprise. These companies typically turn to outside firms like Radian6 as their “listening posts” to compile and analyze the data. But more often than not, the data gathered from these tools becomes siloed in one area of a business, not used to its full potential. The acquisition of Radian6 allows Salesforce.com to fully integrate social media monitoring into their sales and CRM tools, and close this loop for its customers.

What does Salesforce.com Know that You May Not?
There are things you can take away from this news, whether or not you’re a Salesforce.com customer:

• Social media monitoring can augment traditional CRM with real-time feedback from existing customers. Just be sure the information gets out of marketing and into other departments of your organization — like customer service — and that you have a process in place for responding.

• Social media monitoring can uncover potential new customers. Carefully monitoring LinkedIn groups, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and blogs can help you find people considering a purchase of your product type. Engage and direct them to relevant content you created — white papers, your blog — that will help them make a decision. You’ll build trust and credibility at a crucial time in the sales cycle.

• Social media monitoring is valuable to every department in your company. Sure, this data can be used by sales and customer service. But what about R&D? Knowing what new products or enhancements customers want can drive development that results in instantly popular offerings. How about marketing? When your marketing efforts reflect what your customers are talking about, you look responsive and in touch with customer needs. So find ways to share and leverage the social intelligence you gather with everyone in your organization.

The bottom line — and the thing that Salesforce.com realizes — is that the ability to really listen to your customers, get to know them and understand their motivations is vital to building relationships with them. And that’s what sales and CRM have always been about.

If your still on the fence about the value of social media, does Salesforce.com’s decision sway you? Are you using any social media monitoring technology? Tell us about it in the comments.