Social CRM within your Enterprise

Social Networking, Social engineering and Social Marketing have become more than just trends, they have begun to dictate economic trends. The landscape of social platforms triggering this phenomenon includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.

The goal of a sales person now is therefore to maximize the use of these platforms to get more business – through marketing, leads from references. The main idea is to create publicity for your brand through word of mouth (wall posts on facebook, tweets on twitter) and any possible lead by following up on the prospects thus generated.

A sales manager should be able to leverage the social landscape around him. This needs to be made easy by providing a tool that can allow him to post his sales pitch on all the existing social networking tools and platforms.

After having promoted your product or services on the Social platform, the CRM in question should also be able to capture and manage the incoming leads or inquiries. This should be presented in a very clear way to the sales manager. All the incoming leads should be organized and sorted in a very user-friendly manner. This will allow the sales manager to work on each and every lead and not miss out on any of them.

The CRM tool should also enable the user to followup easily with all the incoming leads and prospects from the social platforms.

Let us individually look at some of the main social networking platforms available in the market today

Social CRM for Facebook

Here there are multiple ways of posting the sales pitch – like wall posts, facebook apps, etc –reaching many potential customers. If posted in the right place, the sales pitch can propagate to many prospects.

Social CRM for Twitter

Twitter works on micro-posts called tweets of less than 120 characters to all followers of a user. The social CRM tool should have the ability to capture these postings as well as re-tweets, and then allow to followup with the incoming leads.

Social CRM for LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides information on the business profile of its members, which can be used by a sales manager to find out the right person to contact in a company for making the sales pitch and closing the sale quickly. An ideal Social CRM system should allow searching of the right profiles in Linkedin for a company in question and then allow the user to post sales pitches and then capture the responses from the targeted profiles. LinkedIn can also work as an extended contact manager for the CRM.