“The Social Revolution is a Trust Revolution”- says Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and in the video from the tenth Dreamforce conference, Men’s Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer seems to agree and say… I guarantee it! [Note: This post is from September 19,2012 with a video segment from the Salesforce Dream Conference, 2012 -Updated March 24, 2021]
The Salesforce.com approach, as unveiled today, does a nice job of integrating social media information about a sales prospect to the salesforce.com platform on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. Salesforce.com has bought the social media monitoring companies Radian6 and Buddy Media and is offering an integrated cloud solution to the sales forces of companies. Benioff does a great illustration of how Rossignol a ski manufacturer uses the cloud to integrate in-company prospect/client information with the information on social media. Particularly interesting is the specifics of a sales call that a sales rep makes and updates information about a new client VP based on what is available on the social web. The specific prep for this sales presentation is being done in the lobby of the client right from the tablet computer using an app.
So why is this relevant? Because as Men’s Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer points out in the video on this post, millenials are about being social while Men’s Wearhouse was more used to spending 1 Billion$ /year on TV advertising for the baby boomers. Today as customers and organizational decision makers from the millennial generation grow up they’ll trust their friends and contacts opinions more than a TV ad. And it has become far more easier to keep track of stuff on social media than ever before. By dovetailing the social media information for every customer to the company’s databases and then allowing cloud access to a global sales and delivery team is a huge step in sales force automation and CRM. More on the innovation possibilities of this integrated social and CRM technology in a later post.