I just posted a note the other day looking for information about how people were using social media in relation to CRM – it didn’t take long before I saw this post on Anneke Seley’s Sales 2.0 blog:  Social Networking in Sales.  It has some great concrete examples of sales teams using LinkedIn and Twitter with measurable results.

At dSales we have been looking a lot at web chat technologies and their application as another sales and service channel – LivePerson is a particularly successful provider that we have been working with especially because of their integration with salesforce.com.   It seems that this chat has not really caught in in Australia like in many other countries and I’m trying to figure out why – it can provide significant uplift in sales conversions and increase in service agent productivity.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Recently saw salesforce.com’s presentation on the Service Cloud, which included discussion of integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The concept of monitoring what your customer base is saying about you in the cloud and reacting appropriately is  getting a lot of attention at the moment.

Certainly the ability to find out more about your customer contacts through the various social & professional networking apps makes a lot of sense – a lot of us look up people on LinkedIn before making initial contact to get some idea of who we are dealing with.

And I also buy in to exposing solutions to customer issues on the web in a way that is easily searchable – if you have a problem with a product, you are more likely to search for a solution in Google than to start with the manufacturer’s knowledge base, so if your company’s solutions are out there in search engine land they are more likely to find them.

But I’d be interested to hear other ways that people are using their customer relationship systems to interact with social media…

Once upon a time, I started a consulting business providing services to implement large accounting, HR and manufacturing systems, later called ERP. We started the business focussing on Oracle Applications, and then, when PeopleSoft came to Australia we signed up as their first implementation partner here. PeopleSoft was started by Dave Duffield, and moved from an upstart challenger to Oracle and SAP by entering the HR & Payroll market first (now called HCM for Human Capital Management) and then expanding into accounting and other applications. The company was very successful and after a long battle were eventually swallowed by Oracle.

Now Mr. Duffield is back, doing it again with Workday, an ERP application delivered using a SaaS or on-demand model.  The company has raised several substantial rounds of capital and already has started accumulating an impressive customer list include some Fortune 500 companies.  Interesting, they list on their customer list some of the major SaaS players such as salesforce.com, Xactly and Astadia, who are using Workday for their back office functions.

I am watching with great interest.