Better Than Santa?

“Dad do you believe in Santa?” ...a question that many parents field from their children in this holiday season, and not an easy one to answer, at least not for me. Ironically there is a similar question that I ask of Andy Beaupre (at our PR agency) on a regular basis: “Andy, should Glance believe in Social Media?”

I mean, think about it. Is there really an entity that can circle the Earth in less than 24 hours, and deliver revenue at your door step?
 
Prior to mine and Andy’s philosophical debates on “believing leads to seeing” I would have told you I understood the theory but was looking for clear proof points and execution.
 
That was until September, when the Smarketing Team at Glance decided that we would bring in several account intelligence packages for evaluation.
 
We had just completed our roll out of Salesforce.com, and were building out our enterprise sales organization.
 
As part of our target account selling efforts, we gather as much g2 on prospects, to insure that we can make an impact on every call, deriving the greatest return on our marketing investment.
 
We looked at all of the top account intelligence packages, including Hoovers. In full disclosure, I was in a hurry and just assumed that all of these services were alike.  But that night I posted on Mobile Facebook: "About to purchase Hoovers Services, anyone have any feedback? Speak now or forever hold your peace". Before I completed my commute the next morning, I had received three posts in reply, one of them from trusted advisor Steven Harper, CEO of Plan2Win and Consultant at Trish Bertuzzi's The Bridge Group.
It was simple, he said, "Check out InsideView, great service..."
 
So, I did.
 
I called InsideView, they called back, I connected with them on-the-fly using Glance's screen share service, got the demo, validated Steve's guidance with my own eyes, placed an order, and was up and running with InsideView in days.

This may not be the best blog post for InsideView competitors, but that's not the point. Instead it’s the fact that with one simple social media post from a Blackberry, I was able to obtain feedback from an industry expert regarding a new and innovative service that I otherwise would have missed. Pretty cool for me as a buyer, but think about it from the sellers' perspective; they get an inbound phone call from a qualified, educated prospect, resulting in nearly immediate recurring revenue.

Yup -- social media -- I believe!

-- Tom Scontras, VP Sales & Marketing