For sales professionals, one of the biggest challenges is keeping track of your contacts and knowing when they get promoted, jump to a new firm or event start their own company. From our own research at RightSite, we know that in China’s high-churn environment, as many as 25 percent of the people in your contact list may change their jobs every year, and if you have hundreds or thousands of contacts, then all of these job changes can mean a lot of missed opportunities.
Because of all this hard to track job hopping, I was interested recently to try out a new web service called SalesLoft.com that pulls data from LinkedIn into your CRM (as long as your CRM is SalesForce.com). Essentially, this service allows you to treat your LinkedIn contact list as an extension of your CRM.
How SalesLoft Helps Unify Your Lists
As faithful Mingtiandi readers may remember, one of my central tenets of effective sales and marketing is that you should only be maintaining one list, and by joining LinkedIn with your CRM, you can expand the reach of your CRM list and eliminate the need to manually update your CRM from the updates you see on LinkedIn.
The beauty of this particular synchronisation is the ability to leverage the user-updated nature of LinkedIn with your own private user list in the CRM. It would be great if all of your contacts sent you an email when they change jobs, but unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen.
However, many if not most of your contacts do make a point of of updating their LinkedIn information at least semi-regularly. By pulling this user updated content automatically into your CRM, SalesLoft saves you a lot of time and makes it easier to get in touch with the people that you need to reach.
Plus you can always give those newly promoted individuals a call to congratulate them and see if they have any new requirements or needs in their new roles that could translate into leads for you.
More Features and a Few Gripes
In addition to the LinkedIn integration, SalesLoft also has some additional features for sales professionals that provide you with news updates and sales prospecting tools, however, I have not had a chance to try these out so far.
Maybe my biggest gripe is that SalesLoft doesn’t integrate with SugarCRM, HighRise or other CRMs, but we can always hope that these additional integrations arrive later. However, I did get in touch with the management at SalesLoft and they offered to set up Salesforce.com account for me which could then be used to syn up with RightSite’s SugarCRM installation. A bit of a strange workaround, but it seems like it would work for smaller companies.
And what about update for your contacts who are not on LinkedIn? Well you can always send them a telegram each year asking them to update their contact information. Just go down to the Western Union office and….
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