IntellectSpace announced this week ProspectVisual, another tool that can help integrate your social graph with your existing contact and customer relationship managers.
The service doesn’t come cheaply: pricing starts at $2500 per seat per year, although quantity discounts are available. But the level of integration is impressive.
Like OpenXchange, Nimble and others that we have written about, ProspectVisual can connect with a variety of contact sources: it works with Salesforce.com Microsoft’s DynamicsCRM and ACT.
But unlike other tools, it is specifically designed for a sales team to keep track of prospects and to show the existing social connections among them. It automatically draws “knowledge maps” that show you these connections, and you can click on the relationships to drill down further and see how to reach particular individuals. All of this happens within your CRM system, so you can leverage the existing information that is stored there. For each contact, there is also a list of top ten relationships that the system has sussed out from your social graph.
IntellectSpace calls this process “warm prospecting” to distinguish it from cold calling, and states that it can be up to 25 times much more effective in closing sales. I spent some time with a test account and the Web-based service has some promise, and certainly if you are looking at ways to leverage your existing CRM investment you should take a closer look. Free 30-day trials are available.
