Businesses Seek A Personal Touch

A variation on the Friendster system that in the consumer world enables people to recommend friends on the Web could also help businesses better mine contacts buried in personal e-mail, PIMs and other applications.

The problem these systems set out to solve is universal. In their search for new business, sales professionals know that nearly any kind of personal connection to their prospect will likely bear more fruit than a cold call. So they want to find out who, in their organization, or even partner organizations, might have an existing relationship of any kind with their prospective customer.

If, for example, a company wants to pitch its product to prospect John Brown, it is more likely to get face time with him if there is some sort of pre-existing personal relationship. Social networking "mines" the myriad PCs and servers in a business, looking for links to Brown.

The software would then analyze and rank those relationships. So a person with Brown's name in her contact list and who sends mail to him is scored one way. But someone who receives mail back from Brown would be ranked higher.

A handful of vendors like Contact Network and Visible Path are hoping that this notion will take off, especially as companies struggle to rationalize the fortunes they have already spent on CRM and SFA (sales-force automation) systems.

By pairing technology with a sensitivity to privacy concerns, they hope people will opt into a system that essentially searches their data. To succeed, executives from these vendors acknowledge, they must offer complete anonymity up front so a sales assistant will not feel compelled to offer up Uncle Joe, who is CEO of XYZ company, to her boss as a sales target.

Some solution providers see the value here. "Anonymity is the home run," said Steven Pope, president of Applied Marketing Science, a Lake Forest, Ill., consultant specializing in commercial realtor accounts. "The system can map every contact and relation path there is, but no one will know I know Bill Gates unless I want them to know I know Bill Gates," he said.

Pope sees Visible Path's offering as a way for him to get often-distributed commercial realtors to work better together. Unlike some professionals, these realtors tend to get the notion of referrals, and how lucrative they can be.

Chesley Chen, financial services practice director at Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) who is working with Contact Network, is optimistic. "Clearly this is in front of the curve, but it could solve an age-old problem in terms of developing business contacts, getting warm introductions. A lot of CRM systems that have failed could be bolstered by this," he noted.

Visible Path CEO Antony Brydon concurs, but acknowledges that customer education is important. "If you can show customers they can have 100 percent confidence in the [privacy methodology] and show them the benefit can be very valuable, people will join in. We have to show them how they can make 80 percent fewer cold calls, then this becomes a 'must have' for them."

Contact Network and Visible Path are concentrating on direct sales for now, but that will change. Both companies say they want to work with partners with CRM and SFA expertise.

Solution providers can help customers "figure out how to maximize the utility of the massive SFA systems they already have, said Cesar Brea, CEO of Contact Network, Boston.

Ken Winell, CEO of Econium, a Totowa, N.J., solution provider specializing in collaboration, expressed skepticism. "This seems a little too Wild Wild West for business adoption," he noted.