What prospects and customers look for:

  • Information on potential suppliers and their products
  • Relevant comments and reports from other users
  • Supplier independent discussion platforms

What B2B prospects and customers do not want is a sales pitch, for that they can go to the suppliers web site. Many groups in XING have mutated to sales platforms, which is not what social networking is about.

What B2B suppliers want:

  • Background information on persons involved with purchase decisions
  • Visibility resulting from discussions and comments
  • Market background information
  • Real-life contacts resulting from social network activities

These requirements are not incompatible, but there is a numbers problem. While individuals looking for information can research on a specific topic when interested, suppliers need permanently to monitor these activities. Also the number of people gathering information will always be considerably higher than the number of employees available for monitoring social sites. The effort involved in monitoring is immense.

Evidently, there is a need for automating these processes, which is where CRM software comes in. As may be expected. Salesforce as a cloud oriented supplier has announced several functions, most of which are still in development. Other companies, Pivotal for example, have announced plans for integration with twitter, linkedIn and facebook. The solutions offered are oriented towards gathering information, which is fine but is only a time saving function for sales and marketing personnel who would otherwise research the information directly.

After saying that automation is required, there are some major challenges to master. Firstly, the amount of information available is considerable and only a small part of the information available will be relevant. Secondly the behavior of people active in the social web world is changing rapidly and there is no reason to suppose that this will change during the next years. Finally, marketing gurus will say that there must be a dialogue between suppliers and the outside world. All this makes automation more a dream than a realistic aim

Common to B2B and B2C is the aim of steering people to the company web site, assuming of course that the web site offers support,  forums, customer information platforms and order processing. At this level, processes can and should be automated.  The message I am getting to is this. CRM B2B applications may be loosely linked to social sites, the really import interaction is that between the CRM solution and a modern, functional internet presence.