Leveraging Enterprise Relationships to Drive Sales

Are your enterprise relationships also closed?

On Labor Day weekend the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was closed for repairs, leaving drivers of the approximately 260,000 vehicles it services every day to choose other options. The bridge closure and those who left the Bay Area for the holiday weekend reduced the number of people in San Francisco and got me thinking about the need for bridges to facilitate relationships. Also, in a recent call about the economics of software as a service (SaaS), an industry analyst stated that “you can’t commoditize relationships.”

It is true that relationships matter most in conducting business; it is usually easier to reach a business goal, such as getting an appointment or making a sale, with someone who knows, likes, and successfully worked with you than with a new contact. However, business is also about continually building new relationships, and one of the easiest and most effective ways to build new relationships is through existing relationships. That is one of the reasons LinkedIn is so popular.

Every company is filled with opportunities to build new relationships based on employee business contacts. Wouldn’t it be great to leverage the relationships your colleagues have to further the business goals of your company? The only drawback is that some colleagues may prefer not to participate; they may not want to expose or risk their relationships to further every business initiative, and they may want to avoid the pressure of participation every time they are asked.

One of the keys to successfully unlocking and leveraging internal business relationships is anonymity. If there were a way to indicate that colleagues have relationships within a prospective company, without initially specifying the exact contact or the colleague who has the relationship, it would provide an opportunity to build a new relationship while providing your colleague the comfort level he or she needs to evaluate the opportunity and make a clear decision with no pressure to participate.

BranchIt is one product that helps organizations accomplish both objectives of leveraging relationships colleagues have while keeping the relationships and the colleagues anonymous until the colleague decides to help with an introduction. It supports the above analyst statement that you can’t commoditize relationships while providing organizations a better opportunity than they would normally have to build new relationships at the discretion of those who hold the relationships.

What are some of the ways your company uses enterprise relationship management and social networking to achieve business goals?