What is KiteDesk and How Will Help You With Social Sales
Sean Burke is the CMO of KiteDesk, a new startup that offers an integrated sales platform thanks to a nice little Chrome browser-plugin. The idea, according to Burke is to eliminate Tab Creep – you know, having the millions of browser tabs open for every application you need to do your work (yes, I exaggerate on ‘millions’ but you know what I’m talking about).
Think – a tab for Salesforce (and yes, this solution integrates with Salesforce), a tab for LinkedIn and your other social networks, a tab for email, a tab for your website, a tab for your marketing automation solution, and so on.
Imagine developing client relationships and having to manually maintain them within Salesforce, or to manually monitor changes to your clients by checking their LinkedIn and other social profiles regularly, or consider the disconnect that regularly happens between what marketing has done with a client to what sales is doing with that client.
KiteDesk, says Burke, can help bring everything together by providing a browser plugin that is accessed by the applications you use regularly. Here is what it looks like:
This solution works like this: you sign up for a KiteDesk account. Then you connect all your applications and invite your colleagues to join as well. Then you install the plug-in and get to work.
The KiteDesk solution focuses on three key areas:
1. Sales Intelligence:
KiteDesk offers a 360 degree view of a person or a company. This includes information from email , calendars (Exchange, gmail), CRMs, marketing automation (Marketo, Eloqua, Silverpop), social tools, external third party information systems such as Zoomfoo, Net Prospect and more. The idea is to offer as much data as you need in the right context.
2. CRM Automation:
The idea here is that you should not have to do the work twice, so it enables you to push and pull information into your CRM system through the KitDesk app. That app can be opened on top of any application you have open in your browser, whether that’s email, marketing automation a website or some other web based application.
3. Social Selling:
It pays to pay attention to what your prospects and clients are doing and saying across social media. If you can take the relationships you and your co-workers have developed over LinkedIn and other social media sites and do things like request warm introductions, then you are taking things to a new level.
Functionality you get with KiteDesk
There’s a fairly long list of functionality KiteDesk offers for helping you source leads across a wide range of data sources, reducing the amount of time you need to spend researching, helping find relationships across team networks, keeping Salesfore up to date and more. It offers what it calls an Intelligent ranking algorithm which tells you how strong relationships are (which in turns gives you a good idea how good a lead a person is).
For example, in the screenshot below you see two numbers beside each contact. The first number tells you how strong the connection to that person is, while the second number tells you how well the contact is connected to the company. You can click on a number and see details on how you are connected.
Other functionality includes sending emails and setting up meetings from your mobile device, record calls, create tasks and notes to put in your CRM app. All interactions also ensure detailed contact history is added to the CRM.
Not everyone is open to sharing their contacts and other information, so when you set up your KiteDesk account you have a couple of security options:
- You can be anonymous (so you just show as an employee or a co-worker) and others will have to reach out to you directly to get the information they want.
- Share your name only.
- Share everything.
As a company, you can also pre-configure all users via a management setting.
KiteDesk is essentially a big data platform that offers not only a place to collect and store information, but also a service that provides intelligent alerts and triggers as the information changes, along with centralized search, analytics and reporting.
But for KiteDesk to really take off and be successful, you need to get everyone participating. This is part of the reason the basic service is free, to get as many people using it as possible Burke said. Fees start to apply when you want to connect to Salesforce or connect with Exchange or Google Apps.
Burke also told me they are working on making this platform work for recruiting companies and other services. The possibilities for this kind of services are wide ranging. He also said that it could be used for groups of people who were not part of the same company, but want a way to share information and contacts. One possibility might be a group of people trying to organize conference and they want to share networks to find presenters, sponsors and volunteers to help out. Just an idea I had , if not a good one.
What do you think? Yes it only works on Chrome right now, but put that aside and think about how this service can pull together all the tools you need to build your sales pipeline. Could you make it work?
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