CRMs are getting social but one important piece is missing

As I wrote in an earlier post last week, Salesforce.com is getting more and more into social business. SFDC leader of the Enterprise CRMs with social integration is not alone, MS Dynamics, Oracle and Sage are fighting as well for the social integration. Most famous product is chatter for SFDC.




With chatter you can subscribe feeds and find relevant people you want to follow. Vibe.com offers similar product for other CRMs like Dynamics CRM.

Another great feature is jigsaw which keeps your contacts clean. SFDC has over 26 million contacts in their DB which get with jigsaw updated and cleaned.

However an important part is missing in each CRM. As a sales person I don't want to read every day tweets from my contacts or their status update on linkedin.

The next step (for CRM) is to do it for me. The perfect CRM would work like this.

We create our contacts and save with them their twitter account, linkedin profile and eventual Facebook address. Then we can input some important terms like relevant to the business we want to do with the contact. Maybe I want to sell my client an ERP solution, then some of these keywords would be "CRM, Oracle, Microsoft" etc. I might work for Microsoft therefore I want to have my competition as keywords.

Everyday my CRM would scan the internet like linkedin and twitter for these keywords assigned to the contact.
When I open my contact in CRM I would see a word cloud with the most relevant keywords big and the least relevant keywords small. Similar like the image below.




I could instantly see that my contact has my major competition as biggest word. When I click on it, I could see my contact has 3 news contacts in linkedin which are working at my competition etc.

The word could visually give us a feedback about our contact without the need to read. The CRM could even send an Alert if a certain world gets a certain size. The possibilities are endless. Sales Managers would not need to read every tweet, blog etc. And still get in a grasp the most important message. Maybe we see in the word cloud that the keyword for our company is big and green. We click on it and see a lot of positive comments about us (this person did post in twitter) or that two of our contact linkedin connections are already using our software or just bought our software.

For me, this would be the ultimate CRM for prospects and existing contacts. The last thing i like, is to spend hours on the computer to put thousands of notes and info into my CRM, nor do I want to read hundreds of blogs or tweets. I want to sell and the CRM which helps to sell easier is the best. I strongly believe a function like the interactive word cloud would be a killer app. Granted, not everybody has a twitter account, linkedin profile or a Facebook page (I know Facebook might be tricky if you are not befriended with the person), but companies who are using the CRM for b2b can be sure that the people they contact are either on twitter, have a blog or are in public through newspaper etc.

The perfect CRM does the pre-work for me, does all the scanning and reading and just provides for me a snapshot of the most relevant data.

Is there something like this out there? If yes, let me know, if not, then I will happily provide my complete concept to SFDC, Dynamics, Sage etc if they are interested. Or do I just not get it, and my idea is ridiculous?

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