DataHug – The Business of Relationships

Relationships = Route to Market

Posted on 08. Jul, 2010 by Connor in Blog, Sales

Understanding, sharing and leveraging relationships (i.e. ‘who you know’) is vital in professional services. Relationships are used across all areas of the business to help improve sales, operations, recruitment and account management. Successful sales people, in particular, understand the importance of relationships. Used correctly, relationships help facilitate warm introductions, identify opportunities and gain valuable insights into political, financial and other hidden factors that may dramatically affect the probability of winning a sale.

However, it is not easy for organisations to capture, measure and share relationships. For example, consider the scenario where a partner who specializes in E-Learning has read an article by ‘Mary Roche’, the new head of E-Learning at ‘BigPharma Inc’, on her plan to invest heavily in this area. The partner immediately sets about trying to find a relationship he/she can leverage to meet with Mary. The partner will typically go about this in a few ways;

• ‘Ask the Audience’ by sending an email to all his/her colleagues who the partner thinks works with BigPharma or their competitors. This is basically a fishing expedition that results in multiple email forwards, out of office responses and bloated inboxs.
• ‘Check the CRM‘. This approach relies on other colleagues having invested the time and effort to enter information into the company’s CRM system.
• ‘Check LinkedIn’. This public approach may give more insight about Mary’s past experience and what contacts the partner can begin to leverage in order to connect. This can again involve emailing or asking several 2nd+ degree contacts to forward messages to their contacts. It also fails to estimate which contact route has the strongest relationship path.
• ‘Google it’. This public avenue may find other routes to Mary such as a phone number or email address. However cold calling busy executives is not always the best way to build a relationship.

These typical approaches are currently available to most organisations but can be cumbersome, time consuming and ineffective. Many leading professional service firms are now beginning to ask is there an alternative, more efficient and more cost effective way to approach managing relationships and contacts ?

DataHug  offers a new system to  organisations that automatically processes their contacts / relationships information  allowing them to better identify, organise and share their collective relationships.

We believe that our system will give organisations with strong collaborative cultures a powerful ‘competitive edge’. An edge that will allow them go to market faster, leaner and better informed than the competition. A scenario where partners (like the one mentioned in the example above) can simply and quickly get in front of the potential client and start the sales process.

If you think DataHug’s solution could benefit your company and you are interested in learning more about  the system, then please register for our upcoming beta trial.