Hearsay Social Debuts Brand, Social Sales Tools

Enterprise social media platform provider Hearsay Social released the latest version of its social sales platform today and launched the Hearsay Social Brand Solution for marketers to create and manage high volumes of social content and interactions.

Using the social sales platform, reps can tap into conversations occurring with potential customers across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; some of the features include alerts related to prospect activity, mobile device compatibility, and improved calendars and activity streams.

"People are saying, 'Social marketing is great, and I believe in social [for] brand uplift, but social selling is really where it really starts to connect back to return," comments Steve Garrity, founder and chief technology officer at Hearsay Social. "We're seeing a lot of interest for the ability to identify active prospects" and for the intelligence to not only target prospects but to know the right time to engage with them.

The Social Brand Solution is geared toward groups of five to 10 corporate marketers that manage hundreds of thousands, if not millions of fans and followers on social platforms, Garrity notes. The enterprise platform seeks to streamline marketing messaging across multiple social networks to give corporate marketers access to the same content and functionality as other teams, such as compliance.

Although the Brand Solution is early in its roll-out, Garrity expects "a vast majority of customers" to leverage Hearsay's social software and brand marketing solutions together.

Companies that have reached early successes in social selling tend to integrate social media differently at every stage of the buying cycle, he says. In addition, when social media is tailored to specific lines of business and functions in an organization, such as sales operations, sales enablement, marketing, or compliance, marketing and sales efforts through social media have been much more unified.

Of the early adopters of its social selling solutions, Garrity says the average deployment size is 1,000 seats. "We're talking about big salesforces here, where they're…really [looking to] leverage the technology platform and all of the collective data from social sources. In marketing organizations, the average magnitude is about 10-20 people."