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Comment by JarekS | Hacker News Reader

One of the ideas was to create something like a local business social network and use it for connecting employees and customers. You would ask your users to login with their Facebook account to your system (benefit - a lot of info about the customer) and then hook them up to the product they have and deal value they generated. This would give you good info about importance of the call.

Idea could be summed up as "Quora for support with CRM integration".

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I think the problem with Facebook, is in a straight B2b job, quite apart from the fact i think i could never legally clear working with FB apis, is the info people put on their FB is not relevant to their work. The info i want to plug in to is such as reporting structure, tenure in a position, line responsibility, projects, published papers, conferences attended or talks given. That's very specific stuff which sometimes is publicly available, but usually not. THis intel comes off the direct sales floor. But it can be super useful when you need to work with a customer to understand the scope of their needs, because you have some kind of map based on which you can (if you are good at this kind of interpersonal) start asking how your bit of code affects group a in a related department, or if a change to say a account presentation will go down well with CFO. There are commercial databases which try to keep up with personnel changes in bigger companies. Thomson does one. "Amadeus" a Belgian data source does well for company reporting structure. I'm a firm believer in selling features up the chain in a customer site, not "upselling" them new products. Dones well, this has sometimes had for me the side - benefit of locking consultants out of the loop. Nothing worse than aiming a project or sub - project at needs you've discovered at a custmer, to have a different management branch bring in a consultant to "evaluate" your work's worth. So, i try to insist that the primary role of sales is not necessarily to be closing deals, but to be closing the data we need to work quickly with a customer. I'm specific too, we never use the word "client" beause it sounds too open ended, too "maxing out billable hours". I try to teach sales that the efficacy of their sale is directly related to how easily we can start to work as closely as is practical or legally appropriate with a customer. Basically, play the consultants at their own game. You can bet they know who is who in a attractive potential customer site, because, generalizing,that sems to be the only leverage they ever have.

It's a nice idea you have there. But it's 20 years since i first experienced customer receptions declining to give any info as to employees, even for specific roles / names. I've no idea how legal in a big corp would think, about even using FB personal data to approach or manage contacts with employees. That said, the first thing i learned about sales, which is still an essential component of your job, i'd say particularly so if you're coding to fix a customer problem or desire, is to verbally map out common contacts with the first person you speak with. That's not far from what FB actually does, but you're doing it in person, albeit down a phone call often as not, and so concerns as to privacy can be finely guaged if you learn to listen.

The kind of data we pull in for any company we'd like to wok with is theses, lectures, of who we think pays attention to what we do, even if not "decision maker" then we delve deeper to try to understand the scope of a department influence - are they a skunkworks, with board support, are they mavericks, are they hard pressed ops guys? Sometimes just because who you communicate with might be classified as one of those types, you may be doing a lot of help by widening your contacts outside, because for big corps it's not a given teams talk to teams talk to the right management layers all the time.

What i'm on about i think works for any company you work with above 50 employees, and requires a lot of discretion. I don't have any "hard sell" function in where i work, but it's good to learn off experienced sales guys, and quite often they've worked "hard sell" before. My definition of "hard sell" is to just be absolutely direct about what you want to convey, waste the least time of any party, and haggle price especially if your bit of the project can give longer term or wider benefits. My own experience is you're lucky if you an pitch a technical project at a senior manager and get two way conversation, so the idea is you mix up who you speak with. Learn off a sales guy how to get past secretaries, also, it is handy in a pinch!

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