First - our system lets businesses to invite their customers and prospects to the joint workspace (target customers are B2B companies. Facebook-like system - see screenshots here: http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/08/summary-of-key-elements-of-... ).
If the sales cycle is longer you have a lot of email chaos (both on sales team end and customer team end) and we help those teams to avoid that, build stronger relationship and maintain their own business social network. We also automatically track sales cycle progress based on the communication that is going on in the system.
And yes - we are using this right now and people prefer this to an email. It really works (because every action you make in the system sends an email notification it's not really such a huge workflow change).
Anyway - we see that Instant Personalization could improve shared customer workspace a lot: - customer could see "social proof" - who else in his social network did business with that company? And instantly ask for the reference. - auto avatar and contact info - Sales team could have instant info on what current customer likes (i.e. food, hobby etc.). This is a bit creepy but could speed up the sales cycle.
What do you think?