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The term "customer relationship management" is something of a misnomer, because CRM, in general, tracks relationships but does nothing to help sales reps build them with customers.

That's all changing with social CRM, according to John Rourke, CEO of Bantam Networks, an online service that allows business teams to collaborate. "Social CRM is a fusion of social-media technology with the CRM systems used in sales, marketing, customer service, and even product development," he explains. "With social CRM strategies, all these departments can now collaboratively include the voice of the customer into their business practices."

In the sales environment, for instance, social CRM software is used to collaborate within sales team and search across the Web on such networks as Twitter to discover prospects and partners, communicate, start a business relationship, and begin process workflows that turn the contact into a customer or partner for the purpose of generating revenue.

For example, Bantam Live allows a sales professional to search Twitter, for instance, using a keyword and then import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with sales team members to engage this new contact, converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, and maintain all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page.

Social CRM is important because sales professionals must "fish" where there are plenty of fish. Social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, are increasingly where business executives and decision makers "swim," i.e., maintain their identities and interact with peers. In addition, many decision makers are now using Twitter to maintain a constant feed of their interests and business direction. Monitoring Twitter can thus provide real-time insight into what prospects and customers are thinking about.

Social CRM thus provides sales professionals with a new and growing channel to discover, build, and maintain relationships with people for business purposes. For example, with Bantam Live, tweets from selected customers and prospects cascade into the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, so the sales team can constantly keep its finger on the pulse of what's going on with customers.

Social CRM also helps sales teams work more closely together to develop and close sales opportunities. Because it encourages more and deeper interaction, it adds to the "ambient awareness" of all team activity, thereby keeping everyone in the loop. Sales professionals can comment on activity, add notes to contacts and tasks, provide status updates, share calendars, etc., to each other's data input for improved collaboration.

In short, social CRM helps sales teams actually manage relationships, rather than just track them. The result is improved lead-generation, better business relationships with customers, and, as a bonus, improved communication and connectedness within the sales team.