Ask any sales person within your company to give up one of their hard-earned
contacts and you’re likely to meet stony silence as they look for a way to
keep that information to themselves. Spoke Software only wants to help spread the sales person’s contacts, and is turning skeptics about the process into believers.
Protecting a sales person’s privacy and at the same time giving other
enterprise employees access to the same network of contacts is the basis for
15 technology patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office by Spoke Software.
The Spoke Enterprise Edition and Spoke Showcase Network give large
corporations inside access to thousands of people around the world, a
network of contacts gathered by its own employees. Already in its third
generation, Spoke officials claim they are far ahead of the competition with the help of the patents.
The best part of the technology, according to Chris Tolles, Spoke’s vice
president of marketing and one of the company’s seven founders, is that it
involves zero data entry — no forms to fill out, no human resources
specialist going around asking hundreds of questions — which means that
almost immediately after downloading the application, it’s ready for use by
everyone on the network.
“Its time to value is about 10 minutes,” he said.
The information is garnered through the employee’s own workstation
application, be it Microsoft Outlook, AOL Instant Messenger or the Web sites
they’ve visited. Spoke has already integrated a host of computer
applications to its Showcase Network (alternative e-mail client Eudora went
online Friday).
Digging through people’s emails and using them for a intranet database, for
use by the entire corporation, is one of the reason’s Spoke has been working
to build new technology that protects the employee’s privacy.
“Getting people to give up their extended relationships is very hard,”
Tolles said. Making a successful product, he said, required software that
lets the employee limit the extent of the information given out.
Tolles said that any one employee has anywhere between 1,500 to 3,000
instances of relationships residing in their computer, whether it’s a direct
line into another company, or just the friend of a friend who knows someone
at the target company.
The software isn’t designed to let sales people go on a name-dropping
bonanza and possibly ruining existing relationships. It’s designed to get
help from other people in the company to help out with relationships already
formed to save time.
For example, say sales person Bob at Company X needs to contact the IT
manager at Company Y for a potential sale. Not knowing whom the IT manager
is, Bob would call up the Showcase application and type in the name of
Company Y, hoping for a match. Tom in human resources at Company X plays
squash with the IT manager every other Friday at the YMCA and happens to
have the phone number. Ten minutes later, Bob’s on the phone with the
manager.
The end result is productivity gains that Spoke officials say saves an
enterprise using the software anywhere between 25-30 percent. Savings like
that are crucial for software company to tout, in an economic environment
where IT staffs are increasingly tightening their budgets on new software.
“Being able to offer a solid value proposition around sales productivity
improvement by building something new is the kind of thing Silicon Valley is
all about,” said Ben Smith, Spoke CEO, in a statement Friday.
Currently, there are seven companies in closed testing of the social
networking software, according to Tolles. A $9.2 million funding round
earlier this year is expected to last Spoke until those companies become
customers.
