Is Social Selling the New Oil?

This article previously appeared on the DLA blog here

Clive Humby, UK Mathematician and architect of Tesco’s Clubcard, is widely credited as the first to coin the phrase: “Data is the new oil.”

In fact, the whole quote reads:

“Data is the new oil, valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analysed for it to have value.”

Data is great but it’s how you use it that’s important.

When Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for $26.2bn everybody seemed surprised, but not me.

The rumour that they were going to buy Salesforce, for me, didn’t ring true. Why buy a “me too” CRM when you have one already? Surely you want to leapfrog the competition, so the purchase of LinkedIn made perfect sense.

I’ve used a number of CRMs and the issue has always been that it’s an “empty shell”. As a salesperson I am supposed to populate it with data only for the data be out of date in three months. Data is never static, it’s evolving. What I want, as a sales guy, is a CRM that works with me.

So, when I heard that Microsoft, owner of the Dynamics CRM, was going to integrate with LinkedIn, the database of 500 million professional people worldwide, I thought, “game on”.

The blog continues here

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