6 degrees of (insert your name here)
A fairly common social circle concept is that any one person is connected to another person by at most 6 people. It was made famous by the game 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Now let's apply this to business, networking, and job hunting. The number one reason for getting a job or catching wind of an opening is by who you know. What if you could connect yourself through your social network to the person hiring? What if I want to work for a certain company and don't know how to gain an audience?
These questions pose an interesting challenge easily solved in the digital age. 
While researching ways to improve sales leads and sales in general, I stumbled upon PeopleMaps. It's a way for you to say, "show how you're connected to me". Or how you're connected to the president. It's quite accurate and the more information you allow PeopleMaps to see, the greater the tool performs.
As a child I wanted to be an astronaut. Well I wanted to be many things, but my main fascination was (and still is) around space. To this day I would volunteer in a heartbeat to go to Mars. I decided to see if I could meet or get introduced to someone at NASA. I figured this would be an impossible task for PeopleMaps to perform. Amazingly I am connected to a few NASA employees within 3 connections at an 86% strength. Who would've known?! You're beginning to see the importance of this tool in your sales generation and job hunt.
After signing up, you are asked to include log in information for a few social networking sites. I did both LinkedIn and Facebook. These seem to represent my professional and personal networks and by combining them PeopleMaps is able to determine weighting and relevancy of your connections.
Here is an example of the resulting map. Hover your mouse (on the site, not on the image below) over each connection line, bubble, or icon to see contextual information showing its relationship and strength.
The last piece of the puzzle is CRM integration. PeopleMaps provides integration into SalesForce as well as potential expansion into SugarCRM.
Give it a test drive and let me know what you think!
Tracking your sales leads, for free
While working at a local Rochester firm, sales tracking consisted of a precariously rigged Excel sheet that only one person could edit at a time, was consistently out-dated, and just all around horrible to use. Not to mention you couldn't access it outside the network without VPN access.
After asking around, this was a pretty typical setup. And the response from business owners when asked about sales tracking tools consisted of, "sales tracking is for the big guys" or "small to medium businesses can't afford full time sales professionals, let alone a system to track their leads."
In comes SugarCRM... It's open source, runs on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) server, and takes less than 30 minutes to set up. It sounds too good to be true, I felt the same way trying it out.
After the initial setup I copied what I could from the existing spreadsheet into SugarCRM, showed it to my boss, and had her test it out for a few days. The result, she was amazed! It was immediately implemented to everyone within the company (every employee is a salesperson within a small business).
One of the best features is the ability to add cloud connectors (LinkedIn, Jigsaw, homebrew) to your leads. Once you're logged in you can hover over a LinkedIn icon and see if you have any connections within the organization, or if you've even spelled the company's name correctly.
I'd have to say the second best feature is the charts/reports. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. The below image makes it even easier to see that a large amount of potential money is stuck in the First Discussion phase and gives staff an opportunity to put emphasis on opportunities within that bucket.
If you're already using SugarCRM you may notice that the above funnel chart doesn't come built in. I have a secret for enabling it, leave a comment and I'll send you the details.
Oh and don't forget the ever popular plugin capability! Anyone with a will and a way has been at work creating features and functions to make the tool fit your needs.
I'm writing this about a month after roll-out and things are going strong. Sales leads generation is up, sales are up, and we've developed a nurture program for companies who have expressed interest but may not be ready to purchase.
Without further sounding like a complete commercial, go have a look. Get rid of the idea that sales tracking is costly and time consuming. Find the nearest open source guru, an afternoon and be amazed at how cheap and simple lead tracking can be.