Partnerpedia adds lead management 13 August, 2009 By Steve Wexler

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"Notwithstanding the Gartner report, social media is gaining leverage and being used throughout the business world," said Constructive's Sam Liu, director of marketing. Targeted at vendors and solution providers, the new features, which will be rolled out this month, provide business partners with a secure content portal for B2B collaboration, enabling companies and partners to manage and track sales activities. He said leads can easily be entered into the system and tracked throughout their lifecycle. In addition, sales managers and representatives can receive notification of lead status and pipeline reports can be generated instantly to project forecasts.

One of the big challenges for business is figuring out what social media means and how best to leverage it, said Liu. Constructive has already done the heavy lifting with Partnerpedia and adding lead management just makes that much more attractive, especially for smaller solution providers who aren't ready to step up to a full CRM system. They no longer have to rely on spreadsheets or other ad-hoc methods to track and manage sales activities, he said.

"It's a great tool for small-medium businesses that don't have the resources of large companies. Now they can leverage Partnerpedia to manage leads . . . helping them to close sales."

Some of the advanced features that will be available on the Partnerpedia Private Networks, custom vendor-specific networks, include the ability to pass leads on to partner and manage partners' leads. In addition, it also allows partners to register deals with the vendor. "In that way the partner is somewhat protected."

According to Liu, nobody else has integrated lead management into social media, although he made it clear Constructive isn't trying to compete with the established lead management vendors like salesforce.com and Siebel. "We see it mostly appealing to small medium vendors and solution providers."

Launched last year, Partnerpedia has seen strong interest in social media, especially since the spring time. "We're growing at about 30-40 percent per quarter. People are starting to leverage social media in the right context."

For Constructive, the right context is a business focus. "It's about helping companies close deals. If you focus on closing business then you have staying power."

Recent data from Integrated mar.com (publisher of eChannelLine) and Gilwell Group found that channel partners that are growing in this economy are the ones using social media for business purposes, whereas those who are ignoring social networking sites and other social media applications are struggling more, said Michael Dubrall, managing director of Gilwell Group. A comparison of growing versus non-growing resellers showed that the former make use of social networking sites more than the latter. When broken out based on growing versus non-growing resellers, the results showed MySpace/Facebook at 4.18 for growing resellers versus 3.2 for non-growing resellers, LinkedIn/Plaxo at 5.36 and 3.63, industry blogs at 4.07 and 2.98, YouTube at 2.96 and 2.39, Second Life at 1.25 and 1.1, and Twitter at 2.93 and 1.9.

For information on Constructive and Partnerpedia, visit http://www.constructive-media.com/

With files from Chris Talbot.