Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 3)

Duncan Lennox: Another classic case for us would be on-boarding. Like a lot of our technology companies, customers are very fast-growth companies. They’re bringing on board a lot of sales people all the time. They’re also acquiring companies. When they acquire a company, they get a new set of sales people with that as well. The issue is what we would call time to productivity. How quickly can you get those new sales people up to speed on your products, selling methodology, and sales tools so that they can get out on the field and be effective?

Typically, that’s a process that can take eight to nine months with traditional approaches. We’ve been able to do a certain amount of that material up front with Qstream, in perhaps two or three months. Then get you out into the field faster and use Qstream to drive your capability and effectiveness once you’re out in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Is your customer base enterprise customers largely? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What other things have you seen in the social media performance measurement space in general that are worthy of note?

Clara Shih: More broadly in social media, outside of sales, the easiest is if you’re an e-commerce provider because you can trace directly the fact that someone clicked on a post or a paid ad inside of Facebook or Twitter. That’s the most direct way. There have been correlation studies done between the fact that consumer is a fan of your Facebook page or a follower of yours and on whether that’s an indicator of a more loyal client who spends more. Also, on the customer service side, there’s a number of companies now that handle customer service questions and issues over Twitter. They found that it can be more efficient, and it can actually save in terms of customer call center volume. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: To all of the connections, that’s not necessarily trigger-driven. The trigger is coming from one particular person.

Clara Shih: We can identify patterns across their networks. Insurance agents tend to have peer groups and sell to customers similar to their age range. You see these clusters of people, typically around 30 or 40, who all suddenly get engaged in the same amount of time. If you see many of the same signals in your network, you can share. Then, there’s just good general knowledge content that agents like to share like earthquake readiness, or winterizing your home before the storms come. There’s a general content that’s engaging to a wide population of people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that naturally break down your business into the kinds of insurance or products that you’re helping sell to? For example, marriage, engagement, or having a baby as opposed to cars or something that has a less pervasive presence on social media?

Clara Shih: A lot of people share photos of their new car also. Maybe, they’re more boastful. As a company, we have chosen to focus on insurance and financial services. I think it’s part of a broader trend that you’re seeing of the rise of vertical SaaS companies. SaaS is becoming a more pervasive delivery model. We’re able to provide much deeper customization for each industry and that allows us to focus and drive greater value to that industry. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on this example a bit. Let me ask you a few questions that will clarify how you do it and how much of this is viable. What is the assumption? Are we talking about running these kinds of trigger analysis on Jimmy’s already connected set of friends or are we running this trigger analysis algorithm on a broader set?

Clara Shih: That’s a great question. On Facebook and on LinkedIn, we run this predictive algorithm on your existing connections. This is due to privacy policies. In a more public social network like Twitter where you can follow people without them having to follow you back, we can apply this analysis more broadly. Part of what Hearsay does is, we train our users on how to authentically connect with more people on their network whether those people are existing customers or not. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 1)

Social media is dramatically changing sales and marketing. In this interview, we double-click down on the insurance and financial advisory sales functions. Clara Shih guides us through the developments in this field, as well as offers suggestions for new venture opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as to Hearsay Social.

Clara Shih: I’m the CEO and Founder of Hearsay Social. We’re a 200-person enterprise software company based in San Francisco with offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Sramana Mitra: What is Hearsay’s primary business?
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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Darren Hill, CEO of WebLinc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Besides geography, what other parameters do you personalize on?

Darren Hill: For a lot of our fashion clients, we personalize on sizes. For instance, if you have come to the website and you’ve looked for a specific pair of shoes, we’ll actually tag your account and we’ll know what shoe size you are. So the next time you look at shoes, we will filter and sort that specific shoe category. We will make sure that the shoes at the top are available and are in sizes that you indicated that you were interested in. That simple little tweak can increase the conversion rate by about double for specific clients. That is pretty significant.

Sramana Mitra: What else in fashion is interesting in terms of personalization? I’ve started one of the first Internet fashion companies about 15 years ago. I know this category cold. What are you seeing in terms of trends? I’m a big believer in online >>>