Executives and management have benefitted greatly from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, gaining critical insight into managing their business and driving revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability. But, information vital to delivering that insight needs to be entered by individual sales users, many of whom view CRM as simply a surveillance and reporting tool for management to track their activities rather than as a user productivity tool. Consequently, lower user adoption by salespeople results in incomplete data and analysis in such systems.

Similar to how Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Twitter have changed how people communicate and interact within personal social networks, salespeople need comparable applications that facilitate collaboration within enterprise social networks and increase their sales effectiveness. They need applications that work the way they do and increase their efficacy in the critical activities that underlie their daily business routines. This paper examines the challenges salespeople face, the growing Web 2.0 trend in the enterprise, and the drivers for a new breed of social applications that complement traditional CRM systems to help sales users close more deals quickly.