Listen to this articleGrapevine6 is a patented social and digital sales engagement platform that accelerates sales and marketing efforts. Below is our recent interview with Bruce Culbert, Board Member/Senior Advisor at Grapevine6:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Grapevine6?
A: Launched in 2013, Grapevine6 uses artificial intelligence to provide content that moves sales opportunities through the pipeline in a more efficient and effective way. Grapevine6 solves content challenges faced in deploying employee advocacy, content marketing and social selling, and works with existing sales and marketing investments to increase ROI. Headquartered in Toronto and led by an award-winning team of engineers, Grapevine6 powers global social selling programs at some of the largest technology and financial services companies in the world. For more information, visit Grapevine6.com.
Recommended: Q: Can you give us insights into your solutions?
A: Savvy businesses are leveraging today’s rich social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter as powerful sales channels. These networks allow sales and marketers to engage in a highly personalized 1:1 conversation with prospects. But it comes with a caveat: to overcome the hesitation and suspiciousness. This means, instead of pitching their connections with a promtional offer, one should “nurture” the sales relationship via sharing valuable, relevant, engaging content, that will, over time lead to a conversation around the desired commercial transaction.
So if the recipe looks so easy, why isn’t social selling working out? Simple: most corporate social selling programs fail because of content. It’s because sales people only share marketing-generated content. And going outside of that requires a lot of time and effort to find, research, summarize and post. It turns out the most valuable behavior on social is also one of the most time consuming – sharing useful and relevant content that will build your personal brand and improve relationships with your network. That’s where Grapevine6 excels – The mobile first app quickly finds relevant content and automatically schedules posts so you only need to use it for a few minutes, once a week. Think of each piece of content as a piece of your personal brand and as a way to start or continue conversations with prospects and customers.
Q: How exactly does your product work?
A: What you share on social says a lot about you. Grapevine6 uses AI to analyze digital footprints (that is, what you share and what your network reacts to) and recommends content that is a best-fit for a specific account or specific contact. We tie content from more than 11,000 publications into the personalization of your social sharing.
Grapevine6 is an app that finds, curates and publishes timely, relevant and trusted third-party content for your brand and for your audience, in addition to your company’s expert content. The app streams relevant content, which can be published to social with a single tap. Each post is automatically scheduled for the ideal sharing time, filling up the queue of posts. The posts can be customized, allowing the user to choose which networks to publish to and edit the text and exact timing of the post. The AI-powered framework can create interest graphs, analyze the user’s personal digital profile, his/her interests and past posts that had the most engagement, and then pick the best content based on that profile. Each new article that a user publishes updates their interest graph, which “teaches” the AI to be more and more intelligent with every iteration.
Q: You’ve recently been named a Leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Sales Social Engagement Tools, Q2 2019; could you tell us something more?
A: It’s an honorable achievement for a company of our size, and we appreciate Forrester for recognizing our contribution to the improvement of using of social to drive the buyer journey and ultimately revenue. The New Wave™ itself is a signal to the market that social is now a widely-accepted best practice for sales, and that sales organizations need solutions to help solve the biggest problem, delivering relevant content. We focus on the seller and the most important things for them – content, risk and ease of use. Grapevine6 understands that awards like these don’t happen in a vacuum. This recognition is the result of a lot of hard work and support from key players including our dedicated and brilliant employees who give their best every day. We also applaud our business advisors and ecosystem of partners who challenge us to keep our eyes on the future while delivering in the present. And of course we credit our amazing clients to whose success we are fiercely dedicated. We are committed to innovating social selling and we anticipate earning future awards that validate our leadership and innovation in this field.
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Q: What can we expect from Grapevine6 in the future?
A: Sales processes are undergoing a major digital transformation, driving to greater personalization. Content is the currency of this personalization. It transforms the entire customer experience putting engagement as the desired outcome. Content plays a key role in that experience. Grapevine6 is a content engagement platform that uses AI to personalize experience at scale, and it means that we will continue enhancing the personalization that AI has begun to deliver in content marketing and leveraging it for digital selling. As a result of our recent wins, we are now confident that we are very well equipped to move into other industries and markets over the next two to three years and replicate the success that we have had in the financial and tech sectors. We will continue to invest in furthering AI’s role in compliance, and security and risk management in social media. Grapevine continues to partner with leading companies to build a strong ecosystem for identifying and remediating risk. This is a real challenge our clients face in both the wealth management and tech sectors and thus we’ve deeply integrated this critical capability into the Grapevine6 platform.
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