Social Network Analysis

[elliottm]

Has anyone ever used the VisiblePath plugin. My company is looking for a CRM tool that can do some Social Network Analysis and I saw the article about the qindustries implementation. Does anyone know if this is going to be opensourced or added as a feature?

[susiewilliams]

As I understand it, the QIndustries solution involves not only code but some custom implementation work, so it likely will never reach the "plug and play" stage. It is currently offered as a "package" (code plus services) by them and will likely be offered on SugarExchange in that form.


I have used Visible Path in a previous company. The software seems solid, but the real challenge was getting buy in from the sales reps. You have to identify contacts to be included in the network (it scans your Outlook contacts and emails) and most sales reps didn't want to give up their contacts. The rest of the company was asked to participate too (i.e.- the executive staff was asked to have it installed so their contacts could be "mined") and that was met with only mild response. For me, I felt odd having a program scan through my personal contacts (realizing that the data on my PC is "owned" by my company, etc etc) and having that information "outlive me" when I left the company. To get the implmentation going, the Sales Ops group (who ran the project) tried all sorts of contests and adoption techniques, but in the end, sales reps didn't find the tool useful. Once again, the adoption and "selling" of the tool was more important than the software itself and the project failed because it wasn't adopted by the people it should have benefited.