Want to make a connection with someone at a prospect, but you don’t know who to go through?  It’s the age-old problem of making the connections you want through paths you don’t yet know.  How do you do it?  

Suppose I want to meet Dave Girouard, VP and General Manager of Google Enterprise.   What’s my best method of getting to him?

If I go in through LinkedIn, I see that I’m three degrees from him.  I can go through six of my connections to get to one of his connections to get to him.  Sounds good so far.  But who should I go through?  Who carries the most weight getting me in?  Did one of these people go to the University of Michigan with him?  Did someone work with him at Accenture?  It’s hard to tell.  I can’t draw any conclusions like that from what I have.

In comes Cogito, Inc., an on-demand relationship analytics company that can take hundreds of thousands of pieces of data about every person between me and Dave and assess the best path for me to follow.  It can take LinkedIn, Hoovers, Zoom Info, and hundreds more public sources and put them together for me graphically, without me hardly lifting a finger.  Cogito calls it Social Network Analytics.  “If somebody knows somebody else, however that might be, we can tell you how strong that relationship is, no matter how highly separated the relationship is,” says Coleman Barney, President and CEO of Cogito.

And if that wasn’t cool enough, imagine drawing those paths from you to your Contacts and Accounts in Salesforce.com.  Imagine seeing a thumbnail pathway from you to your prospects right there in Salesforce.  Find your best way to key influencers using the data you have, along with everything else that’s out there.  That’s relationship management to the next level and that’s powerful!  And for $10 a month, it sounds like instant ROI.

To find out more, check out Robert Scoble’s interview with Coleman Barney from Cogito.