Startup 7 Degrees is launching PeopleMaps, a social business application that aims to give professionals direct visibility into how they are connected to any person or company. Basically, PeopleMaps sifts through educational, social and business information to determine personal and professional relationships between people.
PeopleMaps allows users to automatically search their personal contacts from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo, while simultaneously searching data from public Internet sources. The application’s graph engine then analyzes all of this data to determine “connection paths” to any person or company, which lets you see how you are connected to any person or company. PeopleMaps also pulls in bios of individuals (when they are public info).
The application also offers a professional, paid edition that is optimized for sales professionals to create better leads. PeopleMaps is actually launching on Salesforce’s AppExhcange today and will be available to be incorporated into any Salesforce CRM. Similar to the free version, PeopleMaps will import contacts and then establish connections with leads, letting salespeople establish personal and professional connections with leads and potentially create more successful sales. The CRM-focused app will instantly analyze and ranks sales prospects based on the strength of personal and professional connections to people and companies. Sales managers can then assign each prospect or lead to the salesperson with the most relevant connections within the CRM itself.
Sales teams can also access maps of each employee’s personal and professional relationships to tap into the collective network of an entire organization. While the professional edition is priced at $49 per user per month.
Founded by for Yahoo Finance exec Tim Sheehan, PeopleMaps has received $1.2 million in seed funding from vSpring Capital and Parkview Ventures. PeopleMap’s graphs are similar in theory to the connections made by LinkedIn within the social network. The application is undoubtedly useful to visually determine your social connections, and is even more compelling when used in conjunction with a business software like Salesforce.