I recently had some time to speak with Richard Caballero, Founder and CEO of ComLinked Corp, about his organization and the methods they use to develop innovative solutions for SMB IT Professionals. I’d like to start with a bit of background on Richard, and finish with our discussion about B2B networking.
Richard, who is a 25-year veteran in the IT field and who spent 11 years with Hewlett-Packard in Canada, said that he went to the SMB sector because he saw a great need for SMBs to get the same quality solutions as their enterprise counterparts. To be more specific, Richard, who was in charge of recruiting thousands of resellers globally across his career, looked at the discrepancies between SMB companies, which comprise 95% of all NorAm businesses, and enterprise environment, and said “somebody needs to solve this issue.” He brought his extensive knowledge of both the reseller and vendor community to his startup, ComLinked Corp.
So what is ComLinked? Well, Richard’s organization developed a B2B networking platform specifically for SMBs. As Richard told me: “We have the social networking for person-to-person, but I really see this extending to the business side, and soon.” Thus, he and his team developed a platform that allows businesses to connect via a social network, along the same lines as what LinkedIn does for individuals.
There’s a very important facet of this networking for businesses, and that comes down to connection retention. As many of you are aware, when an employee leaves an organization, more often than not, they take all of their connections with them. ComLinked allows organizations to keep connections on a company level, if not an individual one. Additionally, ComLinked is designed to help SMBs overcome three major pain points:
- Lead Generation
- Marketing
- Social Media
Richard said that he built this platform to empower SMB IT Pros. First of all, ComLinked is free to join, and uses a sophisticated algorithm to help companies connect based on business needs. For SMB IT Pros, this system will allow them to see who has viewed their profile, and when, so they can make a connection and earn a lead. In addition, the platform will proactively qualify leads on its native dashboard, so the user has a better chance at winning the lead.
You can view the ComLinked site at: https://www.comlinked.com/
