Social intelligence vendor Trapit launched a social selling service for account based sales.  The monitoring service tracks over 100,000 curated web sources.  Content categories include blogs, professional journals, social media, and news services.  For Twitter, the service supports Retweets, Replies, and Favorites.  Trapit also supports “robust filtering” by media-type, source quality, tags, and geographic location.

“With this package we are empowering salespeople to close more business by providing them with capabilities that help them take control of and excel at every stage of the customer journey,” said CEO Hank Nothhaft Jr.  “This new package, coupled with our core curation and analytics capabilities, makes Trapit the only comprehensive sales enablement platform that actually puts the seller in the driver’s seat.”

TrapIt displays pre-defined messages to assist with social media engagement.  A publishing module helps the marketing department schedule posts to social media or blogs and feeds suggested copy to sales reps.  An analytics module assists with tracking social media metrics.

“We think this is really important because buyers have more power than ever,” Nothaft said. “The seller has become almost obsolete, and many are doing little more than taking an order from a customer who has already made a decision. Trapit allows the seller to get involved much earlier in the customer journey, which had previously been controlled mostly by the marketing team. We’re putting these empowering tools in the hands of the sellers directly,” said Nofthaft.  “The top salespeople already understand how to navigate social and digital relationships and how to use them to drive engagement and sales.   Trapit not only makes it easier for those sellers to do what they are already doing, but it also gives others an easy to use platform specifically designed for making social sales.”

Customers include Everbank, HD Vest, New York Life, and Microsoft.  Trapit is based in San Francisco and has received $20 million in funding to date.