This article originally appeared in the Dec. 2012 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

A startup called VoloMetrix wants to make your business smarter in how it uses communications and collaboration. It offers what it calls a social enterprise intelligence tool, which is aimed at enabling businesses to leverage data inside existing communications and collaboration tools like calendars, e-mail, IM and social platforms to address top priorities more quickly and to understand how employees and teams work and interact.

“People are many organization’s biggest investments and most powerful assets, yet companies today can’t determine whether their people are positioned to achieve the greatest business results,” said Ryan Fuller, CEO VoloMetrix.

Shasta Ventures-backed VoloMetrix has just under 10 customers, some in pilot phase and some in commercial deployment. He declined to provide customer names, but said most of them are large technology companies that are interested in the VoloMetrix solutions to help them understand whether recent reorganizations are working and how to make things more efficient, and/or simply to get more insight into how staff members are spending their time.

Among the VoloMetrix solutions is its recently unveiled VoloMetrix Sales Module, which was designed to access the productivity of sales staff.

The company points to a Gartner (News - Alert) estimate indicating that salespeople spend as little as 10 percent of their time interacting with customers because most their time is spent on other work-related tasks. The new module can help a business access exactly how much time is spent on what so, for example, they can consider doing things like making adjustments to workloads and responsibilities to get higher yields from sales staff.

Specifically, the VoloMetrix Sales Module highlights sales pipeline opportunities and customer account escalation trends as they occur, so the sales team can mobilize resources to close a deal or expedite work to resolve a customer issue; provides what the company says are deep insights into a sales team’s time and resource allocation against specific customers, internal stakeholders, and key topics; and does alignment indexing to allow sales organizations to understand and manage team resources to better achieve top priorities. It also includes what VoloMetrix calls an enterprise sociograph, which shows connections among teams and partner organizations in an effort to identify under-served resources.

“Our new sales module builds upon our initial vision of increasing productivity through actionable insights,” says Fuller. “Now sales teams are empowered with never-before seen insights that improves focus and responsiveness to their highest priority sales opportunities.”