SocialPandas, a company focused on social CRM tools for sales people raises $1.5 Million in a seed round led by True Ventures. The company co-founded by Mark Trang, formerly of Salesforce.com promises to focus on the "forgotten sales person."

Crushpath has raise a $2 million seed round led by Charles River Ventures to further develop and launch a platform designed help salespeople better control a deal from lead to close, with social elements added into the mix.

Here is a great article from TechCrunch that is worth a read. Gone are the days of rolling out CRM across your organization and turning to multiple vendors for integration, lead lists, and marketing automation. Today vendors like Salesforce are providing and all-in-one, taking CRM to a new level. With the acquisition of companies like Radian6, Jigsaw, Salesforce's platform comes stacked and ready to generate and manage business.

Contactually, a 500 Startups-backed company has launched an easy-to-use CRM solution for email users. The application works with any IMAP-connected account, including Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, AOL and others. Plans to support both POP3 and Microsoft Exchange in the near future have been discussed.

When the first CRM system came to life in the 1980s, it was nothing more than a robust database structured like a funnel; collecting and filtering client information. The 1990s brought with it one of the most crucial advancements in CRM still prevalent today- the ability to use the system as a two-way street: gathering client data and giving back a customer experience. The combination of newer software, the internet and superior capabilities has lead CRM to evolve into one of the largest and most competitive industries in today’s economy.

Are you getting obsessed with tweets, uploads, and writing on your wall? See our checklist to be sure.

These days everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it's hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: Do Facebook fans drive sales? Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service and tout the competition? And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it's working?

In the search for truth, sometimes social media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

This week Saleforce took the wraps off the Chatter pilot program. After several months of testing with select customers, it is going into production for this group. We reviewed Chatter with SalesForce's VP of Corporate Strategy, Bruce Francis and SVP Product Marketing, Kraig Swensrud to find out what all the excitement was about.

Chatter has the goal of bringing the best of the social media tools to the enterprise, making enterprise sales as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter. With all of the buzz around privacy and social networking tools, it's refreshing to hear that these tools use a the same security models that the rest of SalesForce has built in to its platform.