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Social CRM Strategies for Sales
"VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”
VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”
Much of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. (And no, I’m not going to dive into the even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to sales). That’s up to each organization to decide – but unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there’s going to be trouble.
Clearly, the sales team is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like lead nurturing communities with lead scoring can help identify the buying interest before the sales team contacts the lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from marketing to sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold."
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Providing a social business process that facilitates the questioning and sharing of answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM for customer service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the expertise of your best subject matter experts – just as in customer service.
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Imagine a living social “RFP answering” community. What if you took every question that came with an RFP and put it into your online community as a question (along with the answer) and the ability for others to ask more deeply about the question, or even to answer and discuss?
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Pegasystems Brings Social Media Collaboration to BPM Solution
"Pegasystems’ SmartBPM uses social media as an interactive and real-time collaborative environment to aid the planning and execution of business improvement projects. By extending is existing tools for ad hoc collaboration, SmartBPM makes it even easier for project teams to connect, add user-generated content, vote, and rank items associated with any given project. By reaching out to customers and clients, SmartBPM now allows critical real-time customer feedback into the process improvement process."
SAP’s Gravity Prototype: Business Collaboration Using Google Wave
"The prototype was featured at the SAP TechEd event in Phoenix this week, and one team at the Business Process Design Slam event have posted on their experience of using the tool, using it to automate business processes related to forming a virtual community-based power plant made up of resident’s personal solar wind generation."
Turning business processes into social processes
"If you want to be proactive with regards to the Hyper-Social shift, you need to evaluate which part f your business would benefit the most from becoming social. In doing that exercise, you will quickly realize that you can reduce transaction costs and improve efficiency by making most business processes social.
Scary? Yes. Inevitable? You bet!
In trying to look at all aspects of your business and how it might be affected by hyper-sociality, we started the table below. If you get a chance, look it over and let us know what you think. Did we miss processes that would benefit from going social? Did we exaggerate the impact of hyper-sociality on others?"
Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships
"Outside of internal team collaboration (say, a group of marketers, a group of engineers, etc.), no spray & pray / general purpose employee collaborative strategy (or tool application) is going to really show sustainable impact for every tribe or collective. And just like traditional business ecosystem partnerships (customers, suppliers, channel), these internal partnerships also get significantly rattled in the face of industry consolidation"
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First, existing structural inefficiencies in how internal or external partners liaise as a result of little adherence to basic human interaction constructs and incentive structures, and unnecessary process centric technology that restricts human capital flow
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. No doubt that the current tools will play a significant role towards simplifying these relationships. But to accelerate business performance via social computing constructs, lots of design work is needed along with the filling of critical technology gaps to truly account for context, cognizance of both process and social at the business activity level, and a deep understanding of and response to individual incentive that makes participation a natural instinct.
Why Social CRM will never be built
Social CRM is not software. Remember, CRM, and therefore Social CRM, is an approach that takes into account people and processes and leverages software to accomplish outcomes. The people and the processes come first. Software, while critical to success, is always secondary.
Vendors that claim they deliver Social CRM are wrong. They are delivering software solutions, generally Social Support Community software, that is a core component of a Social CRM strategy.
Social CRM is a strategy. Building off of my last point. Software cannot build strategy. I know, one day machines will take over e world and I will be proven wrong. :-) Until that day comes I am right, it takes people to build a strategy that achieves corporate goals.
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Your Social CRM strategy must make use of tools that end-users (execs, sales, support, etc..) will use, not because they are forced to, because they add value to their lives.
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Your software must support the varied stages and workflows for all of your processes. When the software forces you to adjust processes due to it’s limitations, you have already lost.
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What Enterprise Could Learn From AI Research History
The analogy itself between neural networks and a real community-based company is striking, and so are the similarities between the limitations of this approach and some Enterprise 2.0 concerns. Neural networks encountered two big problems: relevancy and convergence (they couldn’t ensure to converge onto the desired pattern, and sophisticated training techniques, such as back-propagation, were necessary to ensure convergence). Social media are facing the very same problems in the enterprise: how could we ensure that communities lead to the right consensus for applicable decisions to be taken? I evoked some possible trails in my last post, and this is a crucial point.
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Should, and will, the Enterprise 2.0 follow the same track as AI did? If so, next move would be to get rid of the big business processes we all know, and replace them with micro-processes applicable at individual scale. For instance, the way Japanese coworkers are able to make a consensus emerge from community-based workshops, one of the pre-requisite of Kaizen, rely on their heavy sense of “doing the right thing”. To set up such micro-processes is a radical move from where we are and where the most daring organizations try to go,
GE's Enterprise Collaboration Backbone
The numbers are huge: 400,000 global users in 6,000+ locations around world, all working within a 100% web interface available in 20 languages (your user interface language is defined by your sign in permissions). The system gets over 25 million web hits a day, greater than employee usage of Google and Yahoo combined. Users have created over 50,000 communities with over 100,000 experts signed up to answer questions and manage information; experts are GE workers with full-time jobs who use the system because it helps them do their job better.
Thousands of business processes have already been digitized in an internal world where knowledge and work processes are critical. Everything is behind the firewall except for ‘pinholes’ to external destinations which allow external vendors, suppliers and customers to collaborate on specific projects . There are 30,000 external users who come in through the firewall pinholes to participate in specific communities.
The Nexus of Defined Business Process and Ad Hoc Collaboration
ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer’s suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.
PRaaS, PRocessus as a Service
Un PRaaS possède quatre caractéristiques de base :
- Un service disponible sur le Cloud.
- Propose une réponse complète pour gérer l’intégralité d’un processus.
- Concerne non seulement l’entreprise, mais aussi des acteurs externes, clients, fournisseurs ou prestataires.
- Est utilisable directement par des personnes des métiers concernés, sans nécessiter l’intervention d’informaticiens de l’entreprise.
Why unlocking ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 execution plan
Billy brings a unique perspective given that he focuses on understanding how social computing blends with existing enterprise content management – something that many medium to large organizations are going to have to deal with if they buy into the design and promise of Enterprise 2.0. All control is not bad and all social is certainly not optimal. That’s an important part of any E2.0 execution plan
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For instance, instead of using traditional access control-heavy CMS workflow when working on early drafts of marketing collateral for a product launch, or market projections for a new line of business, a wiki – style environment opens up discussions around early drafts to more constituencies before the owner moves this into formal production.
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Design processes and select applications that can accelerate business activity. If you start with “I need a new content management strategy”, you’re likely off to a wrong start. If your thinking about say how to improve sales close rates by better alignment between sales and marketing content, you’re approaching the problem correctly.
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Don't confuse Enterprise 2.0 with social computing concepts
Earlier this week, a post by Thomas Vanderwal on Microsoft SharePoint 2007 caught fire on Twitter and a few blogs. What started as a spirited discussion on whether Sharepoint is a respectable Enterprise 2.0 offering or not, quickly turned into a debate on Enterprise 2.0 definitions. Mike Gotta masterfully jumped in front of the parade and steered it hard right, questioning whether Enterprise 2.0 is even a category or a rather, a philosophy around the use of social computing within existing business processes. With due respect to Forrester, I’m convinced it’s the latter.
In preparation for a meeting with an old client next week about social computing and the opportunities it presents for lead generation and sales operations, this discussion could not have been more timely for me. Here’s how I see it:
These are social computing concepts. Not Enterprise 2.0.
Broader E2.0 Horizons
Most tools labeled Enterprise 2.0 just scratch the surface of enabling people to change the way they work, but not necessarily change the work itself. Indeed as John Tropea (@johnt) suggests the greatest natural adoption of these tools is using them to work around existing business processes. Creating Enterprise 2.0-class software that can fundamentally change business models and operations is a whole different beast.
Web 2.0 in the Enterprise 2.0
And the most successful projects have at least two things in common: They were built with a key business process in mind, and predicting their ROI was not part of the equation.
The social process | Web 2.0 and business process management
The social process
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17 June 2009 Pete Swabey
How social software is changing the way companies design and execute business processes
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“There is very little in the ERP technologies of today that wouldn’t be recognised by Henry Ford,” he says. “They are based around a very old-fashioned view of static business processes executed by people.”
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He also concedes that the view of a business process as a rigid sequence of events is one that does not suit human beings
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Enterprise 2.0 ‘Changes the Game’ for Business Process Management:
Introducing Enterprise 2.0 approaches may help shift the emphasis from business process re-engineering to business process re-energizing.
Pete Swabey has documented instances in which major companies started addressing critical business problems with enterprise 2.0 approaches. There is growing evidence that social software is changing the way companies design and execute business processes.
Notes from Enterprise 2.0: Still looking for End User Adoption
What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:
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Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve
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Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool.
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A Curious Case of Enterprise 2.0
When was the last time you used a sequence of dot-separated numbers to describe a large official organization? Yet all the talk about Government 2.0 doesn’t seem to surprise anyone. The lack of surprise however doesn’t imply shared understanding. Just try asking ten people who use the term Web 2.0 what exactly it means – and most likely you will get ten different answers.
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AIIM’s year-old survey, which found that 74% of surveyed organizations had no idea what E2.0 meant or how it could be meaningfully applied, likely would’ve come back with a similar numbers today.
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E2.0 is still primarily a vendor space, dominated by ISVs selling software to businesses who haven’t really asked for it. It is simply not a demand-driven market. By contrast, just think of CRM or payroll software. You don’t need to convince businesses they need that.
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The Rise of the Chief Performance Officer
A few weeks ago Obama nominated Jeffrey Zients, another consultant and Washington business executive, for the role. I don't know Zients, but I think the Chief Performance Officer role has a lot of potential, and it's a new wrinkle for something like this to appear first in the federal government.
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Some of the participants pointed out that if you're going to be merging things, you might as well go a bit further. They noted, for example, that if you want to align knowledge and learning with work, you need to know something about business processes and how to improve them. And if you're going to align processes with the content needed to perform them effectively, you need to know something about the technology that would deliver the content in accordance with job tasks.
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The danger, of course, is that a broad business improvement organization would have such breadth that it would lose focus, or that no individual business improver could master the broad array of tools offered. It will be interesting to see how organizations resolve this tradeoff of capability and focus.
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