Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I’m attending the Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco tomorrow morning. On the heels of my recent post on Sales Intelligence in an Enterprise 2.0 enabled world, I’m looking forward to participating in a discussion on how social software can bring new opportunities to the business of selling.

SMB is organized by Chris Kenton, CEO of SocialRep, and founding partner of the social media group MotiveLab. Anneke Seley, author of the new book Sales 2.0 will have the microphone.

If you plan on showing up, come say hi.

Here’s the description of the event:

San Francisco is kicking off its Social Media Breakfast on February 27th, at Cafe De La Presse. Seats are limited to 40, and they’re already moving fast. Tickets are $20, and are available online.

Our first breakfast features a conversation with Anneke Seley, author of the new book Sales 2.0, Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology. Anneke was one of the first employees at Oracle, where she started what may be the best-performing and widely renowned inside sales forces in the software industry. Today, Anneke is founder and CEO of PhoneWorks, a group of the industry’s best sales consultants, where she helps companies achieve revenue acceleration from professional inside sales teams.

As a proven sales leader, Anneke has a unique and compelling perspective on Social Media and its application to sales. This is a timely and important topic for anyone in business and marketing, and a great way to kick off the Social Media Breakfast in San Francisco.

Tickets here.

Lately I’ve been spending time with enterprise sales and marketing leaders discussing what elements in the Enterprise 2.0 bag of tricks are best positioned to serve the needs of a direct sales force. Given the unique characteristics of a typical sales rep (more on that below), common participatory models that epitomize social networks (i.e. the stuff that has to do with sharing) would run counter intuitive to how a sales rep operates. That said, there’s plenty of good stuff bundled in the E2.0 moniker that absolutely can make a significant impact. I’m hoping to start a discussion of what those elements are with this post.

Having completed over two dozen sales related “voice of field/customer/management” engagements for extranet and community platform execution, it’s clear that sales reps within a given industry have very similar work patterns. I’m generalizing here but lets honestly call out some important characteristics of how a typical sales rep at a large organization rolls:

• Media watching is not a sport for sales reps. Feed them the good stuff & they’ll consume it.
• Data/Intelligence extraction over collaboration. “Give to Get” doesn’t fly with most sales reps.
• Good reps know exactly which 8.75 data types help them bust quotas. No more, no less.
• In spite of the above, don’t expect them to dig for it. They’d rather use the time to cold call a lead.
• Sales often ignore a lot of what marketing might offer or recommend.
• They don’t personalize portals & intranets.
• They rather search than browse; they want answers, not search results. (ok, who doesn’t!)
• CRM apps often morph into reporting mechanisms that sales reps are mandated to use.
• Pre-sales engineers (in the case of High Tech) often do most of labor intensive tasks in the sales cycle (assembling proposal components, finding SMEs and references, etc).

With that in mind, what kind of social architectures can truly help a sales team find and close more business? A possible answer: a seriously dummed down version of FriendFeed.

For those of you that are not familiar with Friendfeed, it’s an information discovery platform that aggregates a user’s activity across social media services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp and Delicious, amongst others. Dubbed a “lifestreaming” utility, you can subscribe to a persons updates, search across people profiles for topics or subscribe to “rooms” (in other words persistent search around topics) that aggregate conversations and links on a given subject. Whilst you have access to topic and people based content fire hoses you also have good control over what you see and what you don’t. Here’s my Friendfeed stream for instance and here’s the Enterprise 2.0 “room“. See Hutch Carpenters post and discussion for more on this.

Friendfeeds’ overwhelming user experience, litany of features and interaction design would never work for a sales team. However at its core I think Friendfeed serves as good inspiration to executing a sales focused enterprise 2.0 program. With Friendfeed:

• You don’t *have* to contribute to get value.
• You can follow topics or people and continue to filter down.
• You can generate pointed discussions around broader topics or posts.
• Important topics bubble to the top providing a birds eye view into the best of the best.
• Pose questions on Friendfeed and optionally rope in your extended network on Twitter.
• Notifications of important content and events, via RSS or Instant Messenger.

Here’s the beginnings of a framework to identify what works for a sales organization at large organizations:

An information management architecture that can surface the good stuff as well as support a 90% consumption / 10% contribution model.

Traditional collaborative systems and social networks are built to enable…well, collaboration and being social. As a sales rep what I need is aggregation around news and information (person, customer, prospect, industry news) relevant to my customers that show up in SalesForce or HighRise. User and topical tags help me drill deeper and find authorities or stories on topics that can help me engage a new lead, up sell a customer, build a more compelling proposed solution, or deflect a customer satisfaction train wreck that’s about to hit. The kicker is that I shouldn’t need to browse too much or worse, contribute to be able to extract.

Augmenting or if necessary, even by-passing some of the traditional marketing qualification processes by providing a direct contextual lens into prospect and customer activity

New qualified opportunities are just as likely to show up on these social platforms as they are via traditional marketing programs such as events, email and webinars. Based on accounts I manage or territorial prospects, as stated by my CRM system, dynamically assemble a direct, real-time view into customer and lead activity. Examples are customer activity on support and developer forums, prospects commenting about specific products on blogs, or lead activity on LinkedIn, Techmeme and Satisfaction that might help me spark a conversation.

Federated, persistent search that folds social discovery into SFA/CRM processes and technologies, thereby enrichening the data available at each step of the sales cycle

For instance, say I’m in the proposal creation phase of the sales cycle: Let me look up preset searches and tags on specific content sources (e.g. specific wiki spaces where SMEs hang out, highly rated solution white papers, links to relevant online demos that everyone’s raving about ) so I’m putting my best foot forward.

A push architecture so the critical intelligence can find the sales rep (not the other way around)

I’m not going to keep revisiting content sources (blogs, wikis, forums) to see if there’s anything new that I might care about. Make it easy for me to filter and subscribe to specific events on blogs, support and community forums, wikis etc., (e.g. a new white paper emerges or my customer comments on a blog) via Email, RSS, SMS, IM. Let the information find me.

The ability to broadcast a question and receive an answer

Sales reps want answers. Search functionality provides results; people, however, provide answers. The ability to ask questions to groups of relevant people and quickly crowd source the best solution or identify experts that can credibly address a solution is imperative. This needs to be both open ended as well as around an existing topic (a bookmark, link, comment, video, etc.)

There’s certainly other technologies or components to consider when trying to conceptualize how Sales can benefit from an Enterprise 2.0 enabled world. For instance, ESME is  designed to let globally disparate users easily huddle around tasks at hand and the recently announced lifestreaming capabilites from Yammer is trying to bring Friendfeed-like capabilites to the enterprise.

What other utilities have you come across that have applicable features to the business of selling?

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TechCrunch reports a surge in traffic for LinkedIn thanks to heightened interest in building personal networks as well as job hunting opportunities in this market.

It got me thinking about what “popularity” really means to both web based businesses as well as the enterprise, beyond boasting rights.

For ad based businesses, increased traffic, registration and time on site are obviously good things but how does that correlate with revenue? For LinkedIn, its a clear win since more users means not only more ad revenue but potentially also more paying subscribers.

However, sites that are CPC or performance dependent (meaning they sell ad space to businesses but only make money when there’s click through or a certain predefined action occurs) are facing lower ad spending  so the additional site usage is of tempered value until the market improves. For instance, whilst job sites are seeing a surge in traffic, recruiters that pay their bills via performance ads and placement are inundated with resumes anyway and might need less help finding talent.

When looking at stats for internal Enterprise 2.0 initiatives that boast a surge in registration or other forms of user adoption at the outset, or one year in – buyer beware.  Initial registration metrics mean very little and can be downright deceiving. Why? Because here’s how it generally works in the enterprise:

• A company wide or group wide invite is sent out to check out the new site.
• Users click on a link to proceed into the new wiki, community site, intranet, etc.
• Users are auto registered thanks to LDAP integration so they proceed right in.
• Upon entering, it counts as an additional registered user regardless of whether the users stays, sets up a profile or engages ever again.

Another way that registration gets captured is when user A sends a link to content that happens to be in a E2.0 utility to User B who is not a registered user of the system. By simply clicking on the link and entering to view the content, User B gets added to the list of registered users. Again regardless of whether the user ever comes back or truly utilizes the social space as intended, she contributes to the stated adoption numbers.

Either of these can hardly be called adoption.

It’s heartening to see some headway in this area. Some of the E2.0 solution providers (for instance, Telligent has Harvest) are taking metrics seriously and making it very easy for  their customers to measure the effectiveness of their enterprise 2.0 initiatives, beyond registration and initial engagement. The new crop of E2.0 professional services organizations can provide huge value in this area and I’m excited to see that play out. For starters though, we’re going to see Enterprise 2.0 case studies very soon on ReadWriteWeb, by enterprise social media thought leader and consultant, Susan Scrupski that will undoubtedly shed light on performance of real world enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Until then, ‘popularity’ can mean many things so dig deeper.

The Economic Times has a story today about how Indian Offshore companies are finding it difficult to outbid global competitors such as Accenture due to a lack of domain expertise. Says the article:

“Multinational companies have presence in multiple geographies, economies of scale, in-depth understanding of client’s business and a global view for many industries and this is where Indian service providers lack. These factors may work against Indian service providers when bidding for a project in the current scenario,” said Mark Toon, chief executive officer, Equaterra, during an ET round-table panel discussion held on the sideline of India Leadership Forum organised by Nasscom in Mumbai.”

I’m sorry but I had to check the date stamp on this article a few times to make sure that its current. Are we in 1999? Indian IT Offshore companies have been working on “domain expertise” for almost a decade now and there’s easily 200 articles out there, dating back 5 years that talk about how competing on price is not sustainable and how Indian services providers are working on becoming more strategic. Its baffling to me that after a decade of amazing gains in market share and the creation of companies that have a market cap of ~ $10-15 billion (Wipro and Infosys respectively), we’re still having this discussion.

The article goes on to say:

From the very beginning, Indian companies have taken up maintenance or secondary application development in most cases. And such a move has resulted in lesser domain knowledge and product development capability. “Indian companies lack experience in green-field application development, which needs very deep domain knowledge,” said Dana Stiffler of AMR Research.

If the last round of technology innovation required services providers to have domain expertise, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As I’ve said before, in my opinion, true Enterprise 2.0 transformation won’t take place in the IT organization. Rather, business groups will take the lead as they see benefits to the process of sales, marketing, HR, etc with the proliferation of participatory media technologies that blow open collaboration opportunities across geographical/functional silos and provide unprecedented levels of insight into a prospects purchase intentions. The need to have business/domain expertise and the required agility to help customers experiment with new approaches to leverage these emerging concepts means much much more focus on business transformation and not just cost savings. Cost savings (as most of them know) is not sustainable, and a new trend explained in this post by Vinnie Mirchandani about reverse offshoring adds additional market pressures.

For the record, I do believe that Indian IT services firms have made good progress in this area and but clearly there’s a lot more to be done. It’s time for Offshore services providers to stop playing catch up on the opportunity of the last decade and to start thinking of what a customer’s business is going to look like tomorrow. Skate to where the puck is going to be.

Eric Norlin is hosting Glue, a conference that gets under the hood and examines technologies and standards that will shape how enterprises communicate, engage, collaborate and sell in the coming years. As Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence illustrates in this post, the application layer in the enterprise technology stack hasn’t seen significant innovation for a long time. Enterprise 2.0 concepts present the first meaty opportunity to blow open silos in the enterprise and drive bottom line benefits. I strongly suspect that Glue will bring the right people in the room that can articulate the value of these new technologies as well as the path to introducing them into the enterprise.

I was lucky to make it to Defrag (Eric’s other conference) last year and I can say from personal experience that Eric is commited to creating an intimate environment that enables active participation and learning. As I said to Eric on Twitter about my Defrag experience:  “I made amazing relationships at defrag and ignited existing ones. I’m indebted to you for that ”

Here’s the agenda. And Blog post.

Good to see IT powerhouses paying attention to Enterprise 2.0. In this post, consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu talks about how “enterprises are looking at how they can harness the hierarchy-flattening, information-sharing, team building power of social networks.” They go on to list out a number of social mechanisms such as Syndication, Mashups, Social Networking that are being studied by large IT organizations.

It’s a very succinct summary that will get large enterprises to start to pay attention, if they haven’t already. And it’s a net positive for the Enterprise 2.0 space and so I applaud Deloitte for starting to pay attention early on and engaging in the discussion.

I realize this was a very high level piece but 2 things jumped out at me:

First, there’s heavy focus on platforms that enable content creation. Little coverage on managing the fire hose that’s will emerge shortly after the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. What’s missing is adequate representation of what Andrew McAfee refers to as Signals in his famous Slates architecture (search, linking, tagging, authoring, extensions, and signals).

Second and on a more ironical note, the Bottom Line section ends with:

“Telecommunications operators and IT solutions providers need to invest in ESN [Enterprise Social Networks] so they have the expertise and credibility to deploy these solutions if or when they become more broadly adopted, and start becoming a more significant source of revenues.”

The first point about Telcos and IT solutions providers investing in these tools themselves to gain expertise is all well and good. But the second statement about services firms waiting for broad adoption and significant source of revenues made me chuckle.

SI’s are the ones that have traditionally driven broad adoption and thereby created cash cow services business around new applications.  Also, I realize that there is such a thing as too early when recommending products, but as trusted consultants, it’s up to them to identify sources of value well before anyone sees it and to recommend and deploy solutions that can give their customers competitive advantage.

End of rant.

So to all you SI’s out there: Start evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 concepts and encourage your customers to experiment with them. Go ahead. Be a Tiger.