Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

These were the most visited posts from December 1, 2008 to December 1,2009, per Google Analytics.

I just realized that this blog is only little over a year old. Feels like I’ve been writing for much longer.

A sincere thank you for reading, commenting, referencing and re-tweeting my posts. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it and how much I’ve learned from the debates and exchanges we’ve had here and on Twitter.

Ok, back to the topic of this post. Top posts here, as follows:

Friendfeed: Inspiration for Sales Intelligence in an Enterprise 2.0 world?

This post took the top spot. It did well on its own but some of the popularity was thanks to a link in the New York Times via ReadWriteWeb.

Summary: How to approach sales performance acceleration using Enterprise 2.0 constructs and account for interaction and data preferences of the typical sales rep.

Enterprise 2.0 Software: Commoditization before Monetization

Summary: A software market perspective on where we’ve been and where the category may end up given the entry of free and open source alternatives. This post could use an update given the entry/imminent entry of Microsoft, Salesforce, TIBCO and SAP – all of whom have chosen to build and not buy.

Why Process Barfs on Social

Summary: Taking the battle to the enemies turf. This is in response to “Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock” by Dennis Howlett, addressing what I hope is a balanced view on where process pundits are wrong about Enterprise 2.0 2.0 and the value of ERP that they closely guard. As well, it shows tangible examples of where social computing has in fact accelerated performance and suggests what we in the E2.0 community can reduce this friction between process and social. Dennis comes around with his balanced opinion as well.

Don’t Confuse Enterprise 2.0 with Social Computing Concepts

Summary: An early post – one of my last on definitions and naming – a topic that I generally stay away from. This post suggests focusing Enterprise 2.0 as a state the enterprise achieves via strategic use of social computing.

Why Unlocking ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 Execution Plan

Summary: How you can leverage existing ECM/CMS investments and Social Computing to drive better outcomes for your marketing investments. Also included was a conversation with Billy Cripe, then Director of ECM at Oracle.

Happy New Year. See you on the other side. I’m pumped about 2010.

Marc Benioff unveiled what he described as Salesforces’ “biggest breakthrough” – an enterprise social networking platform dubbed Chatter.

Here’s a video interview, courtesy of Dennis Howlett, that provides insight into the drivers, challenges and opportunities for moving to more open constructs in the workplace, as Salesforce sees it:

VentureBeat has a straightforward run down of the proposed feature list. Some other good commentary as well:

Jeremiah Owyang chimes in with what, I sense, is on the minds of many right now:

Trying to grapple with understanding Salesforce’s Chatter, is it something *new* or just a *me too*? #DF09

I’ve seen all of these Chatter features (at least in parts) from Jive, Telligent, Lithium(client), Socialtext(client), Yammer, #DF09

Dennis Howlett’s skeptical:

Salesforce.com may well be the poster child for hip and cool apps that bring the consumer experience to the enterprise but it will likely find CXO’s baulk at the idea of Chatter as a useful addition to their Salesforce.com environment. Only time will tell whether Salesforce.com marketers have judged this correctly.

And Michael Krigsman concludes:

Regardless of where Salesforce decides to take Chatter, the announcement demonstrates that social computing space is reaching a tipping point, which I think is great.

I’m baffled by the name of this service but on the whole, my sense is that this is a huge development for the enterprise software business, as well as a definitive stamp of validation for Enterprise 2.0 constructs and technologies. Assuming of course that Salesforce.com gets this to market as promised.

Context Built In

Chatter is different. Its got the one thing baked in that other applications don’t – context. Built in from the ground up.

Back in February of this year, I wrote about how social computing constructs can make a difference to enterprise sales organizations. Based on our work with sales and marketing organizations at leading enterprise and voice of customer (sales reps) interviews with over 900 sales reps, I laid out a simplistic illustration of what makes a sales rep tick:

• Media watching is not a sport for sales reps. Feed them the good stuff and 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 reps 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).

Super impose these characteristics on the features presented in the Chatter demo and I say we have a solid start. Chatter’s got context and intent built in for the sales organization given its close out of the box linkages to Salesforce.com’s flagship CRM application. Next, the activity stream/ feed metaphor was made for the sales rep: Why? Given how they prefer to work, it 1) enables them to pluck important nuggets out of the stream that support the sales process and 2) lets the best minds wrap around a task at hand (RFP, prospect inquiry, customer support issue and the like). It won’t all just happen out of the box but the application has the potential to make it a hell of a lot easier.

Process + Social

Last week I wrote a post called “Why Process Barfs on Social”. My central point was that unless we see a social + process in context, Enterprise 2.0 won’t realize its full potential. Whilst tools certainly won’t provide the solution alone, Chatter has the capability of being the first integrated showcase where social concepts are unleashed to enrichen discrete processes (in this case, closing and keeping customers) towards established performance goals.

There’s no question that some of the most important data that sales reps need reside outside of the confines of traditional CEM and sales applications. They sit in home grown contract registries, support agreement databases, 3rd part news and social media platforms, ERP systems and very important – the minds of known and unknown colleagues. Chatters’ platform capabilities enable access to these data sources and people. This, along with the ability to collaborate around an object ( a lead, a competitor, a customer, a topic) brings process + social closer than ever before.

One Part Offence, Two Parts Defense

Despite the very convincing assault on Microsoft SharePoint by Marc, my sense is that this is more defense than offence on Salesforces.com’s part. Taking on the installed base of SharePoint may be a longer term goal but for now SalesForce needs to make its existing applications useful to sales reps and move away from being a glorified reporting application for operational bean counters or (as Scott Schnaars suggests), a contact management system. Not to mention the rising interest in so-called “social CRM” services. Chatter gives reps a reason to stay within Salesforce.com a little while longer and amps up the sustained utility of the service.

Distribution

Whilst this is validation around the concept of social computing in the enterprise and pureplay vendors will see a rising tide effect, there’s a downside as well. Its tempting to say that pureplay vendors had these capabilities for a while and can hold their own. The reality is that feature shoot outs play but one role in enterprise purchase decision making. Salesforce brings its powerful distribution channel, out of the box process integration, and a now social marketplace in AppExchange – together providing a very compelling reason for enterprises to consider this as a company-wide social networking platform.

Customer Centricity

This, in my opinion, was the biggest lost opportunity in the launch of this service.

One of the reasons for Bloomberg LPs ungodly success is that every single employee’s bonus is tied to new sales and renewals. IT, Product, Marketing, Support, everyone. That means everyone prioritizes their work around revenue. That’s extremely difficult to do especially since only a chosen few at most companies have any control or even insight into the sales process. Now, with Chatter being seeded in the nucleus of managing customer relationships in the enterprise (i.e. CRM), there’s the opportunity, for the first time, to provide a universal lens into the process of courting, converting and servicing a customer. Everyone can see the sales and support process live and chime in with expertise, helping cradle the process to revenue and customer satisfaction. The big value proposition of the enterprise social web is improved customer centricity and there’s a unique opportunity for Chatter to make this a reality. I wish Salesforce had seized this opportunity to present a model that can transform how organizations and their partner ecosystems can be structured around the customer.

$50 bucks a user per month? Ouch!

Yes it’s a lot. But what strikes me as odd was that Salesforce did not offer some sort of basic/read-only access to Chatter for non Salesforce users at a given customer. What better way for others to see where their input is crucial to an ongoing project, RFP, discussion etc and make the case for purchasing that additional seat? That’s free marketing and a straight forward conversion strategy for Salesforce to move laterally, out side of sales and marketing. It’s still early so I won’t be surprised to see something similar to this.

Closing Thoughts

All up, this is excellent news for the Enterprise 2.0 space and I’m thrilled that a process facilitator such as Salesforce has dipped its toes in the social computing arena. Its about time Enterprise 2.0 grew up and started talking business. And Salesforce is one of the few companies that can lead that charge. It’s a separate post but pure plays will gain more than they will loose with increased awareness of the business association of social computing concepts. Good for the entire ecosystem.

For a detailed look at Chatter, see Marc Benioffs (very long) interview at TechCrunch’s Realtime Crunch Up Event.

I’m bullish.

Update: Great analysis on the infrastructure view point by Esteban Kolsky.

In my most recent post about how to avoid Enterprise 2.0 failure, I suggested that it’s important to understand and respond to human behavior if there’s any hope of accelerating business performance via social computing concepts. Here’s an excerpt:

What’s in it for me’. Not just ‘What’s in it for us’

The single biggest point of failure occurs during the initial

planning phase: focusing primarily on organizational benefits and putting individual incentives and therefore, behaviors, a distant second. The former helps crystallize the big picture and to justify the initiative to bean counters. The latter ensures sustained engagement, which in turn delivers improved performance.

The emergence of true Enterprise 2.0 transformation is unlikely to see the light of day if it’s designed to change how we as individuals or user constituencies behave. It might be called Enterprise Social Networking or Social Business, but honestly, if you haven’t considered and responded to the psychological drivers for each user type, a vibrant socially networked business ecosystem won’t emerge.  Consider the typical sales rep: She wants to consume as opposed to contribute. She searches, never browses. And she almost never personalizes interfaces. On the other hand, an engineer wants to collaborate, share, learn how to code better from others and contribute to a larger team success. Two very different behavioral models based on different incentive structures. Designing interaction models around the behaviors of each user type before selecting software and launching mitigates significant programmatic risk.

In the business world, incentive, intention and design context influences behavior. Understanding and accounting for these constructs are crucial to programmatic success and ultimately, performance acceleration.

I saw this post by rock star social web designer Joshua Porter of Bokardo that describes the thinking behind the design of a SocialCast feature. Joshua writes:

One of the guiding principles of interaction design is to support existing behavior. This means to figure out what is already happening, what activities, tasks, and interactions people are already doing, and build support for them into software.

This may not seem like a glamorous way to approach design, but from my experience it’s the fastest way to make people happy. Let them do what they already do faster/better/easier, and then you’ll have their attention in order to push the envelope after that.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a similar topic: Design, but in a programmatic sense of which interaction design is certainly a crucial component. (Post: how social computing can accelerate business performance for sales teams.) Central to this strategy and execution plan is understanding how the typical sales rep wants to work with people and data. And then exponentially improving that interaction via social computing constructs and technology. That’s very different from trying to design software or programs that want to fight known human instincts and behaviors.

Social software is but one component of overall enterprise 2.0 success. There’s a litany of factors to be considered to successfully realize true business performance acceleration and to manage risk, not the least of which is accounting for interaction patterns of each user type. That said, there’s no arguing that its a hell of a lot easier to improve probability of success if the software does its part to make this process easier. And so Joshua’s post really struck a chord with me.

I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing interaction designers and I’ve always felt that good interaction designers never get due props for their role in the overall success of a given initiative. Thanks to Joshua for writing about this topic.

Update: A few hours after I published this post, Steve Wylie, GM of the Enterprise 2.0 conference (Disclaimer: I’m on the advisory board) just announced that Thomas Vanderwal will be speaking at the conference this fall in San Francisco. Thomas, a well respected social web designer, will join social software luminary Stewart Mader to talk about “Five Things Companies Learn After a Year of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption”. Its great to see a designer joining a strategist to talk about adoption strategies and inhibitors. Full post here.

Image: Reiki

Umberto Mellitti, CEO of on-demand sales intelligence provider InsideView, said on Twitter:

Umberto’s analogy is spot on. Also, if you’re worried about your Sales folks getting distracted by Social Media tools such as Twitter, sorry, but you have bigger problems. Either your compensation structure is just not juicy enough to keep them focused or I’m afraid, you got the B team. Or maybe marketing isn’t filling up the funnel effectively with qualified leads from Social Media channels.

My ex-colleague from marchFIRST Margaret Francis (now killing it at the awesome ScoutLabs) responded:

If your sales team is going to goof off, Social Media hardly presents the first opportunity to do so. There’s over 300 channels on cable TV, Golf Courses, Hulu and if all else fails, Vegas.

In the course of my work, I’ve conducted user needs assessments with well over 200 sales reps and sales managers at large organizations and it takes under 3 minutes to spot the ones that have “time is money” ingrained in their DNA. They have a nose for islands of opportunity and know how to use it effectively, always keeping the goal in sight.

I’d argue there’s ridiculous amounts of un tapped sales opportunity hidden in social media, and the good sales reps are figuring it out. And it’s time to fold in lead generation and revenue as outputs from Social Media, beyond awareness and engagement.

What a Good Sales Rep Would Never Do

I can’t imagine any good sales rep actively scouring Twitter for leads at the expense of traditional prospecting, especially in the B2B area. Sure, set up some persistent searches and if something juicy shows up, engage. But beyond that, carpet bombing Twitter or actively following (by following I mean reading) thousands of people to see if someone pops is obviously a waste of time. And the good ones know it.

Where Social Media Makes Sense for Sales

Social media for Selling pays huge dividends 1) as a lead qualifier and 2) as an engagement platform, after you have established a requisite qualification level.  Start with a qualified list from your existing funnel and using Social Media to connect, network, nurture and enrichen your prospect intelligence, as you begin the close.

Social Media rock god Chris Brogan has some good advice here.  After marketing has created awareness and surfaces leads, selling can commence:

So now you’ve put someone into your lead cycle. You’ve decided you are going to close them for a sale (and remember, let’s use “sale” loosely. Maybe you’re “selling them” on donating to your charity, or watching your video channel. The advent of services like Twitter allow you to mind read from afar. If I’m going to hit up Len Devanna from EMC to sponsor a conference of mine, I’m sure as hell going to read his Twitter stream from the last two days and make sure his dog hasn’t gone into the hospital or that he’s not dealing with a budget cut, etc.  It also allows you to gently touch (without selling) your clients so that they keep you top of mind.

Mark Hausman of the Strategic Communications Group also lays out a good approach, though focused more on how Marketing can use a Sales reps time more effectively:

• Step 1 Prioritize the Hot Ones. By working closely with your sales team, a set of prospects can be culled based on their standing in the sales pipeline, intimacy of existing relationship and potential size of the transaction.
• Step 2 Map and Monitor. Compile an overview of each prospect’s [Social Media] engagement
• Step 3 Engage in a Prospect’s Communities of Choice.
• Step 4 Evaluate. Get Sales reps to give you feedback on how social media has helped move these deals forward.

There’s some basic tenants of what defines the work model of a killer sales rep. These hold true for the use of both internal sales operational data as well as prospecting insight. The simple fact is that the availability of data or any other potential distraction such as Social Media will never, ever, come in the way of a good sales rep making his or her numbers.

Of course, there’s always another perspective on all of this, best characterized by Conan O’Brien:

“In the year 3000, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook will merge to form one super time-wasting site called YouTwitFace.”

Happy Friday

I’m looking forward to attending the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco at the Intercontinental Hotel on March 4th and 5th.

Ironically, my last post was on the topic of opportunities and pitfalls of Enterprise 2.0 in the context of Sales. Given my work with Sales and Marketing organizations, I’m very familiar with the litmus test these buyers use (or should use) when selecting social software. I’m hoping that over the next few days, we’ll learn how well some of the solution providers have taken into account what makes a sales rep tick. Looking at the list of presenters and sponsors, I’m fully expecting to see some really useful innovation. If you’re attending, come say hi. Or register here.

Agenda topics include:

• How to Accelerate Sales in a 2.0 World
• Sales Lead Management 2.0
• Customer Engagement Strategies
• Analytics and Compensation Management
• Accelerating Productivity – New Sales 2.0 Tools
• The Foundation of a Sales 2.0 Business

Speakers include a list of whose who in the Sales community including Anneke Seley, author of Sales2.0,  Tom Barrieau from IDC, Jeremy Cooper from Salesforce.com, Scott Santucci and Brett Wallace from Forrester. I have to admit though, I’m as excited in the “LobbyCon” part of the event. Trying to understand how Sales and Marketing solution providers such as InsideView, LucidEra, Marketo and others are going to reinvent/improve the business of selling should be very interesting.

I’ll be there as part of the blogger/media folks and the plan is to soak it all in and write up a few posts at the end. I also plan on tweeting the event (@sameerpatel). The hashtag on Twitter is # sales20 for those of you that want to follow along.

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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