We've seen many examples of the power of social media in the BtoB space, however, few companies have been able to truly leverage social media within their own organizations. I've written about this quite frequently across our CMO and Sales Advisory Service blogs. (e.g., How Social Media Helps Enterprises, Rise of the Social Media Function) This has also been a key growth area within one of IDC's five sales productivity levers: Sales Enablement. That is, how can sales organizations best leverage new social media capabilities to improve their productivity.
Well, with much fanfare and pizzazz as part of its recent Dreamforce event in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Salesforce.com announced its newest offering to help companies leverage the power of social media: Salesforce Chatter. Chatter, which will be officially launched in 2010, is both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing applications. Please refer to Mike Fauscette's blog review of this new product/platform for a more comprehensive analysis of its capabilities.
This new SF.com platform will provide sales organizations with the capability to better leverage social media across their organization; not just pulling in market, customer and competitive data from publicly available social media sources, but also better connecting individuals within the organiztion. (e.g., sales reps, presales, sales ops, product management, marketing) The potential value add here for sales organizations is improved productivity; for example, sales reps will be able to more efficienctly use their SF.com deployment (e.g., you can be notified regarding updates/changes in opportunities or other parts of SF.com); competitive information will be more easliy accessible (e.g., internal CI communities can be established within the SF.com application); communication amongst sales teams and managers will be enhanced (e.g., status updates will be available); and sales reps can be better connected with customer interactions (e.g., updates from other applications regarding product fulfillment). As with any new application, the true productivity enhancements will depend upon companies' abilities to quickly adapt to this new and evolving paradigm and leverage it's capability for their unique situations.
How much will this additional offering cost? Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.
November 24, 2009
November 19, 2009
Maintaining your Momentum for Sales Productivity Improvements in 2010
With the end of the year quickly approaching, many sales and sales operations executives are once again establishing their investment strategy for the coming new year. A significant part of many companies' strategies is their sales hiring process; or should I say, their "revolving door" process. Too many organizations have spent too few resources improving their overall productivity during the past several years, more satisfied with simply trying to hire an entire sales team filled with "A" players. Yes, that is a state that we all yearn for; and this may be possible for smaller organizations. However, if you're a large organization with 00s or even 000s of sales reps, you're better off playing the lottery than trying to achieve a sales force with all "A" players. Not only is there an insufficient supply of these unique individuals, but even if there were, do you really have enough confidence in your hiring process to identify who these players are?
This brings us to the dilemma of how do we, as sales and sales operations executives, elevate the skill-sets of our existing sales force while simultaneously matching the correct competencies with the current and future needs of the organization as part of our hiring process. This may lead many folks toward the path of "Talent Management"; however, this is only part of the sales productivity formula, as presented below in IDC's Sales Productivity Framework. Other areas requiring our attention include Sales Management, Sales Methodology, Customer Intelligence and Sales Enablement.
Acknowledging the need to focus on these key areas to optimize the potential of our sales force, still brings us to the challenge of how we more tactically execute this strategy across a $1B+, multi-national organization? No doubt that the downturn created a true sense of urgency across many companies to begin real investment in productivity improvement, but these initiatives will be in jeopardy at companies that fail to grasp the longer-term importance of improvement in their sales organization for survival in an increasingly competitive environment.
Here are just a few examples of what the better sales organizations are doing to maintain the momentum for productivity improvements:
Other ideas? Please join the discussion below.
Also, please do reach out to us if you would like to participate in our ongoing research. (mgerard@idc.com)
Acknowledging the need to focus on these key areas to optimize the potential of our sales force, still brings us to the challenge of how we more tactically execute this strategy across a $1B+, multi-national organization? No doubt that the downturn created a true sense of urgency across many companies to begin real investment in productivity improvement, but these initiatives will be in jeopardy at companies that fail to grasp the longer-term importance of improvement in their sales organization for survival in an increasingly competitive environment.
Here are just a few examples of what the better sales organizations are doing to maintain the momentum for productivity improvements:
- A sales operations team has been put in place to focus on the key levers of productivity, including taking a process and technology perspective of each of these levers.
- Key wins are achieved and highlighted in the short-term to demonstrate the real impact of productivity improvement initiatives and to demonstrate the potential future impact of related initiatives. (e.g., "We have launched a productivity newsletter to publicize our successes and impact across the organization and enable sales reps to gain a greater appreciation of the potential output of productivity-related initiatives." [$1B+ software company])
- Time-motion studies have been completed to identify and focus on areas of improvement to free up sales reps' valuable time; however, this is only the start. The next steps include helping sales reps to best use this "time saved" while in parallel articulating the value and impact of these changes to management. (e.g., "Impact of our productivity initiatives will be measured based upon: time (rep time savings in hours per week), cost avoidance and reduction, and customer satisfaction." [sales operations executive, $1B+ hardware company])
- Putting in place a Sales Performance Measurement strategy to better measure more traditional areas such as pipeline health, as well as beginning to better quantify the impact of productivity improvements. (e.g., through efficiency and effectiveness metrics)
Other ideas? Please join the discussion below.
Also, please do reach out to us if you would like to participate in our ongoing research. (mgerard@idc.com)
November 4, 2009
Bringing the Right People to the Table
In my prior blog I spoke a lot about the need for sales to have deeper, two-way conversations with customers. As I have these discussions with sales operations and sales executives, there's much discussion about sales enablement for "sales reps" and "sales teams"; however, the need for sales reps to better leverage their own immediate and extended team(i.e., sales, marketing and engineering) as part of the sales process receives little attention.
I included a chart in my last blog from some of our customer experience research indicating that one of the top messages buyers are telling us is that sales reps need to "bring the right people to the table". This may be intuitive and standard practice for the "A" reps, however, how are we ensuring that we're making this as easy as possible for the "A" reps and equipping our "B" reps with the knowledge and capabilities to accomplish this task? Are you expecting your front line sales individuals to know too much? And to what extent are you providing these reps with the knowledge and capabilities to best leverage expertise within your organization to approach clients with the best "team"?
Questions to ask yourself about your current state in this area include:
1. Are my sales reps sufficiently fluent in our customers' language (and needs) and our companies' products and solutions to have a deep conversation with customers?
2. Do sales reps know when to bring in the right people for customer engagements? (e.g., presales engineers, industry specialists, subject matter experts(SMEs))
3. How do sales reps access SMEs for questions? (e.g., SME access through your internal sales enablement application; leverage of internal social media capabilities to get questions answered)
4. What process do you have in place to help reps justify the need for more resources for an account and/or opportunity? (e.g., through the account planning and opportunity management process)
5. How do you ensure that sales reps always know where to go for information? (e.g., One sales exec. indicated at a recent Sales Leadership Board Meeting that "Our sales teams are not seeking information on a daily basis; therefore, they continuously forget it exists or where to get it.")
It's not always what you know, but who you know. And leveraging expertise across the organization can, in may cases, be the difference between winning or losing a deal.
I included a chart in my last blog from some of our customer experience research indicating that one of the top messages buyers are telling us is that sales reps need to "bring the right people to the table". This may be intuitive and standard practice for the "A" reps, however, how are we ensuring that we're making this as easy as possible for the "A" reps and equipping our "B" reps with the knowledge and capabilities to accomplish this task? Are you expecting your front line sales individuals to know too much? And to what extent are you providing these reps with the knowledge and capabilities to best leverage expertise within your organization to approach clients with the best "team"?
Questions to ask yourself about your current state in this area include:
1. Are my sales reps sufficiently fluent in our customers' language (and needs) and our companies' products and solutions to have a deep conversation with customers?
2. Do sales reps know when to bring in the right people for customer engagements? (e.g., presales engineers, industry specialists, subject matter experts(SMEs))
3. How do sales reps access SMEs for questions? (e.g., SME access through your internal sales enablement application; leverage of internal social media capabilities to get questions answered)
4. What process do you have in place to help reps justify the need for more resources for an account and/or opportunity? (e.g., through the account planning and opportunity management process)
5. How do you ensure that sales reps always know where to go for information? (e.g., One sales exec. indicated at a recent Sales Leadership Board Meeting that "Our sales teams are not seeking information on a daily basis; therefore, they continuously forget it exists or where to get it.")
It's not always what you know, but who you know. And leveraging expertise across the organization can, in may cases, be the difference between winning or losing a deal.
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