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Having the Relevant Business Information Needed to Act

By Suaad Sait December 20, 2010

Last week we talked about Sales being a team sport. They are no longer the “sales team,” they are part of YOUR team. Sales is the driving force of company – it’s how we make money. Sales awareness and acquiring and sharing business information that helps spur new business is becoming and more a priority for more than just the sales department.

It’s not just about availability of information and increased collaboration, however. Sales 2.0 is also about the ability and authority to make actual decisions at the point of insight. It’s one thing to know, and it’s quite another to act.

As a recent Gartner report projected, by 2012, 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. That’s pretty bad – just having the right information puts you ahead of the class.

But on top of that, Gartner anticipates that by 2012, collaborative tools being deployed by savvy salesforces and companies will also have enabled a shift of traditional management decisions further down the chain as cross-communication and business information becomes more targeted, relevant and useful. I’m thinking salesforce.com might have read this same report….Chatter and now ChatterFree….

What Gartner is saying is that this is an evolve-or-die situation, in no uncertain terms. Non-hierarchical processes will win. You need to have the right information, and have the authority to wield it.

But that’s scary, right?

What makes such a paradigm shift less intimidating is, again, precise, useful and readily-available information and contextual awareness not only for sales professionals, but also, importantly, for the entire openly collaborative and communicating company — across departments and hierarchies.

Well-informed roles will make well-informed decisions. The reason the kinds hierarchies Gartner critiques have existed until now is because information had always been concentrated at the top.

Now, the right business information can be made available to everyone, democratically, with one-click tools that deliver up-to-date information at the point of a decision.

For example, a sales professional may be working on successfully closing a deal with a prospective customer, but accounting could have awareness of that customer’s problematic credit history, or a recent financial filing signaling distress. As sales professionals focus on moving the flood of productive leads through the funnel, that kind of information which may not be available to them directly is crucial in indentifying the deals that can most doggedly pursued, and it needs to be communicated across the company.

Likewise, a sales professional could be courting a customer that HR realizes a new employee used to work with, a connection that may valuable in closing the deal. An awareness of the activities across departments becomes essential, a shared business intelligence that isn’t confined to individuals but made useful throughout the company.

The right listening and business information platforms are key to establishing and effectively fostering a culture of sales as team sport, with informed and empowered roles that are authorized to make real decisions and thereby meaningfully move the needle on closing deals.

Do you know who is one the “HOT” deal list at your company right now? Are you sitting on information that could accelerate a WIN?

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TOPICS: business intelligence, new information economy, sales intelligence, social business

Sales is a Team Sport – Everyone Has to Be In the Game to WIN

By Suaad Sait December 16, 2010

The most important aspect in sales used to be lead generation, which meant identifying and connecting your prospective customers by any means necessary.

Thankfully, the tools and technologies of today’s “sales 2.0” environment have largely alleviated the most burdensome and inefficient methods of casting the lead gen net, killing the cold call (thank goodness) and allowing sales professionals to effectively target the most promising new customers through better information and communication.

Information empowers, cuts inefficiency, and increases the relevancy of sales professionals’ efforts, likewise increasing their effectiveness and the company’s customer base.

The growth of technologies to enable marketing to do a better job of lead generation has enabled a better top of the funnel effect for both inbound and outbound marketing. We need to apply that same level of innovation and information empowerment to the rest of the sales funnel and its various touchpoints, increasing communication and awareness across the company to help close deals and share relevant information. In the same way we have increased precision and relevance for lead generation, we now need to foster the necessary analytical and coordination culture to secure the follow-through and victory.

What does that mean?

It means giving everyone in your organization the information to understand and help by enabling them to proactively listen to the target prospect, customer or partner.

Such is a shift in understanding to recognize that within the company, sales is a team sport. It used to be that marketers brought volume to the top, sales vetted and sold through to TQL’s, and management came in for a bit of superhero work at the very end (a combo of POC and glad-handing).

Today, as a prospective customer begins to move through the sales channels and further down the funnel, a wide variety departments and roles beyond the sales force necessarily need to be aware of the acquisition. This is not only because they may have valuable insights and potential relationship networks to help close the deal, hedge any potential conflicts or identify possible synergies within the company’s activities, but also simply to better serve the customer, whose needs and expectations have themselves changed.

Sales, of course, doesn’t end with lead gen identification, or even the acquisition of the new customer, but is rather a continuous effort to best serve.

“Sales” is now a core competency across any organization, no matter the department.

At workstreamer we believe that all business professionals need a holistic view into the companies with which they interact, because all functions – whether that’s marketing,sales, bizdev or customer service – now permeate across traditional lines.

Is Sales a team sport in your company? If so, we’d love to hear how you are teaming up to WIN!

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TOPICS: business listening, sales intelligence, social business

3 Tools for Listening to your Customers

By Suaad Sait August 18, 2010

We spend a lot of time at here at Workstreamer talking about listening to the social graph. Our product is designed to let our users hear the heartbeat of insight related to the companies that matter most to them. But how should we be listening to our customers? As our user-base grows quickly, I’m spending an increasing amount of time talking with users about their likes, dislikes, and ideas. I’ve also been reviewing different technology solutions that will help us listen to our customers.

Here are three tools that I have been studying; learning how they can help me listen to customers.

In years past, I’ve been a part of several help desk tool implementations. Generally, they were rather expensive boxed software products, and we had to hire consultants to help us deploy them. We’d have dedicated IT resources to manage them as well. Even with all that infrastructure and attention, it was sometimes a struggle to actually connect with customers.

Zen Desk is the help desk re-imagined. First, it is completely web based, with no IT overhead required. You can probably get it up and running in 15 minutes, and it comes pre-populated with web-forms and works with my email system. We can easily start building a knowledge base from existing email and voice exchanges with customers.

Zen Desk also supplies some sizzle in the form of an iphone app. This app allows our customer support team to respond to issues on the go.

From a cost perspective, Zen Desk is quite reasonable. The most popular plan runs $24 per month per customer support agent.

Started by University of Texas graduate Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction is a super-social mix of customer feedback tool and community idea generation discussion-board. While Zen Desk tends to favor 1:1 interaction, Get Satisfaction is all about building a community of customers around their support issues and product ideas.

You can see our Workstreamer customer community under development at http://community.workstreamer.com/. You can also share an idea, ask a question, log a problem or give us praise directly by clicking on the “Feedback” tab on the left side of the Workstreamer app. A reasonable starting price point for Get Satisfaction is $89 per month.

Moving from support to sales brings us to Bazaarvoice. If you are looking for a tool to listen to what your customers are saying about your products, and then harness and purpose those comments to drive increased sales, Bazaarvoice is without peer.

Over the last 5 years, Bazaarvoice implementations have served more than 100B pieces of content. This content was originally generated by customers giving opinions on products and services. By listening to those statements and creating a work flow process that harvests the best content and serves it in a manner that can influence buyer behavior, Bazaarvoice has created a powerhouse solution that is changing the way companies are being perceived online.

Bazaarvoice is headquartered right here in Austin, we are proud to share our city (and our venture capitalists) with them. Their software is definitely enterprise class with pricing starting at $2000 per month.

As we grow our community, we are focused on listening to our customers. By doing so we will be able to innovate new services that will allow Workstreamer customers to listen to what matters most to them. If you haven’t already done so, please give Worksteamer at try and give us feedback – we are listening!

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, social business

Are we in a Social Recovery?

By Hank Weghorst July 9, 2010

A funny thing happened on the way to recovery.

Markets rise and fall and rise again. The global recession that we are finally shaking followed a familiar trend. 16 times since 1919, our economy has faced recession and experienced follow-on growth. From a peak of nearly 14000 in 2007, the Dow Jones retreated to nearly half its value in early 2009. Then, as sure as spring arrives; the markets began their march ahead – reaching 11,000 by mid-April 2010.

What exactly is a recession? According to my notes from Econ 101, it represents 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Our current recession technically started 3Q 2008, although experts point to the end of 2007 as the “real” start.

While this recession has lead to a malaise in the general economy, there is one group of firms that have bucked the trend: Companies that deliver value around the Social Web. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare represent a new breed of service that were launched or grew through their formative stages during the downturn and have accelerated even faster as the recovery has evolved.

Lets look a little closer. Since March 13^th 2009, barely a year ago, the market has increased by 53%.

Facebook, which launched in 2004 and reached critical mass during the slide, saw growth in unique visitors that virtually parallels that of the stock market’s recovery during that timeframe.

Foursquare, a social mobile application that tracks your “check-ins”, launched in early 2009 has grown dramatically with the recovery.

And Twitter, which launched in 2008, has grown at an almost identical rate to the Dow Jones Industrial Average over its life.

So what do these trends mean?

One of the key traits that these services have in common is that they are largely consumer focused. While consumer debt was piling up, jobs drying up, and the housing market cratered, consumers were turning in droves to the social web to keep them connected, entertained, and happy. Business to Consumer social technologies appear to be a leading indicator for recovery this time around.

It’s been long understood across those 16 recessions, that consumer sentiment drives recovery. Once consumers decide it is time to buy, business spending must pick up.

And so as social consumer applications have dominated the last few years, social business apps (apps leveraging the social concepts and constructs) may dominate the recovery. Perhaps we need to christen this recovery, the first “Social Recovery” in history.

For example, B2B social site LinkedIn saw hockey stick like growth in 2009 and this year as business networking and hiring picks up. Business collaboration tool Yammer has taken the Twitter business model to corporate messaging. And its still yet to be seen how salesforce.com Chatter will change the way we do business.

It appears that the most successful tools that drive reach and collaboration within the business ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors, competitors, prospects, clients etc) have a good shot of riding the recovery. I’m expecting established apps like LinkedIn, Yammer, Spiceworks and new apps like Salesforce.com’s “Chatter” to grow and dominate the new business software scene.

What do you think? Whatever the outcome, the next couple years of recovery are sure to be a wild ride.

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TOPICS: its all about the data, new information economy, social business

What’s Your Social Business Score?

By Amy Hawthorne June 28, 2010

With millions of gallons of oil spilling across the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon Rig spill is a tragedy for the Gulf ecosystem – and a disaster for British Petroleum. BP has been knocked back on it’s heels for the last month as wave after wave of critical analysis flowed from the media.
To add insult to injury, along comes a comedian who scoops up the Twitter handle @BPGlobalPR and tweets a stream of embarrassing comments, 140 characters at a time:

One of our robots knocked the cap off the well. Don’t worry, he’s grounded for 2 weeks w/ no allowance. http://ow.ly/22lnV 1:50 PM June 23rd via web
ATTN: Looking for a skilled photoshop editor to clean up photos like this one: http://ow.ly/1ZnVZ – No conscience required. 3:42 June 16th via web
I’ve gotta say, at night the gulf really doesn’t look that bad. #bpcares 9:39 PM May 30th via Twitterrific

In just over a month @BPGlobalPR has been tweeting they have accumulated over 175,000 followers. You can follow along yourself at http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR. Compare that to @BP_America, the official voice of BP on Twitter with less than 17,000 followers. British Petroleum is a stunning example of a large and otherwise savvy company that is not winning the social media war.

It is interesting that, by-in-large, companies are far behind individuals when it comes to maximizing their social presence. As individuals, we track friends and followers. We watch the trending topics, and we know who the best sources are for our interests.

Is the social web a uniquely individual platform? Can businesses also capture this value? What framework should businesses use to track and score their social presence?

The Social Business Score: A Cross-Platform Metric
Business participation in the social web is not a part time endeavor. Companies need to identify organizational leaders who share both an expertise in their areas and a desire to be seen as thought leaders. These leaders then must establish soap-boxes across the social web. Finally, thought leaders must contribute to the conversation regularly. We’ve proposed a simple rubric that you can use to get a handle on where your organization stands. Hopefully, you will find that you are in the leader category. If not, use this charge as ammo to get your social business strategy headed in the right direction.

Use the following table to score your business on our quick rubric.

Interested in keeping up BP in real time? Sign up for workstreamer and start following BP. Want a good laugh, start following @BPBlobalPR on Twitter.

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TOPICS: business listening, social business

This is NOT your Father’s Information Economy

By Suaad Sait June 24, 2010

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. – Stewart Brand, at the first Hackers Convention, 1984.

These days, information is everywhere. There are millions of blogs and billions of posts on Facebook. Wikipedia is growing faster than you can read it and every traditional magazine and newspaper has a hundred competitors online. No – this is surely not your father’s information economy. Things were very different back then.

In 1937, economist Ronald Coase wrote his seminal article titled “The Nature of The Firm” in which he argued that the size of the corporation is correlated with the cost of information. Large firms had evolved to dominate the 20^th century economy because the cost of getting the information necessary to conduct business successfully was so expensive. Massively hierarchal organizations – the rise of middle management – were a direct result of this effect.

In the mid-Twentieth Century, information analysis was performed much like auto manufacturing. A large assembly line of white-collar workers pushed information up the pyramid – analyzing, augmenting and combining as it went. Once decisions were made at the top, a reverse process occurred as the “insight” was pushed down and out to the far reaches of the enterprise. It was nearly impossible to change course in a large firm because of the rigid and massive information gathering, management, and decision-making infrastructure.

Fast forward to the web-enabled world. With so many new “sources” of information, you’d think the costs to generate insight would become astronomical, right? Well not for the agile enterprise. With the right tools, the cost of capturing and analyzing the right information can be exceedingly cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Coase’s Law can been flipped on it’s head.

The first generation of mainstream information aggregation tools for the web were the Internet directories – remember Yahoo when it was just a directory? (Am I dating myself??) We found information online by hunting through directory structures – just like a card catalog.

Then came search and exotic names like Alta Vista and Inktomi and then Google. Information access exploded, as did our ability to sift through it. Now we are in the third wave of information aggregation with the convergence of social, real-time and mobile information overwhelming our previously reliable search and research strategies.

This “RealSocialMobile” web calls for a new strategy for information aggregation. Rather than expecting traditional search technologies to yield optimal results, we now must turn to tools that provide a federated approach to information retrieval and insight analysis.

In 1991, Ronald Coase was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the Nature of the Firm. His work points us toward a world where information is everywhere, and information is free. This paradigm of cheap and effective services that listen to the pulse of the real-time web and automatically identify the nuggets of insight that are directly relevant to your specific needs will soon be changing the face of business. Jump on now and enjoy the ride.

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TOPICS: business listening, new information economy, social business