Customer Enablement Technology

9 08 2010

Enterprise Software Vendors have always focused on their enterprise clients’ needs when concocting their products. SFA, SCM, CRM, ERM, [insert your TLA] were all developed with the objective of optimising business from the inside-out, formalising and streamlining processes and connecting systems, and now with Social Software in the Workplace connecting people again. In parallel to that, we have seen companies build platforms that help people connect such as the now-ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter and consorts, bridging time and space to help people interact and reinforce ties with others like them.

What we are experiencing now is that the ESVs are integrating concepts learned from Web 2.0 into their product suites, and making them ‘enterprise-grade’ by including security, domaining, integration tailored to the needs specific to organisations. Hutch Carpenter goes as far as to say that this can be predicted by a simple rule of a two-year lag between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. The boundary between the technologies in the home and at the office is becoming less marked, but I still have the impression that the products developed are evolutionary rather than revolutionary – blogs, wikis, communities and so on with an ‘enterprise control’ layer – nothing disruptive as such. If you look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrants on the subject, you see that there are some big and a plethora of smaller actors (ripe for a round of consolidation?) with all of them having more or less the same feature set. So the question that arises in my opinion is where do we find inspiration for software innovation?

Enter The Social Customer

Paul Greenberg – who has greatly influenced my thinking, thank you Paul – reminds us that the company needs to become a customer-driven organisation in order to understand and meet the needs of the Social Customer, as compared to having an inside-out vision of what customers want. The Social Customer has expectations regarding interactivity and ‘partnering’ with you to meet their needs, and social CRM is about organising your company and collaborative value chain (CVC) to meet these.

Getting to the needs and turning them into actionable insights is where there is still a lot of work to be done. In Marketing, answers have been sought by using surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, behavioural observation etc. and more recently we are extending this paradigm by sifting through comments on Twitter, blogposts, fanpages and “Likes” on Facebook and trying to make sense of them. As Esteban Kolsky noted after the CRM Evolution 2010 Conference, Analytics is going to be the hot topic the next 2-3 years, and in my opinion especially when we start combining Social Network interactions and interrelations with transactional customer data in our CRM systems.

Although these approaches give us new ways to get to the Voice of Customer, In the age of scarcity we need to find new ways of creating value that go beyond creating value for the company alone, as Wim Rampen states here. The issue with VoC is that you are still looking through the lens of your company that has a particular colour. Rather than nurturing a collaborative relationship with customers, employees, and partners that feeds on itself and leads to the closest approximation of the desired outcome for all parties involved, there is a fair chance that idea&s and insights just get bounced around the walls of the company to either get lost in its meanders or come out looking quite different from what was actually needed.

We are starting to see some platforms emerge that aim to capture needs by allowing customers to offer suggestions (such as ideation software) which can then be voted upon ‘democratically’by their peers (a.k.a. crowdsourcing) in order to provide priorisation, but again these are systems are developed by ESVs from the point of view of enterprise needs.  Ideas are funneled into business processes, lost to the customers because they are left to ‘wander off’ to be worked upon behind closed doors.

If we really think that customers have something to bring to the party, but also they don’t know our constraints well enough to contribute as an equal, let’s enable them by educating and learning together with them! Give them the information, insights and tools that allow them to effectively partner with us! When and if they choose to reach out for whatever reason (advice, support, contribute, complain etc.), provide them with the tools and venues that are geared to these interactions and that provide value to all!

Where an ESV can add value is by devising platforms that are designed from the outset to facilitate interaction and engagement between all actors of the collaborative value chain, and in particular to capture the customer’s job-to-be-done and facilitate collaboration that leads to the desired outcomes. Facebook, blogs and Twitter are interesting platforms but when customers post comments or ideas for a company – they do so with the hope that the company is listen AND will do something about it AND will acknowledge and give them feedback – but currently the experience continuum they offer is clumsy to say the least.

Some quick examples of platforms I can think of : wiki-like platforms where communities can collaborate on an public RFP for a company’s offering; information aggregators that show product information, ratings, comments, issues & resolutions so as to give  customer data that will allow her to make informed decisions and/or comfort them; ideation platforms that allow suggestions AND involve customers in their elaboration…if you have other ideas, please leave them in a comment here!

I am not saying that there are no enterprise software platform providers out there that “enable” the customer to get the job-to-be-done done (and align customers with the brand as Graham Hill would say). Lithium Technologies has a interesting platform that was designed first and foremost with the customer in mind, but its integration with the CVC is still far from complete). What I am stating however is that ESVs could focus more on providing solutions that help the customer partner with the enterprise.  As such, Customer Enable Technology may be one of the new ways that we can create value beyond creating value for the company alone, to the benefit of all.


Comments : 8 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM Converge towards the Collaborative Enterprise

17 06 2010

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Milan where Esteban Kolsky and I presented the “The New Era of Customer Engagement with Social CRM“, I spoke with Emanuele Quintarelli of Open Knowledge who organized the event – and he did a very good job I might add!.  During our conversation Emanuele made the remark that Social CRM has now become an accepted part of the agenda in comparison with last year. Participants attending the previous edition found it strange to even mention customers when discussing E2.0 and preferred to focus on the software solutions – but this year this seems to have changed completely.
It was thus of particular interest to me to note was that the notion of the Social Customer and that we need to organise to engage is starting to gain traction from the protagonists of Enterprise 2.0 (see Bertrand Duperrin’s take on it here).  For example, Emanuele Scotti’s opening speech dealt with changing needs and behaviors of the Social Customer, followed by Sameer Patel‘s excellent Keynote who continued on by talking about how companies should organize for customers that want to interact with the company (and not only be passive buyers). And as a sidenote – on the vendor side, Jive Software for example is adding “Social CRM features” and repositioning itself as as a “Social Business” platform provider.

In my opinion the discussion around Enterprise 2.0 has been too internal-facing and focused on the tools, rather than what the objectives for collaborating actually are. The market is maturing though as we see the approach evolve from innovators to early adopters. This was especially evident when looking at the agenda of the Milan edition, in contrast to the Boston edition that is still more focused on the software “solutions” (go ahead and deploy this module and you are now a “Social Business”..NOT!). Could it be that Europe is leading the way in its understanding of what it takes (culture, organisation, customer focus, employee engagement…)?

Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0

Although collaboration in customer driven organisations in not a new concepts (albeit still exceptional rather than a rule), Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM were meant for each other. a Social CRM customer engagaement programme that has no link back into the enterprise risks becoming cloistured in whichever department that decides to pick up on it first – thus risking incoherent experiences when a customer interacts with another department for whatever reason. Enterprise 2.0 on the other hand has been about collaboration, but  sometimes it seems that it is just for Collaboration’s sake. What Social CRM brings to the party is a compelling business reason, namely to collaborate for, around and with the customer to better meet desired outcomes.

Social Business as the Business Model

In my opinion the next step is the “Collaborative Enterprise”, organised around understanding customer jobs and collaborating with the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, channels) to deliver on the desired outcomes. This is not about about implementing Web 2.0 technology to make your organisation “Social”, but rather using the means available to facilitate communication and knowledge flows to get the customer job done. Furthermore, it is about organising the enterprise on its road to becoming a customer-driven, customer-focused extended company, and facilitating systemic integration to achieve this – as described by Ranjay Gulati in his excellent book “Reorganize for Resilience“.
It is not about introducing new tools to do business in roughly the same way – only more effectively and efficiently, it is about adapting our business model to become a Social Business so as to take into account changes in the business environment, most notably the advent of the Social Customer.

The Collaborative Enterprise

The “collaborative enterprise” is one such approach of adapting the business model. The basic premise is that it serves as an interaction and reference hub through which stakeholders can collaborate to match expectations with outcomes – mainly of customers, but also all other parties – by first and foremost understanding what these are and putting the mechanisms and processes in place to gather and share insights and act upon them. The idea is not only to “collaborate” with  your customers by interacting and engaging with them and thus glean actionable insights, but  also extend this by collaborating with other stakeholders to combine their understanding with yours so as to provide the desired outcomes such as a satisfactory end-to-end customer experience – presale, sale and postsale, or by shaping your new offering through collaborative innovation etc.

I’d like to add here that your unique understanding of your customers and what their desired outcomes are, form the basis for your competitive advantage. The product you manufacture, I can build in China or wherever far cheaper than you can, the service package you offer I can copy very quickly, but the relation you have with your customers which allows you to meet their expectations – and which draws new customers to you – I cannot readily emulate.

I’ll look at the above in more detail in follow-up posts, let me know whether you want me to look at something in particular. Also please leave me a comment to let me know your thoughts, I’m keen to hear them!


Comments : 8 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM

Data-Driven Social CRM

15 04 2010

I have been reading some very interesting books about strategies around becoming a customer-driven organisation and also about the benefits of Customer Engagement Programs (more on that in later posts). In the discussion around Social CRM we agree that it is beneficial to business to engage the Social Customer, but what seems to be more difficult to articulate is the Business Value Proposition – why should a company invest in Customer Engagement Programs in conjunction with CRM? What value is in it for the company and what is in it for the customers? We also talk about the need to move from value-in-exchange thinking to value-in-use. What tangible benefits are there for companies to take a a customer Lifetime Value approach rather than concentrate on the sale? Or simply, how can Social CRM Strategies can provide a significant impact to the bottom line.   

This is where Jim Novo’s book “Drilling Down” got me thinking – hard (and kudo’s to fellow AC-er Mike Boysen for helping me shape my thoughts). Jim Novo’s premise is that the data you have in your systems about your customers will allow you to segment them based on their behaviour and not sociodemographic characteristics and concentrate your resources on those that will bring you the highest value. It sounds kind of like inside-out thinking, but believe me, it is quite the opposite. Rather than concentrating on attrition and win-back of all your customers(which is far more expensive than customer retention), the method he proposes also allows you to pick up on deviation from expected behaviour, use these as triggers and perform what I’d describe as “just-in-time” retention activities to keep the patronage of high-potential or high-value customers.   

 This excerpt is taken from the free chapters of Jim’s book (you can get them here by signing up for his newsletter):   

1. Past and Current customer behavior are the best predictors of Future customer behavior. 

You can predict future behavior based on an understanding of past behavior, and use this knowledge to improve marketing or service programs [based on] actual behavior, not implied behavior.

2. Customers want to win at the customer game. 

They like to feel they are in control and smart about choices they make, and they like to feel good about their behavior. Marketers and service providers take advantage of this attitude by offering programs and communications of various kinds to get customers to engage in a certain behavior and feel good about doing it.

3. Data-Driven programs are about allocating resources.
 
Data-Driven marketing and service programs are among the very few allowing you to accurately measure ROI. [It's about] reallocating capital with low return to higher return projects or programs, generating higher profits in the process.  

4.Action – Reaction – Feedback – Repeat.

Data-Driven marketing and service programs are driven by creating continuous communications and interactions between the business and the customer, and analyzing these interactions for challenges or opportunities.

This is the example Jim uses to illustrate his propos: 

For example, a win-back program is triggered when the customer defects. Have you switched long distance or cellular providers lately? Did you get inundated with win-back calls begging you to reconsider? “Jim, we just wanted you to know we have lowered our rates.” Yeah, well, thanks for telling me after overcharging me for the past six months! But could they have known I was about to switch by looking at my behavior? 

Sure. If they had looked at the calling patterns of previously defected customers like me, they would have seen a common thread in the behavior.[...] The proper profit maximizing approach is to wait until I look like I’m going to defect, and then call me and offer a lower rate before I defect.

Too late. The customer no longer is one.  

The “Drilling Down” approach is aimed at constantly improving and optimising the value of both the company whilst ensuring a satisfactory customer experience.  

 What I like about Jim’s approach is that they provide a concrete Business Value Proposition for implementing a Customer Retention Strategy that optimises the allocation of the company’s resources by focusing on the most profitable segments – or in Finance speak: optimize the Return On Investment.   And as you probably know, the quickest way to a CFO’s heart is not though his stomach, but through the figures…The only issue is that it requires the company to move away from a quarterly quota model to a customer Lifetime value approach (see the book for more details on this last remark…)  

 Enter The Social Customer  

 In Jim’s example above he focuses on someone who leaves and moves on without looking back. What has now changed the game is that the Social Customer – through her interactions with her peers – can have an impact on the cost of new customer acquisition and as well as on retention, both in a positive and negative sense. No longer is the customer ‘an island’ because of ubiquitous opportunities for peer to peer conversation. These can influence customer behaviour patterns on a world-wide scale and thus adds a variable to the equation to the above that needs to be taken into consideration.  

In a Social CRM strategy, to address the Social Customer whilst at the same time optimising the company’s resource usage and profitability, key to me will be the ability to link the conversations of your customers to the segments you have identified of high/low potential/value. This means that rather than tracking all conversations everywhere and pumping these into your database, you should be focusing on your high potential/value customers Furthermore your understanding of the customers should be aimed at identifying behaviour patterns and triggers within the channels where your customers express themselves and that you can monitor.  The barrier to pick up the phone [or fill in whatever channel you like] can be high for some customers and this can deprive you of the trigger needed to track a deviation and react accordingly. The conversation the Social Customers are having through these public communication means may now provide you with this trigger that you would have missed out on before. And rather than allocate your resources to responding to every person that wants to rant, you can concentrate your efforts on those that you would like to retain (whilst remaining ‘polite’ with those that are not of direct interest of course).  

 Although I realize that this line of though does not address all the opportunities of Social CRM and Social Business Strategies, it is my first attempt at rationalising  and articulating the Business Value Proposition. With a broad stroke of the pen I have put other elements such as peer to peer support, ideation, customer experience programs, open innovation etc. under the header of Customer Retention Strategies, and I do apologize for this.  I will try to work out my ideas in further posts.  

 What do you think? How would you formulate the Business Value Proposition for Social CRM and Social Business.

UZ8A5PVZS5F7


Comments : 25 Comments »

Categories : Analytics and Data Mining, ROI, Social CRM

Enterprise 2.0 Boston Bait and Switch

31 03 2010


Enterprise 2.0 concepts and tools are gaining more and more traction in “mainstream” Business Practices as this is seen as a good way to captialize on the human assets of organisations. To reflect this trend, and to spread awareness and understanding and also to provide a platform for exchange of expriences, a conference is being organised at the Westin Boston Waterfront on June 14-17, 2010.

Apparently it was felt that the base premise of the subject was not enough to attract attention that the organisers had to resort to Switch and Bait practices to generate Buzz and use Command & Control decision making (how very Enterprise 1.0…). I commented on the announcement to draw attention to the dichotomy between their message of “letting the audience decide” and their actions.

Apparently, my opinion did not go in the sense they wanted so I guess they decided against publishing it. Or they’re not monitoring and thus didn’t get round to moderating yet – in that case, why provide a comments area?

Let me elaborate on the dichotomy through the use ofPrem Kumar’s  Context, Content, and Intent -at least  in my opinion…

Context

For this edition the organisers decided to be innovative by enlisting the “wisdom of the crowds” to source Papers to be presented at the conference. They relied on the Spigit – which in my opinion is ideally suited for the task at hand (disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with them). The expectation that was set was that the all Conference Topics would be chosen through the principle of ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ as stated in the ‘How Things Work’ section, with the Conference Management just making sure that the tracks were balanced.  Proposals with the most votes would be part of the E2 Boston 2010 Conference.

Content

The Call for Papers had potential speakers expose the their subjects of predeliction in a short summary and supporting documents in attachments (UGC). They were then actively encouraged to get people to vote for their subject (WOM), directing traffic to the site and generating buzz. The target audience was asked to add comments to the entries to instaur a dialogue – level 4 in Mitch Liebermann’s Social Interactions post

Intent

The original intent was to get a Conference Agenda that reflected the subjects the participants would be interested in and that would be rich and varied in teachings and facilitate the exchange of experience to propulse Enterprise 2.0 concepts and usage into organisations.

Although the programme put up is actually a very interesting one - the original context, content and intent were not respected. Out of the 30-odd sessions, only 8 are community-sourced - less than a third.  The Conference Management or Advisory Board decided to disregard their own selection process and make their decisions in a completely opaque manner. To my knowledge, none of them interacted with the potential speakers at any time to get details, or a better understanding, either through comments on the community site or even through other means at their disposal such as blogging about the subjects put forward by the candidates, sending twitter messages, or sending email. Voting was started in January, and the speakers were informed on March 30 – with a long zone of no communication in between.

The Top Two community-voted Papers did not get in, the third speaker did, but just one of his subjects. Of the top 10, maybe 2 actually made the grade according to the Board. People put a lot of effort into coming up with interesting Papers, and their peers thought they were interesting enough to merit reading through, understanding, commenting and voting for (full disclosure - we had put in a Paper up concerning bridging scrm & e20). By neglecting the votes, the Board is showing an extreme disregard and disrespect for the candidates and more especially their audience - their customers.

The voting process turned into a popularity contests, with people actively asking to be shown ‘Twitter Love’ by their followers to get more votes – followers who potentially would not be interested in attending the event because their interests lie elsewhere. This all turned into a real buzz machine, driving a lot of traffic and awareness that this event would take place. While this is all fine and understandable and a good way to build interest for Enterprise 2.0, it was done with the wrong Intent  and thus under  false pretenses. Trust has been squandered.

Through their actions, the organisers have also seem to think that:

  • collaboration and ‘wisdom of the crowd’ is not a valid way of selecting Papers
  • conversation is good between the clients of their ‘product’ but decisions should be made by a ‘Management’
  • feedback and management participation is absolutely not necessary

Now what was the Enterprise 2.0 way of working supposed to promote again..?

I am not saying that the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ is the most suited way for selecting interesting presentation subjects, but using the Switch and Bait technique is a deceptive Business Practice and reflects badly on the event as well as the validity of the Enterprise 2.0 Business Case. Although this is not at the scale and will not have the impact of the Nestlé debacle, the organisers are showing a there is a disconnect between their actions and the expectations they have set for the consumers of their product. It is kind of like saying ‘What is good enough for the customers of the tools we sell, is not good enough for us - we still manage our business as usual!’. The Advisory Board reached out to the consumers of the E20 Conference product to engage with them through ideation, but has done only half-heartedly. You need to go whole full nine yards! Moreover, in the public arena there is no hierarchy or HR to put a muzzle on the people that voice their opinions.

Transparency and authenticity can generate a lot of Goodwill and potentially a high level of participant engagement, but can just as easily backfire.  You can’t only just ‘pretend’ to be transparent by putting in a tool and not following through with actions – or ‘living the culture’, especially if you expect to be trusted in return. Changing the rules and not informing people about that when the result does not meet your goals is just Bad Practice. And thinking that people would not notice is just silly. I already know of some that will not bother with putting in a Paper for the Fall edition of the #e20conf…

It would have been so much easier to have been transparent in the selection rules, once the expectations set you can then meet them – the math is easy. This would have avoided the Bait and Switch and would have allowed the Trust Relationship to be continued. This is actually turning into a case study in Social Business; the need to coordinate Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 Strategies - thank you #e20conf!

When you Talk the Talk, you should also Walk the Walk!

I hope this is seen as Food for Thought. What do you think, am I right to bring this up in this manner?


Comments : 36 Comments »

Categories : Enterprise 2.0

Social CRM and Social Business

18 02 2010

Last week had the privilege of attending the CRM Seminar on “Social CRM for Business” organised by BPT Partners, where Paul Greenberg managed to attract a large number the world’s thought leaders on Social CRM and market players during a two-day event in a snowed-in Westin Hotel in Washington DC. To the members of the #SCRM Accidental Community it felt like the culmination point (hence the term #scrmsummit ;) ) after many, many months of tweet conversation, blogging and commenting, skype chatting that have helped us shape our ideas of what a Social CRM Strategy could look like as well as the promise it holds concerning how business can be changed for the benefit of all parties involved. It was great to meet in person finally!

I won’t go and repeat the ideas that have already been put forward by other participants (you can find the links below), but I’ll cut through the chase and give you my takeaway.

The Social Customer is now a given (even though I believe the degree of which she is may vary per country…), and basically always has been around. Contrary to the past, these customers now have the ability to find, reach out and converse with like-minded souls from around the globe, it has exploded. They’re abe to join and leave such tribes and communities provides them with great flexibility to create firm or loose ties as they so please. They are starting to become more and more aware of their power they can bring to bear when they act as a group and are able to bear more pressure as a group, leaving many companies in disarray.

Stop shouting

Rather than turn to your company for their information needs about your product or services, they now turn to their peers who they overwhelmingly trust more than they do you. It is the End of Business As Usual (cf The Cluetrain), no more only Outbound Marketing (some would say “shouting”…), you now have to pay closer attention to what is being said about you, where it is being said, why it being said and strive to anticipate where the conversation is going: The new Marketing Logic is Customer centricity through engagement and collaboration, but on the customers’ terms. Authenticity and trust is what matters – more than even the “consistency” of the message.

What really stuck with me was the idea about the Collaborative Value Chain which extends the Enterprise Value Chain of Company, partners/channel, vendors/suppliers, external agencies to include the Customers. The Customer Experience is central, and the whole ecosystem contributes to providing one that is superb, and that includes “knowing what the customer thinks and involving her in your thinking on a systematic, ongoing basis”.

The main question for me following Paul’s seminar is how to organise our companies for Social CRM. As I’ve stated in my Twitter bio since I opened the account, I am excited about Social CRM as an organisational change agent. I believe it is the compelling reason for Enterprise 2.0 implementation whose mantra is to get people to collaborate across the width and breadth of the company. But all to often I get the feeling that the pitch has been about the tools and that people are asked to collaborate for the mantra’s sake (I will follow up on this in a later post).

Social CRM makes Enterprise 2.0 a necessity for “responding to the customer’s control of the conversation” (P.Greenberg) and extends it to include the whole Collaborative Value Chain. This brings me to Social Business, on which Esteban Kolsky tried to explain in this post on The Social Customer I commented that my idea is as follows : “Social Business is the optimisation of the Collaborative Value Chain for customer-centric business.”. Esteban said that there were too many fancy words, so we settled on it being when Customers, Organizations, Suppliers, and Partners work together to optimize the value of doing business together”.

This leads me to the last bit, the why of going down the Social CRM / Social Business Strategy route. If there is only compelling reason it is to ultimately to run your business more efficiently, leverage the customer experience to increase your customer base and ensuring that everyone involved is able to optimize the value they extract and exchange so they will continue to want to collaborate.

Products can be built in the World’s Factory at short notice. Services are easily imitated. Your competitive advantage will be your Customer Base and their ability to advocate your company and persuade their peers to do business with you.

So what do you think, is the idea of Social Business disruptive on the organisation, or a natural evolution?

Once again, thank you to Paul Greenberg for providing us with a platform that has finally allowed us to meet and exchange. It really felt like it was a defining moment for Social CRM as a Practice. Merci!

If you would like some additional points of view on the event, I suggest you take a look at the posts byattendees  Mitch Lieberman,  Michael Krigsman, Brent Leary, Kevin Paschuck, Mike Fauscette, Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Prem Kumar, Brian Vellmure, Kathy Herrmann, Mike Boysen


Comments : 10 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Customer Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM

Rethinking Sales in a SCRM Strategy

18 01 2010

Before you start thinking “where the heck is he going to go with this, does he want us to ditch our Sales people?”, let me reassure you – it won’t happen so I won’t try to argue in that sense. All I’ll be talking about here is that we could take the opportunity that a Social CRM Strategy can offer to change the approach we have been taking to organizing for Sales activities. In this post I will concentrate on B2B Sales as this is what I am most familiar with (see Mitch Lieberman’s “Is B2B the new B2C” for more thoughts on the subject). 

To condense something that very complex, Marketing has been about getting the attention of potential customers to turn them into lead that Sales can then work with. Sales is about building a relationship with these leads and turning them into prospects and then into clients. To simplify again, Sales – especially in B2B - has come to mean an entity that is specialized in building the relationship between your company and its clients. Note here that I say “building” and not “building and maintaining”… The primary role of Sales Managers is to go out and generate revenue from these relationships. And, unless they have a stake in generating recurrent revenue, they will concentrate their efforts on building new relationships to fill their pipeline. Also, if the fish is not big enough, it may not be fed enough to grow…

Trusted Advisor

So what Sales people actually do? Some cynics would say “press the flesh and cash the check”…but hey! if it was that simple, everyone would be doing it, right? In my point of view, their main role is to establish a trust relationship so that when their prospect decides to invest their time, resources, effort and money, they can be fairly sure that it will not be in vain. The Salesperson serves as a proxy or go-between between the prospect and the company and she takes ownership of that relation (and will be held accountable when things go awry) as a Trusted Advisor, and it is for this that they get their commissions.

Educating the Customer

The way I see it  (at least for in the ‘traditional’ sense of Sales Management), the role is mainly about educating the customer about the benefits of the product or service that the company has to offer. Marketing activities will have generated initial curiosity and an interest to go out and obtain a better understanding to see whether the offer is likely to meet up to its promise, and that it corresponds to the Customer Job it pretends to solve. In Sales Management a there are a number of methods such as SPIN or Xerox’s Customer-Centered Selling and derivates are commonly employed to (try to?) manage the Sales Cycle. The Salesperson acts as an educator, but also as a gatekeeper to feed information and other supporting material into the prosepct’s Learning Curve according to what she believes is the right timing to do so. The Salesperson also serves as a coordinator between internal resources to come up with deliverables such as RFP responses, Presales demonstrations, references, organisation of visits to existing clients etc etc. Prospects rely heavily on the Salesperson, as she is the main touchpoint to get the understanding they need to build their purchase decision on.

The Social Customer

Then came along an itsy bitsy spider that spun its web…the ‘Social Customer’ as described by Paul Greenberg (see here for a nice writeup by Esteban Kolsky). The Social Customer will turn to her peers to exchange on what their impressions, experiences, disappointments and whatnot are. Their buying behaviour is now influenced by what what some call ‘Social Shopping’, so that rather than asking your immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, you now have access to the opinions to help you decide of a virtually unlimited number of ‘people like you’ through the use of ‘social tools’.

Just as it has been the case for consumers that now look on multiple Social Media channels (customer communities, blogs, article, WOM, twitter, shop personnel etc.) to learn about the merits of a product they wish to acquire before going out and actually doing so, your B2B clients will increasingly look to the same tools to evaluate what the value proposition is of your company and, lo-and-behold, engage with other prospects to seek the knowledge they need! These same tools could change the way companies source their suppliers.

Rather than go through their assigned Salesperson for their knowledge needs, they can now meet online and have these same conversations about the supplier’s offer. Sage’s Act! forum is a good example of giving clients a platform on which the Act! product can be discussed transparently. Good ideas as well as shortcomings are available for all to see, thus potential client can actually get a good understanding that will help them in their purchase decision-making process. Furthermore, through the integrated monitoring system (as they are managing this forum themselves, Sage has the ability to extract valuable insights), the company can feed information into the forum by encouraging its employees to partcipate, and in general facilitate the conversations and the e2.0 tools now make this possible. And once you recognize that that this has an influence on the Sales cycle, you can start getting creative by giving recognition to those that contribute to these conversations (such as through an e-reputation system with points that can be redeemed for vouchers, gifts, or even holidays). As an added benefit you maybe catching fish that would have fallen through the net initially and your employees will feel more engaged with your company…

Becoming a Facilitator

 To summarize, the Salesperson has less and less control over the prospect’s learning process and has been taken an inside-out approach. Now that the prospects are starting lose their dependence on the Salesperson for their knowledge needs, her role will change in order to provide the same amount of added value. The challenge will be shift from being an Educator to a Connector/Facilitator - taking and outside-in approach, understanding what is going on in the ecosystem and feeding it with relevant knowledge on which others can build - in a transparent manner and for all to see. And the role will not only be about connecting to the prospects and customers and facilitating customer interaction, it will also be about connecting these customers to Marketing, R&D, (Consulting…), Partners and Suppliers.

By understanding that prospects now have other options for finding knowledge about what you offer (including your post-sales performance…), you should be looking at adapting your Sales methods to incorporate this shift in balance in my opinion. What are your thoughts on the subject?


Comments : 18 Comments »

Categories : Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM

What I’ve discovered about Twitter

21 12 2009

Twitter has become quite centtral in the way that I go out and research subjects that interest me, and to exchange with people that have knowledge and insight about these. Before I used to turn to Google, but it was very difficult to find the nuggets of knowledge you’re looking for when you get 36 million search results (most of them irrelevant). Twitter has turned out to be an extremely effective tool as a community-based knowledge transfer tool.

I used to be a sceptic – proudly saying I did not tweet – as I did not see the value of telling the whole world that I was having double-twisted latté macchiato cappucino coffee or whatever at a Starbuck’s. Boy was I wrong! Twitter has been the most effective tool that I have found yet. I set up Tweetdeck and did one column that filters on the #scrm hashtag (my main interest), and another on #e20 (these are linked as Social Business, hopefully Esteban Kolsky and I can tell you more about it during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Paris and Boston). Soon I found out who the most interesting tweeters to follow were (or is it twits? lol) and reached out.

Visually I represent Twitter to myself as a hub. People come together in the center to exchange bite-sized nuggets, links, comments of whatever, and provide links to information that allows you to dig deeper. Follow the spoke  to the rim of the wheel (usually blogposts) where someone provides their point of view and relies on others to comment in more detail to deepen collective knowledge even further.

Twitter is also a great way of arranging face to face meetings (tweetups), as there is so much more information that is passed as visual and behavioural cues, tones and variations in tones that you just cannot fit into 140 characters. Content is there, but context and intent can be missing (read Prem Kumar’s post on the Triumvirate). So far I’ve been lucky and honoured  to meet Paul Greenberg, Wim Rampen, Bertrand Duperrin, Ian Hendry, Nigel Walsh, Yadu Tekale in person, and in order to cross the divide I’ve been skyping with many others such as Mitch Liebermann, Kathy Hermann. Great people from whom I learn every day that I would have never known without tools such as Twitter!

Like for Wim, Twitter has brought me new friends, connections, thoughts, insights and ideas at a pace I could not have thought possible as little as one year ago, and I hope to meet with even more people in 2010. I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me :)


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Categories : Customer Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM

Social Learning and Customer Engagement

9 12 2009

One of the approaches to improving Customer Engagement and Experiences I’d like to explore is the potential to include customers, partners and suppliers in the Social Learning process. One of the drawbacks of an customer ideation platform/community is that more than 99% of the ideas are never looked at or implemented because they do not take into account the business context and constraints.

Whilst ideation may be a good source for innovation for companies, they can be a source of dissatisfaction for those customers who submitted ideas if they do not receive any acknowledgement for the effort they put into it. So rather than feeling closer to your brand and becoming advocates for it, the quite opposite may occur.

The approach that I would advocate is to educate the customer about your brand and its environment, even let them actively get involved in your internal Social Learning processes of continously striving to gain new knowledge and insights. By infusing ideas from outside of the silos of your organisation, you may discover innovative ideas that will give your company a competitive advantage.

Crowdsourcing has lost favour a little due to the number of uninformed suggestions that bubble up and which generate a lot of overhead to percolate into useful innovations. Smartsourcing has been put forward as a better approach, relying on the ‘better elements’ in your community to exchange with for customer insights. As such I agree with this, but I believe there is an even greater opportunity for informed innovation through the education and deeper implication of those we wish to engage with for smartsourcing by implicating them in collaborative learning.

Education and customer collaboration has the potential to create a real and very deep level of engagement, and thus the germination of fervent customer advocates, who in turn entice others to join this process (and increase the smartsourcing base for qualified innovation).

As Harold Jarche points out in the comments below, I herewith add that the objective of this type of collaborative learning would be to close the loop, not only take the feedback but reinjecting it back into the customer communitites and so on with insights so that we get a virtuous learning cycle. And by being open with your social learning approach, you will lower the barrier for new entrants and thus new points of view and sources for innovation, as well as sending a clear signal to the rest of the customer base that you are listening and collaborating to take their needs into account.

There is of course the (perceived?) risks of competitors glaning information and using it to their advantage, but examples have shown that this risk can actually be a driver for more rapid innovation integration such as Sage has shown with its ACT! community.

To summarize, I believe there is an opportunity to create a collaborative community learning platform that will ultimately lead to informed ideation and nurture more fervent customer advocates.

Let me know your thoughts, am I completely off-track, or is this the TGV to Customer Engagement?


Comments : 21 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Online Customer Communities

The Future of the Training Department

6 12 2009
In my previous role at BEA Systems/Oracle, I created and managed a Professional Services business unit for training clients on the implementation of Enterprise Portals (including Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Content Management, Integration of third-party products) and Business Process Management tools. I have been exchanging with many people on twitter, mainly on the topic of Social CRM, but I keep my eye open to the topic of Enterprise Learning, and from time to time I exchange tweets with Frédéric Domon (@fdomon). So I was happy to be asked to contribute to the Enterprise Collaborative Initiative :) Enterprise Collaborative - Ecollab 250x250

Social Learning seems to me to be an innovative approach to continuous learning (I am an eternal student of life myself). From what I understand, the idea is to use the web 2.0 to enable free-flow collaborative learning that builds upon the insights of others and leads to new ones. This is advocated in opposition to the more traditional, structured instructor-led top-down approach to learning (tell me if I’m wrong?).

Though I do believe that there is a valid argument to the collaborative approach, I believe there should be a juxtaposition with the traditional one.  In my opinion be, what is learned through collaborative learning should formalised, structured an made available as traditional learning. The main reason behind this thinking is that there is a risk to create barriers to new entrants to access and acquire the knowledge of the ‘regulars’. One could argue that the regulars could do knowledge transfer – which is great in theory – but who has the  resources to do so (time, effort, motivation)? I think it will simply not scale.

I would advocate the following schema for new entrance to empower newcomers to become active contributors.

Formal training

Baseline knowledge transfer (developed through a ‘community effort’, extracted from the results of collaborative learning process) to acquire the thinking patterns, guiding principles or just plain knowledge elements.

Skills and knowledge Transfer

Exchange with and guidance from the community to put into practice, get up to speed,

Collaborative Exchange

Continuous learning to further one’s own ideas and incorporating those of others, attracting newcomers to infuse new insights and ideas, and synthetisation, formalisation and diffusion of current knowledge to reduce barriers to entry

The training department can play an important role, especially in the the formalisation and diffusion area, assisting newcomers in their entry and identifying those whom they can help in improving their social learning skills in order to improve the collaborative learning experience for all.

When getting a customer or system integrator up to speed for successful project implementation, my experience has found that it was more beneficial to have everyone talking the same language and understand the base principles (base knowledge), and have this followed through by co-development with subject-matter experts (the Consulting department) to acquire the Best Practices. This I believe was a good basis for both the customer and integrator to effectively communicate and progress in unison towards the desired outcome of the project, whilst leaving sufficient leeway for collaborative learning to achieve improvements beyond the inital goals. Even though the primary subject of Entreprise Collaborative concentrates on internal-facing issues, the above ideas are valid in this context as well.

Would you agree with this point of view? Please leave your thoughts below so that we can all learn from this together :)


Comments : 4 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0

Customer Contexts

3 12 2009

[draft]

When reading through the tweets and the post on Social CRM I often get the feeling that we are focusing too much on the individual customer. We store personal and business informaion in our CRM system, we keep track of what they have bought as well as their history of interactions with Customer Service and Support (or at least we should be…). We try to analyse, extract leads and forecast whether they will be buying from us in the future  or inciting them to do so through push marketing (informing us that our little niece Suzy’s birthday in just under a week, so we should buy her a gift through our online store…).

I also hear more and more often that the major difficulty that we will be facing is the potential for data/information overload (‘drinking from a waterhose’) – even though Nenshad Bardoli argues that this will be dealt with eventually). The individual customers that we have in our systems suddenly are tweeting and bleating all over the internet, and curretn theory seems to say that we need to capture ALL of that so that we can then let lose the ever more sophisticated and more expensive Analytics Engines & Business Intelligence solutions on the data in order to extract ‘insights’ to guide our business and customer engagement with this individual.

Although it seems to make sense at first glance, is it not that we can’t see the forest because of the trees? Are we not focusing to much on the individual to miss out on the bigger trends? Customized service as opposed to being treated as cattle when contacting a call center is like Nirvana, but if we focalize to much on this as the main objective of Social CRM, do we not not risk getting too close when all the customer wants is to be ‘just friends’ (or said differently, ‘get out of my face!’)?

As an individual, it could be that I am not particularly looking for your company to engage with me. Engagement takes time - which is ultimately my rarest resource - so I want to optimize the time I need to spend with you (so that I can have more time on Farmville or socializing with my friends…about your brand for example ;) . What I do want you to do is know enough about me, my situation, my preoccupations, my conversations with others, my likes and dislikes and so on…in brief, my context, so that you can get me to my desired outcome as efficiently as possible (and I may even volunteer some information about me to speed this up).

So it’s not about the tweets I twitter out and blogs I post, but rather about which conversations and exchanges I’m having and with whom, at what moment in time, what my current sentiment is and how it evolves, how my friends’ sentiment evolve, how the sentiment of people in my network evolves - or put simply the context in which I am evolving. Ideally, when I do need to exchange with you in any way, I want you to take all this into account and treat me as an individual. Moreover I want you to take into consideration that, whilst you are exchanging with me, I should be considered as a representative of my ‘tribe’, and if you do not treat me the way I feel I should be treated my tribe may sanction that behaviour.

So what am I trying to get at here? Basically, I’m trying to make the point that even though it may be technically feasible to store reams and reams of data about each customer in your CRM system (and your database vendor will love you for it), it would be more interesting to store information that provides you with the context in which the customer is evolving, metadata that will allow you same-time access to context facebook/linkedin/twitter or whatever other channel that is appropriate hobbies


Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : Analytics and Data Mining, Social CRM

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