Chapter 18

Social Collaboration for the Sales Team

In This Chapter

Coordinating sales teams

Cracking the market for sales intelligence

Creating a culture of collaboration

Capitalizing on competition and recognizing achievement

Sales collaboration done right promises one of the greatest payoffs (if not the greatest) for social collaboration.

Sales is often associated with cutthroat competition, but in many industries sales teams are truly teams. Further, their teamwork is even more powerful if it extends outside the sales organization to include peers in marketing, product development, and other business functions. This is particularly true of business-to-business firms with complex products to sell. Social collaboration can be a tool for building cohesive teams and extending their reach.

Although many sales organizations have gotten a taste of social collaboration because of Salesforce.com’s promotion of Chatter, often it’s introduced so casually that it’s never used effectively (more on that later in the chapter).

To get the most from any of these social platforms, sales leaders need to show how their teams can use social collaboration platforms for purposeful collaboration, not just casual networking.

Coordinating Sales Teams

The most successful users of social collaboration for sales have a focus on accelerating the most valuable types of collaboration, and it isn’t limited to the sales organization alone. As a leader in a sales organization, here are some things to emphasize about the productive use of social collaboration:

Position social collaboration as a business tool. Help your team understand that instead of using the tool for purely social purposes, they should be networking to exchange contacts and strategies for winning deals.

Encourage sharing. Promote routine sharing of information about sales wins, opportunities, and objections to be overcome that go beyond the CRM record.

Reward teamwork. Establish a collaborative culture, with incentives that recognize the work of the team, not just the person who closes the deal. Sales leaders can set an example by using the social activity stream to monitor the whole series of events that lead to success and recognizing contributions people make along the way.

Extend your reach. Social collaboration reaches beyond the sales team into other divisions of the company. Success often comes to salespeople who know when to ask for help from people in other parts of the company who can answer a potential customer’s question about future product plans or bend the rules about granting discounts. For maximum success, you want the use of the social collaboration network to extend throughout the company.

Figure 18-1 shows how sales team members can work together in Chatter to assemble the necessary information to win a deal.

Figure 18-1: Collabo-rating on a proposal in Chatter.

Choosing the Right Tool

This chapter easily could focus entirely on Chatter, the social collaboration tool bundled with the popular suite of sales and marketing tools from Salesforce.com. Chatter makes it easy to start conversations about objects in the CRM system, such as customers and opportunities, and Chatter is commonly the social collaboration tool for sales even in organizations where other departments use a competing product. Microsoft bought Yammer, another cloud-based social collaboration tool, partly to integrate it with Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a competitor to Chatter.

Still, many organizations report making their sales organizations more efficient using another product, such as the Jive platform, that’s not joined at the hip with a CRM system. Meanwhile, some Salesforce.com customers who have taken advantage of the ease with which they can enable Chatter have seen few benefits from it, namely because they never got beyond turning on the software. In organizations where the business value of social collaboration hasn’t been established, Chatter adoption even within the sales team may be poor because representatives do not see how it can help them get their jobs done.

At OpenTable, social collaboration started in sales and spread to other departments. And that’s one reason why Chatter became the social collaboration environment of choice. In other companies where a social collaboration platform such as Jive or IBM Connections has taken root, often the argument against Chatter is that it’s intended only for sales. Chatter may wind up earning a place anyway, as a tool for collaboration within the sales team, while another platform supports cross-functional social collaboration. Too, because Salesforce.com has such a dominant market position in CRM, some of the other social collaboration platform vendors are also offering technical integration fixes for integrating Chatter feeds with their own.

Also, although Jive doesn’t come from the same sales force automation roots as Salesforce.com, part of its corporate identity is as one of the leading social CRM companies because its software can be used to manage public customer communities as well as internal employee communities. That gives Jive a strong sales orientation, which particularly appeals to firms that use its content management tools to manage sales documents and market intelligence as well as social discussions about the sales process. Figure 18-2 shows a Jive workspace for a sales team, with content including a discussion thread, a congratulatory blog post about the best performers, and an assortment of proposal documents and templates.

Jim Buck, the senior community manager at F5 Networks, says sales is his number-one internal customer and was already using Chatter when he was hired even though adoption wasn’t particularly high. Buck had experience with Jive, which he had used with a previous employer to build collaboration networks to connect the company with its channel sales partners, but F5 was a different organization asking him to solve a different set of problems.

Figure 18-2: A Jive workspace for a sales team.

“Jive was not a given when I came in,” he says. “We asked several different companies to provide a request for proposal (RFP), but at the end of the day, Jive just had more things” than F5 needed for a complete solution. “Chatter had very low adoption and was really too sales oriented,” he says. “We wanted to bring in more of the company, not just the sales organization.”

One goal of the project was to create a more unified content management and collaboration environment, using Jive to replace multiple tools — for example, taking advantage of Jive’s capability to manage video to replace a separate product that had been purchased for that purpose.

In addition, F5 wanted to help “expedite the on-boarding process through sales,” meaning the process of getting new sales representatives to understand the company’s products and be able to locate information about them (or people who could answer questions) more quickly. “It’s all about getting them selling faster, with better productivity.”

The only thing this proves about the tools is that there is not necessarily one right answer for every organization. How you use the software you choose is at least as important as which software you choose.

Cracking the Market for Sales Intelligence

Making social collaboration mandatory for the sales team is one sure way of getting adoption. This is one of Senior Vice President of Sales Mike Dodson’s tactics that many other organizations would not want to attempt and may not be able to make stick, but it arguably helped enlist people from other constituencies (such as marketing and operations) who did not report to him. Employees of those departments may not have been compelled to use Chatter, but they did need to use it if they wanted to communicate with the field sales force that was communicating exclusively in that mode.

The most important lesson of the OpenTable example is that capturing the “real-life, realtime experiences from the field” paid off with a greater accumulation of sales intelligence for management, marketing, operations, and the field sales team itself. That’s the same thing Buck aims to accomplish for F5 and a core element of every sales collaboration initiative.

“In most companies, there’s a black market for sales intelligence,” says Joe Galvin, a sales strategies and technologies analyst with Miller Heiman. “It’s the informal knowledge network that exists within and among salespeople in every organization.” The most successful salespeople know who to call to learn information not published in any official market analysis document or secure an extra discount not on any price list. Although these back-channel connections may make a few individuals look good, they subvert the goal of making the entire sales organization more effective, Galvin says. As new employees join, it can take them a long time to build up connections and crack the internal knowledge networks, he says. The question social collaboration poses, he says, is, “What would happen if we took that black market and made it a public market?”

Salespeople are more willing to collaborate than the stereotypes about cutthroat competitors may suggest, Galvin says. Sure, you’ll see lone-wolf competition between salespeople, but these days you’ll probably find far more environments where salespeople are highly interdependent, succeeding or failing as a team, he says. Business-to-business (B2B) sales is dominated by complex deals where producing a winning proposal requires input from many people, each of whom has a different expertise.

And that’s certainly the story I’ve heard from consulting organizations, such as KPMG (finance and accounting) and CSC (systems integration). Social collaboration has taken root there as a means to gather input for a proposal from more people and do it faster than before, winning more deals as a result.

André Huizing, who leads the collaboration practice and technology consulting firm Avanade, says sales is a good place for social collaboration to start particularly for any B2B organization that must respond to large request for proposal documents. “An RFP is a project in and of itself, often involving a few weeks of work with people around the globe,” he says.

“You have to lead by example,” he adds. “No sales guy is going to use these tools if his boss doesn’t.”

Building a Culture of Collaboration

Successful social collaboration does require getting people to see the point. As OpenTable’s Dodson discovered, many sales teams’ first reaction to a collaboration environment that looks vaguely like Facebook is to use it as they would use Facebook: that is, for casual chitchat rather than for sharing meaningful business information. Senior company leaders may be dismissive of the value of the tool, particularly if they see it being used in a trivial way.

“You have to say very clearly, this is not about social chitchatting,” says Bonnie Cheuk, a global knowledge and collaboration director at Citigroup who works primarily in support of improving sales productivity. “I think we should drop the word ‘social’ altogether because when you use that they have the perception that this is for my kid, this is Facebook.”

She contrasts that with what happened when a member of the sales team shared the presentation deck it was using to pitch banking services to a national airline, which led to a lively and productive discussion with others who were also pitching business to airlines around the world. Being able to show how the collaboration network drives sales productivity is critical to encouraging more collaboration that leads to more sales productivity, she says. A story like that “allows a glimpse into what a social platform can do,” she says.

I heard a very similar story from Roland Hulme, who manages both internal and external social media for Tyco. When a company representative was trying to win a major deal to install security equipment at a stadium in Mexico, the Yammer network let him connect with the select club of others around the globe who had also worked on stadium deals and knew exactly what they required.

“He got all this great info that helped him win the contract, whereas he wouldn’t even have known who to call up in a business unit in Europe” with the information he needed, Hulme says.

Those productive connections are possible but not automatic. When Yammer was first made available within Tyco, its use was dominated by “water cooler conversations,” Hulme says. “People were posting questions like, ‘Which do you like better, coffee or tea?’, which was our most popular thread for several months. Upper management was looking at it and saying, ‘I can’t believe this is such a waste of productive time.’” One way he changed that pattern was by gathering and publicizing examples of productive uses of the platform — not only for sales but in other disciplines like inventory control — and promoting expectations for professional behavior.

F5’s Bruck says social collaboration can be a great way for sales leaders to set clear goals and objectives for their organizations. Too often, those goals are not well defined, and employees can’t find them written down anywhere. As a result, employees are not always clear on whether they are delivering on what’s most important to the boss.

Executives know what they want to achieve and are often passionate about expressing their goals although “very infrequently” in the context of a sales meeting. Social collaboration can be a way of “getting in front of the people looking to you for leadership” and doing it on an ongoing basis. “This is a way for them to set the tone for the company,” he says.

Vala Afshar and Brad Martin of Enterasys describe the importance of getting their CEO Chris Crowell involved in using Chatter, in their book In Search of Social Business Excellence (Charles Pinot). Their firm, a networking equipment maker, uses Salesforce.com CRM to track all sales activities, giving Crowell ample opportunity to celebrate every time he sees a big or strategic win pop up on his dashboard.

“Chris’s chats go to everybody — all 1,000 employees,” they write. “In effect, he publicly promotes the salesperson for winning. At the same time, he reminds the other sales folks competing around the world that ‘you too can win.’ He is connecting the dots by connecting the people, because when Chris promotes our win of a university deal on the West Coast, an account executive on the East Coast fighting to win another university deal can now chat or collaborate with her colleague to find out how she won her new business.”

Peer recognition is just as important, if not more so. If you can get your sales team engaged with contributing to and celebrating each other’s success, that’s where the magic happens.

Sharing to Win Sales

One of the big cultural shifts that needs to take place in many sales organizations is toward sharing information, rather than hoarding it as a source of power.

Citigroup’s Cheuk says she sees that as one of the barriers to overcome in the banking world, where salespeople ask why they should share information that others can take and use to their own advantage. Yet when individuals share their observations of the market, the entire group gets a better picture of it. Meanwhile, market researchers can use that discussion as a source of intelligence and add their own data points. Rather than holding research for distribution in something like a monthly newsletter, “they can publish insights as they come in, getting them on the platform every hour, every minute, instead of waiting a whole week,” she says.

Getting good analysis into the social stream also requires coaching employees on the value of open discussion — including the willingness to occasionally disagree with the boss about the best way to accomplish something — in search of a better answer.

“Those are not tech problems, those are cultural,” Cheuk says. “You have to think through what kind of intervention would you introduce to take those barriers away? The technology will not do that.”

Although most employees in her organization still use e-mail communication as the default, and “trying to wean them from their e-mail addiction” is a huge culture change challenge, she does see more sales leaders starting to blog. They don’t even want to call it blogging (which “sounds too technical” to them), but they are sharing their thoughts using the Jive blogging tool. And within minutes of a post, there will be a flurry of comments, she says.

Put the jargon aside and focus on helping your people do what they are paid to do, Cheuk says. “The reason for having the tool is to help them get done what they need to get done, better and faster.”

Capitalizing on Competition

The dynamics of social media can be a great way of encouraging healthy cooperation. Sure, collaboration is a wonderful thing, but salespeople are and ought to be competitive. After all, their job is to beat the competition, every day, and they (naturally) will compete with each other as well.

One common way of doing that is by incorporating elements of gamification, which is the use of the techniques game designers use to motivate and reward behavior, applied to business purposes. A simple example of this is the use of a leaderboard, which is a ranked list of names like you might see for the top golfers in a tournament or the high scores on a video game. This makes it easy to see who’s ahead of whom in the rankings and what they need to do to catch up. By putting the leaderboard in a social context, you can show faces as well as names and encourage discussion about the rankings — even including some (hopefully good natured) trash talk about the competition.

The Chatter Leaderboard shown in Figure 18-3 ranks users by participation in the social collaboration environment itself (it’s a free app from Salesforce.com’s labs group), but more sophisticated gamification software will allow you to rank by all sorts of business metrics.

One way of spreading the credit is to have rankings on more than one metric: say, customer satisfaction and renewals rather than raw sales alone. Many gamification systems also incorporate the concept of awarding badges, which are icons displayed on a user’s profile to recognize some achievement. You may have a badge you give to anyone who closes a $1-million sale, for example. Another tactic is to allow team members to award badges to each other as a form of peer-to-peer recognition for their contributions.

Figure 18-3: A leaderboard for the most active Chatter users.

Then, when the badge is awarded, it is published to the social stream, allowing colleagues to offer their congratulations.

Give careful thought to the design of these game mechanics and what you are really rewarding. If part of what you are trying to promote is the performance of the team, you should reserve at least some of your recognition for teams rather than individuals. You can still take advantage of the social medium to make it easy to see who’s on the best ranked teams and who the most valuable team members are.

Recognizing Achievement

Badges are cool and trendy and can be effective if used right, but a simple Good job! or Way to go! from the right person can be even more powerful. Sales professionals are famous for being motivated by commissions and other financial rewards, but like all people they also crave simple, human recognition that they’re doing a good job.

For those chasing large business-to-business deals, big paydays come only every so often. Managers can help them stay focused by also recognizing smaller victories, such as securing an appointment for the sales team to make its pitch to someone who may be too many levels away from the ultimate decision maker but still closer than before. Good job! Then, when the big win does materialize, recognize the achievement of everyone who contributed to making it happen and share that recognition as broadly as possible. The bigger the win, the more appropriate it is for that recognition to come from someone senior in the company, if not the CEO.

OpenTable’s Dodson says that securing “top-down buy-in” is a critical success factor, which is why he involves CEO Matthew Roberts in sending a congratulatory note to the sales team when it has a good month. “If he’s on it, he’s embracing it; it’s going to happen across the executive team and across all the departments,” Dodson says.

At every level, when you are generous about recognizing success, you will tend to have more of it.

Examining a Successful Implementation

OpenTable’s Dodson says that his firm, a longtime Salesforce.com customer, had to recover from starting down a dead-end path with Chatter. Initially, the product was introduced as “Facebook for the enterprise,” with little guidance on its proper business uses. As a result, Chatter was “more about fun and games, right down to the photos,” in the beginning, he says. Employees were as likely to post photos of their dogs as they were to share anything work-related, he says. It wasn’t until after a briefing with the Chatter product team that Dodson recognized the tools had a potential to be more than that.

“Once I made the decision this was something we had to get serious about, I decided we’ve got to take all the fun and games out of it,” Dodson says. He also told his field sales team he didn’t want to see any more e-mail from them. Their reports of their successes, frustrations, observations, and questions needed to be reported in Chatter where everyone could see them. With e-mail, people would tend to write to a small circle of people, which often doesn’t include everyone who needs to know that information or may have an answer to a question.

Dodson particularly wanted to improve communication and collaboration among the members of his field sales team (most of whom work from home offices around the world) as well as between them and headquarters. These are the people who sell OpenTable’s online reservation service to restaurants.

I happened to speak with Dodson on the day after Groupon (the discount deals website) announced its own Groupon Reserve service, based on an acquisition it had made the year before of a restaurant reservation startup called Savored. That is exactly the sort of the news that prompts a lot of questions from the field, meaning that the OpenTable marketing department needed to arm them with at least a few bullet points on competitive positioning. That information could have been distributed over e-mail, giving the sales force marketing’s perspective. By doing it over Chatter instead, though, they also got the advantage of seeing each other’s thoughts about this development, including intelligence about what the representatives had been hearing from restaurants that had been contacted by this new competitor.

“Rather than being in a panic mode for 24 hours as we tried to disseminate the information, everyone could see ‘my peers see this as a non-issue for the following reasons’ — that’s how we get information out to the field very fast,” Dodson says. The marketing organization also winds up being better aligned with the true needs of field sales.

One of the keys to success with Chatter has been getting it used by people outside sales, in functions such as marketing, operations, and engineering, Dodson says. Otherwise, sales representatives wouldn’t be able to get answers to their questions for marketing, operations, or engineering through Chatter. Particularly with large customers, the OpenTable sales process can include addressing technical issues of software integration, which is why engineering needs to be in the mix.

If you make your sales team alternate between a social tool and e-mail depending on what they’re asking and whom they’re asking, “it’s never going to happen,” Dodson says.

Employees sometimes complain that social collaboration effectively gives them a second inbox they need to check (in addition to e-mail), but the OpenTable field sales team doesn’t have that excuse. “Any communication with the sales team has to happen via Chatter, so there is one inbox for them,” Dodson says.

He did admit that his own communications habits are more mixed, partly because he has to be in communication with people in other business functions whose habits don’t revolve around Chatter. Also, even though Chatter supports private conversations, he says he was never comfortable with it as the right tool for communicating with senior sales managers about unsettled issues of strategy or compensation. “If we’re having a conversation we want everyone to understand and reference, that’s when Chatter is where we go,” he says.

Social collaboration can also be overdone to the point where it pushes out one-to-one contact and leaves salespeople feeling alienated, Dodson says. A good leader needs to know when to take his hands off the keyboard and pick up the phone or meet with someone in person. On balance, though, the effect is overwhelmingly positive.

“For me as a sales leader and my direct leadership team, the real advantage is this gives us more insight, more of a window into what’s happening in realtime in multiple markets in the field,” Dodson said.