Socialtext

Sales and Marketing organizations within leading companies, including Humana and SAP, are seeing record revenues based on Collaborative Intelligence solutions in partnership with Socialtext.

Securely communicating & sharing dynamic information across sales, marketing and the field has never been so efficient and effective. Achieving Sales Enablement prepares Field Sales for success -- to be more informed about a complex and dynamic offerings, enable valued market feedback and engage in conversations that reveal actionable tactics to drive revenue growth.

Read on, or if you can't wait to see and play, go to the Marketing and Sales Sandbox.

Sales, Marketing & the Field

Collaboration across marketing and a distributed sales force is extremely important. In order to maintain a high level of success, sales reps needs current versions of critical materials (collateral, presentations, documentation, demos and competitive intelligence) from Marketing and Product Development. Out in the field, reps are constantly gathering critical information about customers, competitors, and channel partners which needs to be bubble up to the center to inform product design and messaging. Moreover, sales Reps are always reaching out to each other to ask questions, post observations, and pick up on the latest "buzz" from around the network.

Today, most of this collaboration occurs in email and static sales portals. In 2007, the typical business user processed over 150 messages and spent 25% of their time managing this email deluge. Communicating dynamic and complex knowledge across a business usually depends on email or static web pages, yet fails to support on-the-fly sharing of collective insights. With wikis and social software, businesses can boost productivity, increase efficiency and better capture knowledge for greater innovation, faster project cycle times and better overall communication.

Sales Enablement

Traditional collaboration across sales networks is rife with inefficiency and missed business opportunity. Most reps do not have a single place to go where they can reliably find the most recent product and marketing materials. Valuable competitive data gathered in the field is either not captured or bottled up in highly structured call reports. Conversations across reps are lost in the river of email. According to a 2007 Socratic Technologies survey, collaboration between sales, marketing and the field is ripe for improvement:

• 58% of info that sales gathers is not passed back to marketing
• 57% of time cannot track what sales/marketing materials were used
• 51% of sales reps often use outdated documentation
• 43% found it difficult for sales reps to find the documents they need

This is not the fault of sales or marketing, it is a lack of efficient collaboration and learning between the two teams. Knowledge and content creation is largely done in a vacuum. Without feedback loops between marketing, sales and the field -- communication is less effective and there is a lack of quality in prepared materials. Insight from the trenches stays isolated and what little feedback occurs goes unrecognized. Content generated is often duplicated, dated, lacks effective version control and the right content is hard to find. Isolated data sources not only result in tactical error, but they are viewed sequentially, which is less efficient. The lack of confidence in materials and lack of feedback loops not leads to uninformed sales people pushing presentations, collateral and demos -- but it also erodes trust between departments while customers are left with vendors selling in ways they don't want to buy.

The Sales Learning Curve

The problem is particularly acute when launching new products and startups. Stanford Business School professor Mark Leslie developed the Sales Learning Curve from his insights when founding Vertias:

The time it takes to achieve cash flow breakeven is reasonably independent of sales force staffing. It is, instead, entirely dependent on how well and how quickly the entire organization learns what it takes to sell the product or service while incorporating customer feedback into the product itself. Because if the entire organization has to come up to speed, hiring a large initial sales staff does not speed up the time to breakeven, it simply consumes cash more quickly...

Key Socialtext Capabilities

A Collaborative Intelligence wiki and business social software platform can solve these problems. By creating a "one-stop shop" for the sales network, managers can rapidly improve both the dissemination of critical information to the field, and the organized capture of critical information from the front lines. Collaborative Intelligence wikis typically include the latest marketing and product information updated frequently by Marketing and Product Groups, and robust discussion threads for reps to post questions and report observations from the field. The Socialtext Collaborative Intelligence solution provides an enabling Business Social Software platform with distinct capabilities for sales, marketing and the field:

• Co-creation of Collateral & Knowledge -- Robust wiki collaboration enables presentation, collateral, documentation and demos to be co-created (with less duplicative effort) and immediately published
• Efficient Feedback -- Process owners and asset developers gain ongoing user feedback and data to improve or remove sales content. Comments, favorites, ratings and tagging are simple and easy to use. Unlike document-centric solutions that constrain communication and feedback, blog and comment conversations increase sharing and can be re-purposed for content.
• Manage Attention -- Socialtext Dashboard for personalized and customizable management of information flow. Not only enable marketing to push the right asset at the right time, but let end users subscribe and pull topics of interest. Leverage external data providers that aggregate useful information.
• Organization and Search -- Editing, linking and tagging give sales a voice into how content is organized, order quickly emerges, maintained by the group and changes dynamically over time. Unstructured search, tagging and social discovery through conversations and profiles reduce search costs by up to 50%.
• Expertise and Relationship Discovery-- Socialtext People provides social networking functionality built on a wiki foundation. Identify experts for content co-creation and team selling opportunities.
• Mobile & Offline -- Miki the mobile wiki and Socialtext Unplugged for offline use support the way Field Sales actually work at the time they are closest to the customer
• Distributed Data Sharing -- SocialCalc enables cross-departmental multi-workgroup data sharing and modeling that can be rolled up into single unified views relevant for management and end-users
• Enterprise Integration and Administration -- Standards-based API and widget integration with existing systems plus features administrators love

Benefits

Sales Enablement can improve revenue, profitability, access to future opportunities, supports references and referrals, cycle times, close rates, sales effectiveness and relationships. IDC's analysis of Sales Enablement reveals opportunties to grow top line revenue and reduce cost. The average sales cost of generating revenue is at an all-time high of 15-20% of revenue. While training and tools can reduce this cost, tech companies spend an average of $20K per rep every year on training & sales assets -- and sales turnover averages 10-50%. Managing the Sales Learning Curve in this environment is not just a function of tactical execution. Considering performance costs, it is a strategic imperative:

• Rep turnover has a $2-4M annual performance cost per Rep
• Poor engagement has a $1M annual performance cost per Rep
• Lost productivity has a $260K annual performance cost per Rep

Productivity can be improved 10%+ in 30-60 days and there is potential to reduce the performance costs of turnover and engagement through effective enablement.

The Collective Intelligence Practice

Enablement is the broad set of activities that prepare members of the sales team for success in sales engagements, including the following according to IDC:

• People -- hiring, training, certification, coaching and mentoring
• Knowledge management -- content creation, delivery, distribution and the underlying systems
• Processes and governance -- the management practices and ownership that ensure effective, efficient enablement operations.
• Readiness -- a component of enablement, defining it as the ability of a salesperson to handle a specific sales task, event, or obstacle -- to move a specific sales opportunity to the next step in the sales cycle.

Socialtext Professional Services works with your organization to enable these activities on a Business Social Software platform.

Socialtext has a unique understanding of the social, cultural, and organizational challenges of launching a Collaborative Intelligence solution, We have built a comprehensive suite of capabilities to help our customers with all aspects of successful implementation, including strategy-setting, business analysis, training, and impact evaluation. Our Professional Services team works hands-on with customers, leading them through our proprietary SPRING methodology (Structure, Populate, Review, Invite, eNcourage, Garden). Developed over the course of hundreds of customer launches, our methodology and tools ensure the establishment of an active, growing Collective Intelligence solution with business benefits in less than three months of project start.

Rapid Implementation

With Socialtext Professional Hosted Service or the Socialtext Managed Service Appliance, working with Socialtext Professional Services, your organization can achieve business results in as little as 30-60 days. Read our Socialtext eats its own dog food (nay, drinks its own champagne) in a blog post by VP of Sales Kris Duggan on how he implemented Collective Intelligence. Also see recent press coverage from CIO Magazine and ZDNet describing the Collective Intelligence and other Socialtext solutions.

For further information about Socialtext services and the Collaborative Intelligence solution please contact us to get started.

Free Article Download from MIT Sloan Management Review
Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

Case study of how German investment bank used Socialtext to fundamentally shift the way knowledge work is done.
by Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard

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