If personal and informal communication is the best way to get through to people, why do we continually send out formal, impersonal messages?
Why do companies still send out stiff, formal PR messages? Why do they still rely on a formal, sanitized messages sent via email?
We don’t respond to informal, impersonal messages. People want to feel talked with, not to. People want to engage. They want to be apart of the conversation, not on the sidelines.
The tools exist.
Social media makes it easier for companies to create and engage in personal, informal conversations. Enterprise 2.0 makes it easy for the CEO to have personal conversations with the entire company. It’s now easier to create messages that resonate.
The goal shouldn’t be to communicate. The goal is to create action. Action only happens when the messages have impact and stick. Formal, impersonal messages don’t have impact and don’t stick.
Why do we still communicate formally? Why are messages still impersonal?
If you want to get your message across, make it personal, and relax. They will hear you.
It’s a great post re-affirming what I’ve been saying on this blog for over a year. I’ve dedicated a page to it. It’s that important. Our online presence will be THE asset of the future.
His quote on the influence of social networking tools is powerful:
People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.
Our networks are moving online. Our weak-tie networks are expanding. The tools to measure and quantify our networks are readily available. Trust, power, and influence will be at the core of these networks and those with the best networks will be the winners.
Soon it won’t be OK NOT to have a strong online presence. It will be too difficult to compete.
Craig is spot on when he says:
This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.
He’s right!
It will be even more dramatic for those who wait for the tipping point.
Start investing in your online presence and brand NOW! Like any good investment, it’s best to invest early as it takes time grow and have the best returns when you get in in the beginning.
Sharing takes effort. I’m not talking the about the type of sharing we were taught as kids in kindergarten, but the new sharing we do online. I’m starting to notice those with the strongest online presence are good sharers.
Sharing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or on your companies microblogging site like Yammer or Socialcast is different. It’s not an action we were brought up with.
Traditionally, sharing meant sharing”BIG” things; births, deaths, graduations, weddings, etc. We knew to share the big events, the momentous occasions. We shared mostly the big stuff because sharing was so hard. It was too cumbersome to share the small stuff. Sharing meant multiple phone calls, or a mini-letter campaign. Sharing with lots of people was difficult and time consuming. So we did it mostly for the big stuff.
We did share the little stuff, but only with a small group of people, our mom’s and closest friends, and family. We did one person at at time, by phone, or occasionally by letter.
Things are changing. Sharing the little stuff is a lot easier now. It’s a quick Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn status update from your phone or your computer. It takes 5 minutes, yet 10′s, 100′s or even 1000′s of friends and family can experience it. Sharing is different today.
Our sharing habits have been shaped over generations around the “BIG” stuff and social media requires the little stuff. Most of us don’t know how to share the little stuff. It’s uncomfortable. It’s foreign. It doesn’t seem to matter when compared to the big stuff, yet it does. In many ways, it matters more.
Sharing the little stuff builds relationships overtime. The little stuff is more intimate. It’s more personable. The little stuff is much better at creating what is most important; relationships, groups with common interests and connections.
Learning to share today takes effort. It requires we are more conscience of our thoughts. What we once saw as a fleeting observation, is now a potential idea, or thought that can be captured and shared. Learning to do this takes work. Learning how to capture our fleeting thoughts and perceptions and remember to share them is not easy.
Social media is changing how we engage. It’s challenging traditional notions of sharing. It’s asking us to share the little stuff, not just the “BIG” stuff.
We are going to need to learn to share. We need to share the little stuff, not just the big stuff. We need to be more present with our thoughts and observations. It will be critical. Our networks are moving online. They are getting bigger. They are playing a bigger role in our success, at work, at home, in our finances and more.
Sharing is going to be at the core of the asset of the future: our online presence. Sharing just the “BIG” the stuff isn’t going to cut it.
This is absolutely the kind of creativity we need more of.
The Learn That Name game on the Gist IPhone App is plain creative for a couple of reasons
It’s fun
It emphasizes the value of the application
It shows you how to use the application
It reinforces WHY you NEED it in the first place
Getting our attention is getting harder and harder everyday. Gist is being creative. They aren’t just yelling at us; “Hey check me out.” They are engaging us. Engaging goes against everything we’ve been taught about traditional selling and advertising.
Engagement that works, takes creativity.
How creative can you be in engaging us? We will respond!
Many of you know I am a big fan of enterprise micro-blogging. Think Twitter for your company. It is by far the most efficient way to share information, exchange ideas, collaborate and engage people in your company. Enterprise micro-blogging tools make companies more agile and improve performance because they capture the invisible.
Salesforce.com is going to launch their own micro-blogging tool called Chatter (now in private beta.) Chatter will compete with Socialcast, Yammer, Socialtext and all the other microblogging tools out there today. It’s a crowded space, but they will have an advantage because of it’s integration into their Salesforce.com platform.
Chatter provides all the typical features you would expect from traditional micro-blogging tools. You can create groups, follow the people most interesting to you, filter feeds to easily find things that are important, respond to specific users directly, share documents and links and more.
But, Chatter also has a few unique features. The most interesting is, unlike Yammer, Socialcast and other pure play micro-blogging tools, Chatter gives you a home page where all of your Salesforce data and important information is laid out for you to monitor. Think of it like a business application dashboard. Another unique Chatter feature is the profile page. The Chatter profile page appears more informative than Yammer and Socialcast from what I can tell. It provides your experience, skills and other personal information so others in the organization know who you are and what you do. It has more of a Facebook profile feel.
Another unique feature Chatter has is its ability to allow you to follow a document. I like this feature a lot. You can follow a PowerPoint presentation, a spreadsheet, a word doc. anything. I like this feature because it makes updating, and managing versions super easy. It also allows you to see what others think of the information and make corrections on the fly. Beyond documents and people, Chatter allows you to follow other applications, including non-Salesforce.com applications.
Chatter also gives you the ability to bring information in from outside social networks like Twitter. The value here is you can create a Twitter search for a specific company or customer and anytime time that company or customer is mentioned on Twitter, everyone in your Chatter group can see it. This is a powerful way to manage a customer and stay ahead of the competition.
One question I do have about Chatter that concerns me is integrating an entire organization. Traditionally, only sales, and marketing and the executives use Salesforce.com If Salesforce wants it to be a ubiquitous tool for the entire company they will have to create licensing pricing that makes it worth it to have everyone in the company to use it; including those who normally don’t use Salesforce, like product, finance and HR. The real value in micro-blogging comes from connecting the entire organization. Not just a few functional groups.
If you are a Salesforce.com customer, Chatter is a compelling tool to bring your organization together. If used appropriately, it has the ability to create proposals faster, identify useful information faster, improve customers relationships, increase sales, accelerate product development and more.
Whether it’s Chatter, Socialcast, Yammer, Socialtext or any other micro-blogging tool, your organization will benefit from their use. Find one and use it. They are about more than chattering, yammering or twittering, they are about getting business done.
Back in November I posted how a Sales track was conspicuously absent during Defrag. I made a note of how Enterprise 2.0 companies have a very difficult road to hoe when it comes to selling their wares to companies. Most Enterprise 2.0 companies have been started by technologists and lack the experience, knowledge and understanding of B2B sales. So rather than chirping about it, I figured I need to do something about it.
It looks like not enough people read my earlier post, because it appears there isn’t another sales track at Enterprise 2.0 Boston.
Enterprise 2.0 isn’t like Web 2.0 or other consumer products. There is no “build it and the will come.” A decision must be made in order to penetrate a company and drive revenue. Someone has to say “yes,” I will buy your product. Getting to this stage takes effort, and strategy. With my partner in crime Paul Dunay and we will break down the sales aspect of driving Enterprise 2.0 into the enterprise.
Where was sales at Defrag last week? There were some great presentations on Business Intelligence, social boundaries and monitoring, real time streams and search vs discovery. There were some great presenters. It was an all web cast of folks; Stowe Boyd, Fred Wilson, Chris Sacca, Howard Lindzon, and Brad Feld. But, sales was no where to be found.
The booths were plenty, with most if not all being Enterprise 2.0 companies. I like to think of Enterprise 2.0 companies, as companies that sell Web 2.0 or social media products and services to other companies. Unlike the Twitters of the world, Enterprise 2.0 companies have to sell. In the enterprise world, IT departments defend their turf with abandon. Procurement will squeeze every dime they can out of you. Legal will extend the sales cycle by months until you capitulate on the word commit over “best effort”. Being successful in the Enterprise 2.0 is very different than Web 2.0; yet there was no sales, marketing or business development tracts on the Defrag agenda.
I think this was a big mistake. Most of these companies have been started by techies; really smart engineers who have little experience or knowledge on how to navigate a corporate sale. They’ve created innovative products, that in many cases the companies they are selling to are completely unaware they exist never mind understand their value. This lack of understanding of Enterprise 2.0 by most companies makes demand creation a requirement for a Enterprise 2.0 to be successful.
Enterprise 2.0 demands a strong, effective sales team, and sales process. They need to learn to engage the complex buying cycles of large companies. They need to learn account management as well as the transactional sale. The need to be able to create demand, where demand doesn’t exist.
Defrag, Enterpirse 2.0 conference and other conferences would do well by offering marketing, sales and business development. They should bring in folks like Paul Dunay author Facebook Marketing for Dummies, or Jill Konrath author of Selling to Big Companies. They need to provide more insight and information on the challenges of sales and marketing to driving revenue. It’s too critical to this budding business not to.
Enterprise 2.0 companies can’t make it without sales. These tracts will be packed, because the companies that figure it out first will win.
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs”
– Peter Drucker
Where is sales in this quote? Do you think Drucker was including it in marketing or do you think he categorizes it as a cost?
I say it’s part of marketing. It gets customers. I think if you were to ask many of the start ups at Defrag today who are targeting the enterprise they would agree.
I’m watching many of these new Enterprise 2.0 start-ups struggle with sales. They are grappling with the sales process, client profiling, getting access and overcoming objections. Most of these new companies have been started by engineers and sales is not what they know.
One of today’s “Open Space” breakout sessions led by Gist.com CEO T.A. McAnn asked the question; “How do you create sales momentum in the enterprise?” and it spawned some good conversation. The key take-aways and I fully agree were, you have to be agile and flexible. You can’t disqualify your prospects too arbitrarily or too early. Let them say no. You need to find advocates internally to help you sell. You’re going to need someone on the inside to evangelize the reward or benefit of your product. You have to create demand.
Enterprise 2.0 companies are ahead of the innovation curve. There is little to no awareness in most enterprises, therefore the sell is almost ENTIRELY demand creation. You can’t rely on or expect the customer to realize they want it. To sell in a demand creation environment, or to create demand, you must be very good at overcoming objections. You need to be good at creating access to the people that can influence the decision and you must be aggressive. Demand creation is not for the weak at heart and it doesn’t follow paint by numbers. And . . . you have to have a killer product.
Peter Drucker was right, Marketing and Innovation get you new customers. I say sales is part of marketing in his quote because it get’s customers too. Enterprise 2.0 companies have both, sales and innovation and if they are good at both they’ll get customers.
I love finding good sales tools. Few things get me as excited as finding good tool to help me achieve my goals. One of the biggest areas for improvement is access to information. Sales runs on information; access to it and use of it. The best sales people are those who learn how to access information others can’t and know how to use it.
Finding information has usually meant research. Companies like Hoovers would compile all the info and we would go tearing through it looking for the tidbit to give us an edge. The problem was Hoovers controlled the info. If they couldn’t find it or chose not to add it, you didn’t get it. Google Alerts has upped the game a bit, but if you’re like me, you get a little tired of managing the tons of emails that come in everyday. I just couldn’t keep up with all the different alerts. This is why I’m excited about Gist.
Gist has the potential to be the next killer sales app. Gist is a new site that allows you to link your contact list to the web. After you sign up, you are prompted to upload your address book. Gist supports, Oulook, Vcard, Gmail, as well as LinkedIn and Facebook. Once your accounts have been set up, (you can set up more than one) Gist begins to pull all the information from the web it can and puts it into a clean dashboard by person, by company. What I like about how Gist works is I can see a client or companies entire web presence in a single click. Gist does a Google search and throws up all the relevant info on the people and companies in my contacts. It tracks the tweets, and blog posts, as well as any new web mentions. Getting information on clients has always been difficult. Gist is changing this and has taken a tremendous step into bringing sales people closer to their clients and what their clients are saying. Gist also provides the same rich information for the companies in your contacts, as it does for your contact list.
There are a few features I really enjoy. One is the ability to dial up or down the importance of a contact or company. The more important a contact, the higher on the dashboard you can make them show up. This gives you control on who gets more attention your watch list. Gist also syncs with your email account for better organization of all your account information. Gist gives you the ability to share contacts with other Gist users and merge contacts into a single view. (ex: multiple contacts at a single company.)
I have been using it for a few weeks and have just scratched the surface. I uploaded my entire contact list, not sure I’d do that again. There are too many people I just don’t care to watch. Gist does integrate with Salesforce.com. Which was a good move. I haven’t played with that feature yet. I am curious on how it’ll work.
Gist is headed in the right direction. As more and more people come online, via Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn etc, Gist will provide you immediate information that can be used in the sales process, relationship building and a myriad of other business needs.
Gist is easy to use and easy to set up. I don’t see any barrier to adoption. Go sign up and tell me what you think. Playing with it is the only true way to find out how something works. Come back and give us your two cents.
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