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What Sales 2.0 Is Not
Sales 2.0, then, is an approach to selling that leverages Web 2.0 technologies (which enable user-generated content and collaboration) to build long-term, engaging relationships with prospects and customers while driving sales process efficiencies.
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Three Enterprise 2.0 Themes You Should Be Watching in 2010
« For 2010, three themes will impact the sector. These aren’t the only ones, but I expect to see plenty of news, features and industry mental energy covering these. »
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The coming release of SharePoint 2010 is forcing many vendors to evaluate their positions in the market. Going head-to-head with the same or fewer features is going to be tough. What differentiates your offering?
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Putting these tools in-the-flow will be a powerful basis for expanding Enterprise 2.0’s reach. A challenge for standalone general tools of today is that they require employees to toggle between different apps. This can make it tough to get traction.
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What the article doesn’t cover and where I would be interested in your views is how the use of E2.0 tools would enable the Business Processes themselves to be changed. Or innovated completely. eg how do you bring Crowdsourcing, Idea Engines, Prediction Markets etc and integrate those into ERP systems?
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Meanwhile, a new crop of vendors have dispensed with the pursuit of all-everything suite approach. Rather, they build applications that integrate social in solving specific problems (e.g. Spigit for innovation management). Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley tabs these vendors’ offerings as “activity-specific social applications”. These vendors build in functionality that solves specific problems for companies, usually with definable ROI.
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Preventing the Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration
« Today, we have to ask how much progress the U.S. intelligence has made over the last eight years. I suspect much less than we thought. The U.S. Government has spent a small fortune on information technology systems, but the problems we face aren’t just about IT. It’s about changing the culture, from one where officials don’t share much to one where they share widely, so that the dots can be connected. How can they do this? Here’s a start: »
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Change the incentives system. Reward people for sharing, and penalize them for not sharing.
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Recruit new people. Infuse the old culture with new employees who think differently.
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Rotate jobs. Move employees among agencies (a proven technique to build cross-unit professional networks).
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Innovation by Subtraction
« We tend to think that the best way to innovate is to add new features to our products or services. What can we add that increases the appeal of our offering? This route can easily lead to extra cost, feature overload and customer fatigue. Sometimes a better answer lies in subtraction. »
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What can you take away from your current business process in order to save cost and simplify operations? Can you unbundle your product into separate components? Can you strip out costs or processes that not all customers want? Can you bypass a middleman on the route to your customer
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Members help members in USAA’s online forum
« San Antonio-based USAA Savings Bank, which provides financial services to military personnel and their families, recently ended two months of weekly sweepstakes to promote their new Member 2 Member forum. Within USAA’s website, members can use the Member 2 Member forum to ask and answer questions, ask for help, and to share their USAA banking experiences with one another. »
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Reality Check: You’ve got to feel very confident in your products if you’re going to let people rate them publicly online. If you don’t get the ratings you expect, you’ll either get your act together€¦or kill the ratings/reviews feature €” fast.
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Management- vs. employee-driven community involvement
« How do you decide what cause or causes to support? You have essentially two alternatives for this internal process: top-down or management-driven, and bottom-up or employee-driven. What are their pros and cons for you as a company? What’s the optimal way to decide on the direction of your strategic cause marketing? »
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Strategic alignment with a cause relevant to your business benefits your company, as it creates a consistent affiliation with the cause in the minds of your stakeholders, including your employees. A company-wide cause allows employees to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, and focuses everyone’s effort in a single direction
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The top-down decision-making process comes with drawbacks. By default and most importantly, it excludes employees from having a say in your company’s community involvement.
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It may also limit the pool of available talent for your company to people who support your cause.
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Giving your employees the power to decide what causes to support offers you a top-notch opportunity to make your employees feel they, their say, and their work matters. Rather than imposing the decision on them, it positions you and the company as the support platform for their decisions.
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Bottom-up decisions diffuse the focus of your overall strategic cause marketing.
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You can align your company with a strategically relevant cause and open the process of deciding which particular organization(s) to support to a cross-functional team of employees.
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Empowering employees to be engaged in the community can be a cause in itself. At the top you make the strategic decisions to 1) be involved in the community as a company, and to 2) align your company with your employees’ charitable or community interests.
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Initial review of 12Sprints.com
« 12Sprints.com is a project from the Business Objects group at SAP, and seems to be related to a concept SAP previously called “Bridge Space.” Bridge Space was a concept demo a couple of years back at SAP to promote immersive meetings, collaborative decision making tools, linking applications and data into planning and decision-making processes, and just generally making decisions more transparent, collaborative, process-oriented, data-driven, and actionable. »
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While a social tools user would have no trouble picking up the basic use of 12Sprints.com, a less savvy user will struggle, and even a very experienced social tools user will almost certainly miss much of the capabilities of 12Sprints.com due to lack of instructions, tutorials, examples, and help.
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The tools provided for collaboration, decision making, assignment of tasks, sentiment management, etc. were nicely laid out, performant, and stable in my use.
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Another way 12Sprints.com reminds me of Google Wave is that the system is extensible by developers. 12Sprints.com includes a RESTful API for extensions, which allows developers to build additional UIs for users, or to populate content from an application rather than just manually.
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I think I would use this system if it were a collaboration tool attached to a business process in SAP, or a report in Business Objects.
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I could imagine using a tool like this to allocate raises and bonuses, manage a discussion around invoice verification and approval (or rejection!), strategic sourcing decisions, or next year’s budget, but only if it really worked dramatically better for me than the tools I already know how to use €“ e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tools.
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In the end, 12Sprints.com seems like a good tool for planning and capturing meetings, and supporting collaborative planning and decisions. To really get the value out of this tool would seem to require a good deal of discipline
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Management’s Dirty Little Secret — How to Increase Employee Engagement
« Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it? »
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Here’s what the researchers discovered: barely one-fifth (21%) of employees are truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would “go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of ten (38%) are mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest are in the tepid middle.
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Just this: in a world where customers wake up every morning asking, “what’s new, what’s different and what’s amazing?” success depends on a company’s ability to unleash the initiative, imagination and passion of employees at all levels€”and this can only happen if all those folks are connected heart and soul with their work, their company and its mission.
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In every industry, there are huge swathes of critical knowledge that have been commoditized€”and what hasn’t yet been commoditized soon will be.
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To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
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Problem is, you can’t command people to be enthusiastic, creative and passionate.
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My conclusion from all of this: first, engagement is essential to the competitiveness of every company and every economy€”and we need to be doing a whole lot better than we are. We’ve got to get management’s dirty little secret out of the HR closet and into the boardroom.
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The Customer Revolution: How can we prevent a Social CRM bubble?
« The fact remains however, that there was a CRM bubble and it burst. For many years CRM was a dirty word. I worked with a number of customers 5-8 years ago who refused to use the term « CRM » and instead referred to it as « Loyalty », « Customer Management » etc. It has only been in the last couple of years that the term seems to have bounced back and removed it’s negative connotations. CRM is now seen as a positive initiative, crucial to supporting customer retention and growth strategies and Social CRM is a natural extension to the topic, embracing the customer’s new control of the conversation. »
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Nothing like enough attention was given to the people / change aspects of customer-centric transformation. I have personally seen call centre agents with a shiny new CRM system, hang up on customer’s as they answer the call in order to try and get their AHT down! Incentives drive behaviour more than any technology.
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I’ve seen lots of product demonstrations where vendors pitch an offering to listen to customer feedback, connect to the twitter fire hose etc. Few articulate the reality of how that insight can be used to improve products, processes and the customer experience as that involves far more than just technology.
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The viral effect may tempt marketers to view « Social » as simply another low-cost channel to bombard customers with Spam€¦ if this sounds familiar then STOP and consider your usage of Social Media.
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Crowdsourcing: 5 Reasons It’s Not Just For Startups Any More
« While some companies, notably Netflix (the just renewed the Netflix Prize) and Emporis (real estate data), have built their own crowdsourcing capabilities internally, this is not something most companies are experienced with or prepared to do themselves. It also often doesn’t make sense to build a crowdsourcing environment in-house unless the work to be done is strategic to the business. For these organizations there are now commercial services available which have all the necessary ingredients to begin using them right away to crowdsource. »
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While Internet startups have had considerable success with crowdsourcing over the last few years, including with its more serious cousin peer production, it’s only recently that they’ve focused on creating the tools and communities that can be readily consumed by enterprises.
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Does this model really work better for solving difficult business challenges? A new article in The Economist says it does, reporting up to a 74% ROI for crowdsourcing over central production methods.
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Today crowdsourced design often means Web design and leading offerings like Crowdspring provide marketplaces to crowdsource Web designs cheaply and quickly. That doesn’t mean that’s all there is and some marketplaces, like Denook, offer design for other things as well, such as apparel
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Work. For many kinds of simple tasks, particulary if they are small, there have emerged highly granular on-demand work marketplaces.
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- Testing. « Users as testers » has been a growing meme for assuring user input from customers is broadbased and thorough
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Support. Online customer communities have been a steadily growing source of crowdsourced customer service and support for companies that understand how to grow and nurture them
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The Conversation Maturity Model: From Listening to Leading in Social Media
« Although the concepts may be simple, there are plenty of reasons brands are not effectively starting conversations — from incomplete strategies to limitations in technology. There is more to offer here in terms specifics on these limitations – and more importantly, solutions helping companies address to them… «
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Faut-il bannir Twitter des salles de conférence
« A la Web 2.0 Expo 2009, des conférenciers se sont retrouvés en difficulté parce que le public était plus occupé par Twitter que par ce qui se disait sur scène. Dana Boyd a consacré un long billet a cette affaire permettant de comprendre de l’intérieur ce qui a pu se passer. »
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Il y a, pour le public, quatre façons d’utiliser le backchannelling. La première consiste en salutations : le canal est utilisé pour faire connaitre sa présence à l’événement, ou pour saluer une autre personne que l’on a reconnu dans la foule. La seconde consiste à apporter des information sur la conférence : dans quelle salle a lieu telle conférence ? Qui est la personne sui parle ? Ou trouver le programme. La troisième consiste à discuter les contenus apportés par la conférence : liens vers des sites, apports d’informations nouvelles etc. Ce sont des sur-titres apportés a la conférence. La dernière consiste à utiliser le canal pour tout le reste : plaisanteries et messages hors sujet trouvent ici leur place. C’est également à ce niveau que peut se produire tout ce qui apparaitrait déplacé dans l’espace de la conférence.
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Il y a des aspects positifs au backchannelling : il permet de produire ou d’augmenter le sentiment d’être à un événement, et d’y participer. Mais cette participation peut aussi se faire au détriment du travail de pensée qui est pourtant le but de toute conférence.
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Dans une conférence, la tache du groupe de travail est d’écouter le conférencier. Ses moyens de communication sont restreints : quelques membres pourront (peut-être) poser quelques questions à la fin de la conférence, et les échanges entre membre du groupe pendant le temps de la conférence sont mal venus.
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Le groupe de base s’organise selon des présupposés de base qui sont en tension conflictuelle avec le groupe de travail. Ces présupposés de base peuvent s’opposer aux buts du groupe de travail ou les rendre possible. Ce sont des émotions intenses, primitives, exprimant des fantasmes inconscients.
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Idéalement, le backchannel devrait être un espace commun et partagé par toutes les parties. Le conférencier comme le public devraient pouvoir se rencontrer dans les nuages et étendre ainsi l’espace de la conférence.
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Il est important de modérer le backchannel et de l’animer. La modération ne vise pas à empêcher la création de backchannel mais a garantir qu’il reste un espace de travail.
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L’animation consistera à diffuser officiellement des informations utiles au public : présentation du conférencier, liens vers les notions ou concepts utilisés, bibliographies, création de pages wiki etc.
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Le backchannel est au service de l’orateur. Si celui ci n’est pas à l’aise avec ce dispositif, il ne doit pas lui être imposé.
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La disposition du backchannel est importante. Dans les cas ou le backchannel est utilisé sur scène, il faut le disposer de façon à ce qu’il soit évident qu’il n’est pas la principale source d’information : sur le coté de la scène, et jamais en arrière plan de l’orateur.
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
