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A guest post by Steve Diamond, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Oracle
In a recent post on this blog, my
colleague Steve Boese asked three questions related to the widespread
popularity and incredibly rapid growth of Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Steve
then addressed the many applications for collaborative solutions in the area of
Human Capital Management.
So, in turning to a conversation
about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA),
let me ask you one simple question. How many sales people, particularly at business-to-business companies,
consistently meet or beat their quotas in their roles by working alone, with no collaboration among fellow sales
people, sales executives, employees in product groups, in service, in Legal,
third-party partners, etc.?
Hello? Is anybody out there? What’s
that cricket noise I hear? That’s correct. Nobody! When it comes to Sales,
introverts arguably have a distinct
disadvantage. While it’s certainly a truism that “success” in most professional
endeavors requires working with people, it’s a mandatory success factor in
Sales. This fact became abundantly clear to me one early morning in the late 1990s
when I joined the former Hyperion Solutions (now part of Oracle) and attended a
Sales Award Ceremony. The Head of Sales at that time gave out dozens of awards
– none of them to individuals and all
of them to TEAMS of individuals.
That’s how it works in Sales.
Your colleagues help provide you with product intelligence and competitive
intelligence. They help you build the best presentations, pitches, and
proposals. They help you develop the most killer RFPs. They align you with the
best product people to ensure you’re matching the best products for the
opportunity and join you in critical meetings. They help knock the socks of
your prospects in “bake off” demo’s. They bring in the best partners to either
add complementary products to your opportunity or help you implement a
solution. They work with you as a collective team.
And so how is all this collaboration
STILL typically done today? Through email. And yet we all silently or not so
silently grimace about email. It’s relatively siloed. It’s painful to search.
It’s difficult to align by topic. And it’s nearly impossible to re-trace
meaningful and helpful conversations that occurred among a group or a team at
some point in history.
This is where social networking
for Sales comes into play. It’s about PURPOSEFUL social networking versus
chattering. What is purposeful social networking? It’s collaboration that’s
built around opportunities, accounts, and contacts. It’s collaboration that
delivers valuable context – on the target company, and on key competitors –
just to name two examples. It’s collaboration that can scale to provide
coaching for larger numbers of sales representatives, both for general
purposes, and as we’ve largely discussed here, for specific ‘deals.’ And it’s collaboration
that allows a team of people to collectively edit and iterate on a document like
an RFP or a soon-to-be killer presentation that is maintained in a central
repository, with no time wasted searching for it or worrying about version
control.
But lest we get carried away,
let’s remember that collaboration “happens” among sales people whether there is
specialized software to support it or not. The human practice of sales has not
changed much in the last 80 to 90 years. Collaboration has been a mainstay
during this entire time. But what social networking in general, and Oracle
Social Networking in particular delivers, is the opportunity for sales teams to
dramatically increase their effectiveness and efficiency – to identify and
close more high quality and lucrative opportunities more quickly. For most
sales organizations, this is how the game is won.
To learn more please visit Oracle Social Network and Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management on oracle.com
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