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| Social media is great for sales enablement |
Everyone is always banging on about social media these days, and its likely to continue - we're still only at the beginning of what this technology will bring us, and not just as organisations or consumers, but as employees. Many employers now provide mobile technology to their people as standard, meaning we can consume and share content at any time - including work content. Interesting that Steve Jobs predicted this would happen, back in 1990!
Yes, even though LinkedIn celebrated its 10th birthday in 2013, making it a relative technology veteran (Facebook is not far behind) we are still at the beginning, especially from a business point of view. Despite the proliferation of mobile and social technology, many organisations still rely on email, meetings and phone calls for the majority of day-to-day internal communication and collaboration.
Technology companies are well aware of the opportunity here, and have developed or acquired enterprise social network offerings: Salesforce.com with Chatter, Oracle with the Oracle Social Network and Microsoft has joined the race by acquiring Yammer.
I’m fortunate to work for a company that uses a very powerful internal social network, and adoption is accelerating steadily as people wake up to the speed and effectiveness of working collaboratively via a social platform, and the sudden increase in productivity that results.
I’d like to share some of the ways in which I use this platform for sales enablement:
- Finding sales enablement content
- Communicating sales enablement events
- Running and supporting sales enablement events
- Focusing more on face-to-face sales enablement
- Kicking off sales enablement projects
- Running sales enablement projects
- Reducing email
- Sharing and storing sales enablement content
Finding sales enablement content
Once an organisation has been using an internal social platform for a few months, it’s the easiest way to find content that you might need for a sales enablement project, whether presentations, videos, pictures or something else. Most social platforms allow users to upload interesting or useful content as part of conversations they are having, much as you would with email. But critically, on some platforms the uploaded content itself is then searchable (unless flagged as private). Can you imagine the power of being able to use Google to search all the content in your organisation? This isn't usually possible, because digital content is stored on separate servers used for email, intranets, repositories etc and unless you have a very advanced knowledge management solution, there is no search engine to index and search all this stuff.
However, once your organisation has an internal social platform, and a reasonable proportion of people starts to use it and upload content, suddenly you have a very attractive reason to start using it if you weren't one of the early adopters – it’s by far the quickest and easiest place to find up-to-date, relevant content that people are actually getting value from. And for me, this process is the key driver for pushing a social network over the tipping point to become well established in an organisation.
So, social platforms are useful for sales enablement because it’s so easy to find what you need. No more trawling through out-of-date intranets or online libraries, and you no longer have to ask around for who might have this or that. You just search for it, and within a few seconds, you get the material you need - and a new useful contact into the bargain, because you can see who uploaded it.
Communicating sales enablement events
Social media is also a great broadcast tool. Unlike email, which is a terrible tool for broadcast (spamming), messages on social media need only be sent to a small, supportive group of influencers in your network who you believe will see the value of the message and promote it to their network. Additionally the message can be posted to a small number of key public groups, conversations, message-boards or walls. The message will then propagate throughout the network as friends-of-friends share or republish what they find interesting or important. This is the power of any social network. People take far more notice of things that are suggested or recommended by trusted connections than they do of faceless, impersonal spam.
Running and supporting sales enablement events
Social media is a great tool to support sales enablement events as they happen. You can create a group or conversation for the attendees of an event. This is a very quick and time effective way to share agendas, last-minute logistics and, most importantly, content, that you want people to refer to before, during or after the training. Not only that, but with luck, the conversation might then take on a life of its own, becoming a forum for discussion, questions, answers and sharing of relevant content - not only during the event, but for a long time afterwards. I set up a conversation like this almost a year ago to support a series of training workshops, and the conversation is still active now.
Focusing more on face-to-face sales enablement
For me, sales enablement has its biggest impact through engaging, hands on face-to-face training. Remote forms of learning and assessment are of course important and useful, but for me face-to-face learning is what people really engage with and remember.
However, for anyone working in sales enablement, there can be pressure to organise and distribute on-line content through content portals and learning management systems, which almost immediately go out of date.
The problem here is that you are organising something that doesn't really need to be organised. The content organiser can sometimes get in the way of content producers reaching content consumers. What I like about social media is that it allows great content to self-distribute - content producers post new content on the network, and if it's any good, pretty soon it will propagate through the network.
Clearly you still need a formal approach for mandatory training and learning certification, but content that is basically information-driven can take care of itself, allowing sales enablement to focus on where it can bring unique value to the organisation.
However, for anyone working in sales enablement, there can be pressure to organise and distribute on-line content through content portals and learning management systems, which almost immediately go out of date.
The problem here is that you are organising something that doesn't really need to be organised. The content organiser can sometimes get in the way of content producers reaching content consumers. What I like about social media is that it allows great content to self-distribute - content producers post new content on the network, and if it's any good, pretty soon it will propagate through the network.
Clearly you still need a formal approach for mandatory training and learning certification, but content that is basically information-driven can take care of itself, allowing sales enablement to focus on where it can bring unique value to the organisation.
Kicking off sales enablement projects
The great thing about most social media platforms, whether internal or external, is that they usually allow you to create a group or conversation around a topic, and then invite people to join it. This is a very effective way of kicking off a project idea and getting immediate high-level feedback on how to achieve it, who should be involved, what might get in the way etc. This can be done in addition to or instead of the usual approach of booking a meeting or conference call to kick off a project. But it has the added advantage of avoiding the need for live attendance, without losing much in terms of immediacy.Running sales enablement projects
These days I use social project conversations throughout a project’s lifecycle, in addition to regular conference calls and meetings. You can’t beat a live call or meeting for getting something discussed and actions agreed quickly. But the social conversation can serve as the ongoing conversation, a precursor to the call or meeting, as a record of what was agreed, and as a great forum for follow up and further discussion. I also use project conversations to share and store project documentation such as actions lists, budgets and other collateral and to assign and track actions.
Reducing email
Using social media for running sales enablement projects also saves a huge amount of time, because everything is in one place and accessible to everyone involved, on demand. The alternative, using email to keep everyone up to date on project developments, is a painful and time-consuming process. Emails fly back and forth, some in private, some in public, and you spend your time wading through an overflowing inbox, trying to stay on top of what is going on. It’s very difficult to keep track! With social media, there’s just one conversation, and you can keep up-to-date at a glance. Since I started working this way, I get far fewer emails.
Sharing and storing sales enablement content
Most social platforms allow you to upload content into a conversation, a bit like attaching a file to an email, but far more elegant. So it’s natural to use them to share and collaborate on content that might be required for a project. Some platforms even allow members of a group to annotate materials once they are uploaded, rather than everyone making their changes on ten separate versions of a file, which some poor soul then has to collate into one new version!
How has social media helped you in your role? Please feel free to post your comments below!
Picture: Jason A. Howie, Flickr
How has social media helped you in your role? Please feel free to post your comments below!
Picture: Jason A. Howie, Flickr
