Hi, let me introduce myself. Two months ago I joined Socialtext to run the sales organization, after almost four years in enterprise sales management at WebEx (my LinkedIn profile). I think of myself as being pretty entrepreneurial, having worked with quite a few startups now and also having started/successfully sold my own.
That being said, it's been clear to me over the last few months that if you don't stay up on technology -- which happens when you are working on other things like exceeding a big team sales number at WebEx -- it really does pass you by. Being heads-down at WebEx has left me a Web 1.5 kind of guy, and I've been working recently on getting 2.0-ified...
For starters, here are a few things I've picked up recently from working in a social software company, which will be relevant to other sales leaders:
Group memory. Ramp-up time is a big challenge for sales, given headcount turnover and staffing needs due to growth. After spending my first few weeks reading most of the relevant pages in our corporate wiki, including competitive positioning, proposals, sample prospecting templates, best practices, and account histories for our large installations, I feel like I have pretty good handle on our value proposition, benefits to customers, the various use cases, and how to handle objections. We don't have a formal training program here at Socialtext due to our size, but being able to access the "group memory" allowed me to start talking to prospects and jump right in.
Team selling and leveraging your resources (The number one rule in sales!) Last week, a prospect asked me for a comparison between Forums and Wikis for creating a community. "Good question," I thought, "do we have any collateral on that?" A quick search of our corporate wiki didn't show anything promising. So I posted a wiki page called "Forums vs Wikis" with a few starting comments and the purpose of the page, knowing that our team of 30 constantly watches the "What's New" section of our wiki. Within four hours, five team members, including engineers, had contributed to the wiki page with numerous revisions. I had basically a final version that I simply exported as a Word doc, tweaked with final formatting, and emailed to the customer. Hmmm... the ability to dynamically leverage my internal resources and create immediate content for customer facing activities -- pretty cool. This plays into the whole "wisdom of crowds" and "power of the many" ideas too, in that I could have gone to one or two people in marketing and asked, but would it have been as good and as timely? Probably not.
Transparency. Here at Socialtext, we use SugarCRM and also publish comments and activities for our accounts into our sales wiki using "wiki web services". Watching the "What's New" page, you can quickly see what is happening across the entire team at the account level. A quick read at the end of the day or prior to a strategy session provides immediate context on our pipeline growth, opportunities for coaching, and overall level of activity across the team. I've never seen this level of openness available in a stand-alone CRM tool, and I think the combined solution is quite unique and powerful.
Just a few things so far, but pretty powerful nonetheless... I will continue to share my learnings as I experience them. If you have tips for me, or other ideas/comments/feedback, please share, as I'd really love to hear your feedback. In the meantime, remember, "to know your customer is to know your future."
Kris Duggan | Vice President, Sales
