Socialtext

One of the four newly announced Socialtext Use Cases is particularly close to my heart, Collaborative Intelligence. We have a sales and services organization with more than 20 heads located in North America (centered in Palo Alto and New York), as well we have recently opened a sales office in London.

Our distributed nature and high growth over the last 12 months means it is critically important to (1) ramp up new hires quickly, (2) continue to develop our staff with learnings and best practices happening in the field, and (3) share these learnings from the field back to corporate to influence marketing, product, and sales strategies.

In our sales wiki today, we capture all prospect discovery calls (using a template that already contains the questions we use for discovery). Each rep has a dashboard that displays all of their quarterly discoveries and territory plans. These dashboards also display all their existing customers, and allow them to pivot to all the unstructured data related to that account like account plans, org charts, all the stuff you never end up putting in Salesforce.com. Our service team uses the wiki to manage the entire post-sales process for implementation, documenting ongoing account reviews, customer feedback, and more.

We track all our activity metrics in the wiki like appointments, qualification calls, WebEx and onsite meetings by team and by rep. We organize all our sales tools in our Sales Library section of the wiki containing discovery letter templates, customized PowerPoint presentations, close plans, vertical knowledge, use case expertise, etc. We publish our victories in the wiki and focus on why we won, not just the deal size. To top things off, we have integrated our wiki with Salesforce.com so that you can quickly jump to the structured data that we use for pipeline management, like close date, deal size, etc.

The new capabilities being announced with Socialtext 3.0 are also really exciting, and play directly into this use case. The Socialtext Dashboard enables customizing information flow for sales people dependent on their role and interests, along with even tighter integration with 3rd party widgets like Salesforce.com, Newgator, Google Alerts, and other tools we use on a daily basis. Socialtext People let us identify expertise, rapidly form solutions-oriented teams for team selling, and overall bring the team more closely together.

At prior sales management jobs, we didn't have tools that helped the team stay organized, share cross-functionally, discover serendipitous opportunities, reduce noise for the team, have a team culture of sharing and engagement, and really focus on sales productivity. In addition, we get the added benefits of tighter alignment with our marketing and product teams.

People keep talking about the "R" word (okay I'll say it, Recession) and how it is going to impact sales this year. My feeling is that companies need to get back to basics in these times, and focusing on practices that drive overall effectiveness like this use case will actually get a few other "R" words going -- like Results and Revenue.