We've had a lot of demand for our solutions-oriented approach to Web/Enterprise 2.0 with the announcement of our core solution areas at the beginning of the year.

What makes these real solutions for our clients is the combination of capabilities, templates, integrations, and services best practices to ensure 100% business process alignment, real adoption, and actual business results. The Sales and Marketing solution area is one that is obviously close to my line of work.

Today, our marketing team published a "sandbox" environment where you can see some of the things that make it into our actual customer deployments, like examples of the homepage look and feel template, how our environment can be skinned, the templates and workflows that you might support there (like proposal generation, sales library, feedback from the field in a blog/discussion format, and real-time marketing communication). Clearly the underlying technology is a wiki, however its how you "bend" the wiki that makes this so much more, i.e. integrations into Salesforce.com, WebEx, ticketing systems, and the information structure that supports your team's communication and collaboration needs.

You can imagine that every sales and marketing professional will have access to an environment like this in their day to day operations, and whereas Salesforce.com helps organize the structured lead and pipeline data, this workspace approach to all the other non-pipeline related information helps consolidate, standardize, and drive sales and marketing efficiency.

The purpose of the sandbox is go in there, play around with it, and brainstorm on things you would like to see in your own sales and marketing teams' workspace environments. And you are always welcome to sign up for your own 14-day trial of our service or speak with one of our sales or service personnel to take your brainstorms further.

Click to visit the sandbox here!

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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.

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So besides sales talent (which means hiring, developing, and retaining the best and the brightest), there are a few key things that are required to build high-performance sales organizations:

1) Socialtext wiki, of course --- knowledge repository to share sales tools across the sales team, including proposals, templates, collateral, best practices, competitive intelligence, specifications, customer feedback, and much more. It's all about the unstructured ideas and knowledge that don't fit into a CRM.

2) SugarCRM or Salesforce.com account - capture activities, manage the pipeline, support the forecasting requirements of the team. We use Sugar.

3) Hoover's account - information source for territory assignment/routing of prospective clients internally, along with account information, contacts, and more for understanding an organization and determining how/why your solution will fit their needs and objectives.

4) WebEx account - web-based sales presentations and product demonstrations. We manage the team to 8 meetings per week per rep here at Socialtext, not counting face-to-face appointments.

All of these are easy to deploy, either only being available as hosted service, or in the case of wikis, also behind the firewall for security purposes.

Back to talent, we happen to be in a major hiring phase --- with plans to sizably scale the sales team over the coming months. See one of our job placements here,. As always, send me an email if you have any ideas or referrals!

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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

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