If you answered “Well yeah, we get along just fine”, then please keep reading!
What you need to know cannot be summarized in this brief article, but a few “early adopters” may leave your sales in the dust when it comes to this concept.
According to a report by Gartner Research, social CRM for sales has abruptly gained visibility in enterprises during the past year. Their survey in June 2010 of 113 organizations worldwide on social CRM goals revealed that more than 25% of respondents were interested in social software for sales effectiveness. Most sales organizations are just entering exploratory phases in evaluating social software, with actual implementations few and far between, very controlled and considered experimental.
Gartner estimates that 95% of social CRM projects pursued by sales organizations in 2009 and 2010 focused on aiding prospecting and internal collaboration. Their forecast is that over 90% of projects will continue to focus on only those concerns through 2012. However Gartner continues, overall applications of social CRM for sales can be easily broken down into at least two categories:
Social sales prospecting and research: This category focuses on tools that help salespeople better qualify leads, conduct prospecting activities efficiently, and become better informed of both accounts and prospects. Functions include lead qualification, call planning, competitive intelligence, maintaining up-to-date contact information for prospecting, profiling prospects and frontline research, real-time feeds on contacts and accounts from the Web, external social communities, proprietary contact data communities, and sales information services providers.
Sales social collaboration: This category exploits social software to and methods for internal and external collaboration. Internal collaboration could involve interactions within a sales force, and between salespeople and marketing, sales operations, or peer support organizations. External collaboration encompasses partner activities support and direct interactions between frontline sales and customers for collaboration in virtual workrooms responding to RFPs, tailoring solutions and delivery schedules, working on proposals or contracts, etc.
The Gartner team researched a long list of commercial applications and results to generate a summary of the following benefits:
Benefits Measured: Lead management ultimately presents compelling value propositions for social CRM for sales, particularly concerning sales-ready leads and the impact on sales cycle durations: number and percentage of leads deemed ready for sales attention, leads committed to sales pipelines, lead velocity, impact on close rates, decreased time invested in lead qualification and prospecting.
However, companies are also exploring how social software improves turnaround time with proposals, providing sales content and encouraging cross-selling and upselling within sales cycles. KPIs are being crafted to track aspects of RFP response times, bid or proposal cycle times, accepted proposal and quotes, instances of upselling, attach rates, deal size and reductions in sales cycle duration.
Cross-Departmental Link: Social sales has the strongest connection to social marketing for lead-management capabilities. Applications are emerging to connect subject matter experts in marketing with sales to drive proposals, improve presentations, handle objections, confront competitors, and improve deal parameters.
Currently sales has the weakest ties to customer service social processes, although positive and negative client experiences may be important to ongoing account management.
So . . . Is your CRM “Social”? WOW, as big mike says “Learn or Burn!”
You can do this!
From K.B. Elliott
K. B. Elliott is a freelance writer for Salesheads.com. Working both sides of sales desks in the Detroit area for over 30 years gives him a unique perspective on the process. To read more of his blogs see Salesheadsblog.com, and check out the postings for jobs in any industry at Nexxt
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