For decades, CRM (primarily used for SFA) has been \u201cthat critical application that really is not used.\u201d\u00a0 This is because CRM is typically top-down driven, but bottom-up resisted.\u00a0 Executives want a better understanding of how sales is doing, but sales people do not want additional tasks that only take time away from earning their commissions.<\/p>\n
After decades of technology product and customer application implementation experience, I have learned some immutable lessons, one of which is \u2013 top-down driven initiatives that are perceived as detrimental to the users (e.g., more work) fail to meet their objectives.<\/p>\n
Social-enabled (see “‘Social’ in Business: Disambiguation<\/a>“) CRM, for the first time, solves this very simply by providing tangible benefits to the sales people.\u00a0 Order taking is easy, but big commissions are paid on the complex sales.\u00a0 These complex sales can rarely be closed alone.\u00a0 They invariably require \u201cteam selling\u201d (an overused term).\u00a0 How is that predominantly done today?\u00a0 Via Email.\u00a0 The sales person emails marketing for materials, product management for future product plans, customer service for technical problem resolution, and her boss for updates.\u00a0 People who the sales person did not realize may be able to help will never see these emails.\u00a0 Emailed solutions are not easily available for future reference nor discoverable by other colleagues who might benefit from the information.<\/p>\n Email is used to handle these exception workflows because email is flexible in two key dimensions:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Content: You can write long or short messages, embed images, attach files, respond, forward, etc.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 People: You can send emails to virtually anyone, spanning geographies, organizations even outside of the company.\u00a0 And you can include this mixture or people, or virtual team in the same thread.<\/p>\n Social capabilities must provide these capabilities while mimicking familiar the user experiences of email or social messaging, where email is embedded in the application (like Facebook).<\/p>\n In business, however, email is missing this third component \u2013 embedded in the application.\u00a0 That\u2019s where the \u201cContextual Collaboration<\/a>\u201d (as coined by Matt Cain of Gartner in 2005) comes in.\u00a0 Instead of using a detached email application for collaboration, social contextual collaboration provides these email-like capabilities from right within the application, which delivers benefits such as convenience, easy future reference, discovery by broader audiences.<\/p>\n Once CRM is actually used as the primary vehicle for sales enablement, the benefits then come to the management because the information is more complete and current (the opposite of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out\u201d).\u00a0 This alone easily justifies Contextual Social CRM.<\/p>\n However, Contextual Social CRM delivers other key advantages to management.<\/p>\n Instead of conjuring up and perusing daily sales reports, management can define triggers important to them and automatically receive notifications of noteworthy events \u2013 e.g., when a new lead is entered in a certain territory, or when the status of a large opportunity changes.\u00a0 No more inefficient \u201cpolling\u201d for important events.<\/p>\n Once internal collaboration about an account can be pinned to that account record, it is very easy to catch up on what is currently going on at that account.\u00a0 For example, before a client meeting, a manager can review the collaboration activity for that account.\u00a0 To get the status of a large opportunity, the manage does not have to hunt down the relevant sales person, who then refers them to someone else in the critical path.\u00a0 The manager can instantly see the latest correspondence about the opportunity, whether that was internally, with a partner or the customer themselves.<\/p>\n Social technology (see “What Is Social<\/a>“) is not a fad.\u00a0 And Contextual Collaboration is key for business users.\u00a0 Combined with CRM, Contextual Social CRM brings tangible bottom line results to the innovative business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For decades, CRM (primarily used for SFA) has been \u201cthat critical application that really is not used.\u201d\u00a0 This is because CRM is typically top-down […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-crm","category-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghosh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Then, 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