How managers and vendors can help drive Social CRM

(Dec 14 2009) CRM Blog

Categories:
Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

Authors


  1. By Chris Bucholtz, CRM Blogger

    In talking to sales professionals, it’s clear that there’s an understanding of how social media can help them. But there’s also a disconnect. Although many of them have integrated social media into their personal lives, they haven’t quite grasped how to do that in their professional lives.

    This disconnect presents managers with a great opportunity. Rather than waiting for reps to devise their own social media strategies and implement them on an ad hoc basis, sales managers have a chance to design new processes for using social media and social CRM and to encourage their reps to embrace them.

    Just as it’s been tough to get sales guys to use CRM, it’s going to be tough to get them to make the jump to social CRM – but I’m betting this jump won’t be as difficult, because most of them have familiarity with social media. They know how it works, but now they need to know how it works at work, so to speak.

    That becomes the manager’s job. He’s got to let them know that it’s okay to use on the job, and he’s got to figure out how to use it best within his organization’s sales processes. In many cases, this will come in the form of identifying a point in the sales process where the use of social CRM can help accelerate deals. Then, he’s got to insist that reps go and look at this data before they progress beyond that point in the sales process. If he’s picked the right point for the right data, the results should speak for themselves.

    That means that the sales manager’s job just became a little more difficult – he now has to be the guy who understands what tools are out there and which ones are right for his situation. In order to encourage his reps to use social media, he’s going to have to be the evangelist – and you can’t evangelize unless you’re an expert on the story you’re telling.

    For vendors trying to tap this market, there’s an opportunity here, too. That’s the opportunity to lay out some use case scenarios and do some concept education targeted at those managers. They’re the people advocating for the technology; that role no longer belongs to IT, which is still where many vendors tend to focus. IT can help with nuts and bolts issues, and also advise on strategic issues, but social CRM works only when it’s oriented around users and the customers they interact with.

    If a vendor can get the sales manager speaking his language, and the manager can speak to his reps and be understood, that vendor then has inroads into not just a sale but into a successful deployment where adoption is high, sales improve through the use of sCRM and, ultimately, builds a profitable customer relationship.

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