by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
A colleague and I were with a customer a CEO of a customer yesterday and we we were talking about how we use Social to run our business. I’m not talking Twitter and Facebook here, I’m talking about using Social internally.
We have all worked for businesses where email is the way that the company was run. In my previous corporate role, I used to get 120 emails a day. That’s not a boast but an admission of failure. I remember bringing a customer in a for a meeting and to take them to the meeting rooms you had to walk past the “sales floor”. This one customer said to me “why is this floor so full of people, don’t the sales people have customers to go and see?” The reality is that the company was run on email. You would get to work in the morning and start sending emails, you sent them until it was time to go home. Then you sat on the train on the way home and did email on your Blackberry or iPhone.
This email culture is seen right across business today’s much so much so that it’s seen as “normal”. The danger with this is that normal is comfortable. Leaders mistake employees sitting at desks being busy as being productive. Busy, mayn’t be productive. And normal is often difficult to change.
Let’s take an example, one of the pleasures of a quarterly business was the close plan.
Each deal closing that quarter, needed one close plan and they all needed to be inspected. The call would go out from Sales Operations that close plans were needed and a deadline set. That would unleash as torrid of back and throwing emails as sales people said either their deal wasn’t closing after all. Gulp! Or the various versions of close plans would go backend forward. Plus, with the added dialogue.
Your company may not be as big as our, or maybe yours is bigger, but with 80 deals closing, that was a lot of back and forth.
Of course, it would then be time for a deal review. So which version of the close plan are we working from? No idea. Which version have you checked? No idea. I’m not saying that sales people would use this “sleight of hand” to hide anything but the first 10 minutes of a deal review was wasted as people searched for the correct version. Or the correct version was circulated and people opened up email to find it.
I realise that for some people this seems like a business in control, as email is a crutch we can lean on, for me this was a business out of control. There were too many unknowns, too many places to hide and there was no real inspection.
What was the solution?
We implemented social.
Not Facebook, Twitter etc, but internal social.
We created a discussion as we called it, in Slack it’s called a channel and the sales people were told to put their close plans in there.
The first thing it did was create conformity. There was always one salesperson who wanted to do the close plan in Excel, Word or whatever version of Microsoft Office we hadn’t asked for it in. There was the Salesperson on Apple who would submit it in Apple format. Somebody else who wouldn’t like the format. This all stopped. As all of the sales people could see each others close plans they stopped messing about and submitted in a single format. As all the Close Plans were in one place you can see which sales person has not submitted one. You can always see, all the versions that have people have submitted. You always have the most up-to-date version at the deal review.
You have a full audit of all the discussions. Only the people who need to see the close plans can see them, so you don’t have the endless copy all emails. You can also take yourself of conversations if it’s not relevant.
By this small action, we took back control of the close plan process
I asked the Head of Sales Operations how much time this saved “oh about a day a week”. We saved Sales Operations 25% of their time, increased our forecast accuracy and got a grip on the quarter end close. Not sure I can attribute won deals, but there certainly is a business case in terms of saved time and more efficient and effective processes.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/when-your-product-is-in-a-hole-stop-digging/
https://dlaignite.com/what-happened-to-the-marketing-basics/
https://dlaignite.com/what-can-golf-teach-us-social-selling/
