by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
When I worked in the corporate world, I was lucky to work for a sales leader who “got” Social. Not in a “I say I understand because I need to politically”, but in actual deeds.
As somebody once said to me, “in leadership, somebody that “gets” Social is a competitive advantage”. But that, my friends, is a blog for another day.
This blog is about how we use social internally to power our start-up.
Some of you may recall the CEO of Atos, Thierry Breton, announcing he wanted to be a zero email company and certainly this is something we are striving to do. In this blog I will outline the benefits and the business case.
For more details on the Atos case, here is a Forbes article.
Why Atos Origin Is Striving To Be A Zero-Email Company via @forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidburkus/2016/07/12/why-atos-origin-is-striving-to-be-a-zero-email-company/#54f9b2e98d0f
Why Social?
DLA is a social-only company. We help companies understand the business imperative both at a strategic level (say for example, your management team don’t “get” social), we have created Intellectual Property and run sessions to change all that. Outputs include a social vision and ROI. The ROI is fluffy, the CEO will get 1,000 followers, but a $ figure in-terms of an incremental (net new) revenue uplift.
We then drop down into departments say, marketing and sales, through our world class social selling programs, but also HR, Supply Chain… changing the processes from push to pull.
Anyway, enough about us.
What Social Platform?
We use Slack, but I understand there are products such as ‘Jive’, Microsoft’s ‘Yammer’ and Facebook for work. I’ve not used them myself. There are also products from enterprise software vendors such as ‘Chatter’ from Salesforce and Oracle has the Oracle Social Network (OSN).
I know this all sounds complicated, but if you are a user of WhatsApp or Facebook (and I’m guessing you are), then using social at work is as easy as that.
The Problem with Email
Email is such a “time suck”… it’s a great, easy to use communication channel but it’s now at a point where external and internal spammers steal your time.
How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you are on a mailing list(s) and it sends you irrelevant information, or the “copy all merchants” where two people are having a 2 way conversation, but still copy everybody in. At my last company, I would get over 100 emails a day… probably only 20 had any relevance. I recall that I was given advice when I joined the company that “managing the deluge of email, was an acquired skill”.
But Social is about chatting with your mates and posting photos of your lunch, right? Wrong.
If you think about Facebook, you are only in the groups and connected to the people you want to be. You can join and leave groups. You can tell Facebook which groups you want or don’t want updates from. You can be connected to people. One of the features I like is “unfollow”, where you can be friends with people, but don’t have to read all the drivel they post. You are in control of what and how much and what type of data you consume. The same is with internal social.
Let me walk you through some ways we use social… it’s applications are limitless.
Business Issue: Sales Forecast Accuracy
We all know that sales forecasts are accurate to plus or minus 100%. I jest, but there are parts of your business that would agree with that. So how, as an organisation, can we get 95% accuracy or better? Especially when dealing with vagrancy of sales people and the unpredictability of the buying process in 2017.
Very simple.
For every “large” deal or where we see a sale needs extra focus, we open a discussion. This is a private conversation for the people involved in the sale. And you can add people as you go along. For example, you might want the pre-sales person on the conversation from the start, but then want to introduce legal towards the end. (The benefit of legal is that they can see all of the history of the conversation, without having to be involved in every deal).
Each salesperson contributes to the conversation and updates after sales calls etc – this is extremely useful if we are working across lines of business (XLoB). It also allows people to collaborate outside of prime selling time (PST). How does this help with forecast accuracy?
Where we are closer to winning deals, there is always a flurry of activity, a “vibe” to the conversation. Where as, if there is a deal where it is obvious there is an element of “making up the numbers”, there is no activity. Subtle difference, but makes a massive impact on how we forecast.
Lead Generation
In organisations today, most people in sales and marketing, telesales, telemarketing etc are required to contribute to the lead generation process. In different companies the number of leads generated may vary, but with a conversation on the leads generated, this makes clear to everybody who is and who is not contributing. It also helps with leads being double counted (I’ve often seen it, but it doesn’t happen in our company of course). That is salespeople claiming the leads of the SDR. It is also good to give Senior Management access to this, so they can get a feel for leads generated and overall sales contribution.
Product Launches
Launching a product (even in our company of 12) requires you to work across the company as people bring their different skills. It also allows you to crowdsource ideas and communicate where you are and people can update their actions. In an email driven world, people can write long emails (that nobody ever reads), where as the short form of social, forces people to get to the point. Of course, only the people involved in the product launch need to be part of the conversation.
Returning from Maternity Leave or Long Term Sick Leave
Returners can get up to speed and start contributing quicker by being added to the relevant conversations, allowing them to see the discussion over time. In the email world, you might flick them a couple of emails. In the social world, they can sit and see all the “twists and turns” that might have happened. I’ve seen a product launch involving a maternity returner and she was contributing in days, not weeks. This is a massive saving to the business in terms of productivity.
Getting New Starters to be productive, faster
We have a group for new starters and of course all new starters can see the comments from the previous new starters. I have no idea what goes on in there but they tell me this gets everyone to be productive, quicker. For many large organisations it can take 9 or 12 months to get new sales people contributing, my view is that anything we can do to shorten this time will have a massive financial benefit to our business.
Shorting the time of Meetings
I’m sorry I cannot reduce the number of meetings, but I we certainly shorten the time taken for meetings. For most (not all) meetings, a conversation will be set up before hand. This allows the attendees to collaborate and crowdsource ideas before the meeting.
In the email world, I’ve seen meetings take place where people turn up and actions are taken (that nobody actually completes, but that’s a different story). Where as in the social world, I’ve been to meetings where people take completed actions from the crowdsourced discussions. Again increasing productivity.
Business Case
There is a McKinsey report on using social internally. Read it here:
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/taking-the-measure-of-the-networked-enterprise
Here is an analysis of that report: https://www.margolis.co.uk/enterprise-social-networks-study
Would be interested to hear any of your experiences, good or bad, that you may have after using social internally.
We are a Social Media Agency. We do three things: Social Media Strategy,Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.
