When it comes to understanding and applying social technologies to solve business problems, Sameer Patel is at the head of the class. He runs Sovos, a company devoted to the task, and writes an interesting blog about connecting the enterprise using social technologies.
We first met in 1999 when I was building a very large sales portal. It required several technologies to support it. As I lacked the expertise to make those choices, Sameer came to the rescue. A year later later he came to my aid again when we embarked on adding collaboration technology.
A decade ago, social technologies were limited to file sharing, chat, directories and message boards. Today’s social technologies for internal business have come a long way – SalesForce Chatter and Microsoft Sharepoint, for example.
During the past year Sameer and I have talked through the intersection of social technologies and sell-side business processes – usually over coffee at Peets. He’s done a fair bit of development work in how to use social technologies to give sales and marketing a boost – enough that he’ll soon present his thoughts in his blog. I’ll post the link when it’s published.
Just how can an social technologies help organizations improve sales and marketing processes, and make them more effective?
One answer lies in making it easier for employees with complimentary expertise, interests and charters – no matter how geographically or functionally separate they may be – to self-identify and collaborate on common ends. There are, however, less obvious ways of applying social technologies to help businesses accomplish the impractical – if not the impossible.
Consider this: the way large firms choose markets, and allocate sales and marketing resources to them, has not changed in 70 years. Large firms achieve economic scale by mass producing the goods – and services – they sell. A firm may have thousands of SKUs on its price list but, as with automobiles, these represent economically manageable variations on a handful of product lines (color, horsepower, memory, disk drive capacity).
However, variation is the enemy of scale economics.
As Henry Ford said of his Model T, “You can have it in any color you want as long as it’s black.” Product line managers work the trade-offs between unlimited choice and financial sense. Engineers and designers devise ingenious ways to offer choice and variety at minimal cost (e.g. 250,000 apps for the iPhone, computer memory and storage plug and play design).
Marketing and sales coverage follow suit. Sell-side resources are allocated based on establishing market segments that yield the largest revenue at the highest margin. The largest multi $B technology vendors seldom stray far from segmenting markets in classic ways: geographic, Buyer size (SOHO, SME, Enterprise), Vertical (Pharmaceutical, Financial, Government) and by application or use case (payroll, patient records management, securities trading).
Multi-$B firms are build on the foundation of one-to-many. One-to-one has never been a scalable proposition.
Social technologies change this. Firms no longer need to abandon the long tail. Social technologies make one-to-few and even one-to-one market relationships not only possible, but profitable.
- Social media enable niche buyers to not only self-identify but, through wikis and message boards, band otherwise disparate buyers together to solve common problems.
- Internal collaboration technology similarly brings like-minded sales people, marketers, engineers and designers to work on market opportunities that lack the size to be officially blessed at the corporate level.
- Marketing and user support materials can be created through connected communities, and provided at negligible cost. Social networks including support websites, wikis, blogs and micro blogs do the job just fine. Vested interests drive the content and instill them with vigor.
Readying one’s firm for this is no small feat. It requires equal measures of vision, courage, commitment, and the willingness of managements to step outside their comfort zone. It also requires a willingness to take risk, accept that failure may occur, and to learn and try again.
None of this can happen with committed and forward-looking leadership. None of it will occur without hard work and a little luck.
Put Sameer’s upcoming blog on your ‘must read’ list. I can’t think of better brain food for those who want to change the economics of sales and marketing.
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