Death of a Rolodex
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Sales Force Automation applications are often plagued by low user adoption rates. There are a few reasons for this phenomena, however one stands out - salespeople are expected to do a lot of initial heavy lifting by entering their contacts’ information into the new application without any apparent value added for them. Traditionally, salespeople have associated great value to their "Rolodex" or list of contacts and still are quite reluctant to share this information with others, perhaps discounting the value of the relationships they have built with these people, which is not as easily transferable as data. One of the best approaches to solve this adoption riddle is to pre-populate a newly implemented SFA application with a full compliment of relevant contacts for salespeople use.
Yesterday I had an opportunity to talk to Marc Perramond who is the Product Manager for InsideView of San Francisco. The company’s SalesView product is utilizing semantic web tools to harvest critical information the support the sales process. The pro-active, intelligent Contact Management system is one of the most practically valuable applications I have seen so far that is made possible by following the Enterprise 2.0 vision. Contact information is a highly "perishable" commodity with a very short "shelf life" as population and careers are more mobile than ever. SalesView is monitoring, based on business rules, a number of public social networks and private (available by subscription) data sources to keep sales-critical information where and when you need it - "mashed" with your SFA managed pipeline.
Unfortunately I did not have a chance to see a live demonstration of the SalesView yet, but Marc’s explanation of user configurable business rules for people and event alerts and other functionality, has my mind racing with a number of opportunities for meaningful improvements to sales leads qualification processes and "sniper rifle" marketing campaigns.
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There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.