Social CRM Best Practices - Part 3: social sales collaboration

In todays post I write about something not available yet but in my mind will change the sales collaboration/crm market somehow. So for the best practice part, it’s an outlook how things may evolve in that area.

For the upcoming spring’10 release of the popular salesforce.com CRM solution salesforce announced something called “chatter”. Please have a look at the demos first:

Overview

Sales Cloud

Until now Social CRM has been defined as getting social with your prospects/customers on facebook, twitter etc. Nobody talked about getting social inside your organization. Now, with the advent of salesforce chatter, getting social with your co-workers, sales, marketing and services teams/systems and prospects/customers becomes reality.

Most CRM systems today are either record-based (open one customer record at a given time) and navigate to all related data from there or they have been process-based, where one had to follow (more or less) complex process chains.

Both styles had their problems:

• in the first case, it’s hard to get yourself an overview (360°-View anyone?). Apart from that, you won’t get any information that someone is working on some record you don’t monitor at the moment. How often do you hear the question “why didn’t you ask me?”
• for the second one, it depends on the area, where the system is used. If you hav a large call center with standard processes, it my be ok to have strict process chains. But in sales organizations (e.g. B2B capital-intensive goods) most sales people don’t want fixed processes. They want support from systems but don’t want to work through fixed processes.

Now there is chatter. salesforce.com in combination with chatter brings both worlds together. You have a record based CRM with light processes and you have the social flow and status updates from co-workers, records, systems and even prospects/customers. chatter provides a social platform layer for salesforce:

Never miss a sale only because you didn’t know someone is in touch with a prospect. No more E-Mails with “hey does anyone have information about project or customer XY?” - just ask your followers and/or follow the project and get status updates!

The possibilities are endless.

I can imagine chatter is big fun when set up properly. The next generation of workforce will demand something like chatter because they are used to it from their private life (facebook, twitter, Buzz, [insert the next big thing here]).

For me, salesforce chatter will be a big hit. salesforce has once again pushed the limit. Others need to follow soon.

I’m looking forward meeting the salesforce people at Cloudforce in Frankfurt, Germany at March 23. to “chat” about chatter :) Hopefully chatter will be available on my development account by then!