While the following examples are based on the experience with the social business applications from Xeesm, it demonstrates in an interesting way how businesses can leverage social media today, way beyond blogging and tweeting. The following use cases are grouped by 8 categories including Sales, Marketing, Partner Collaboration, Product Management, Logistics & Supply Chain,  HR and the executive bench.

(1) Sales Contact Management
Sales teams use Xeesm to keep all their clients in one place. Like the old address book where they had street address and phone number, the modern day sales people know the LinkedIn profiles, Twitter names, Facebook pages, Slideshare Accounts, YouTube channels, Bookmarks and more about their clients to truly socialize.

(2) Outbound Call Centers
Sales teams also use Xeesm as a replacement to the old cold calling processes. Instead of calling 100 people a day, being able to leave 20 voice mails and reach 3 people, the social sales outreach connect with people in the social web, connect and develops a more social and therefor more successful relationship.

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

I did some research over the past 12 month correlating customer experience and profitability.
The result in a nutshell:

1) You won’t find a company with a great customer experience that is not profitable
2) You may find profitable companies with a mediocre CM
3) You will find that all companies with a below average customer experience have no track record of profitability over a longer time period.

Take Cisco, Salesforce.com, Star Bucks, IBM, Apple, WholeFoods, Zappos, Virgin… You find the correlation of a great customer experience, corporate culture and profitability across all industries, technologies, B2B, B2C, producing companies, service organizations or reselling businesses.

I tried to understand the motives, processes, influence factors and desire to change a certain situation within an organization towards a better customer experience:

1) Organization
Investor driven organizations or engineering driven organizations have the cultural focus either on the shareholder value side of the world or on the technology side of the world. Business driven companies have the cultural focus more on the customer or market side of the world.

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

This post was inspired by an Australian Law Firm raising the question for Social Media Laws – given a series of risk that were stated on the companies blog. And as more and more company officers wonder how to deal with it and what kind of rules to establish and what kind of measures IT should take, I thought about the approximately 500 Million People who discuss those companies, their teams, products or services and how some LAW could stop the conversation:

1) Adding a statement on every advertising that customers shall not share or redistribute, discuss or blog about the particular advertising they were confronted with. Could be in a similar way like the drug industry is doing it.

2) Phone systems shall add to the phrase “this call may be monitored ….” the phrase, “you agree to not discuss, share or redistribute parts or the full content of the conversation you are going to have with any of our employees, agents, call centers, partners or anybody directly or indirectly related to this call in any media otherwise known as social media”.

3) Customer contracts may need to be augmented that a user of the product is not allowed to share the experience with the product, adjacent products, the company, the partner or any other third party the company is associated with, in any media in particular social media.

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

Can yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are,the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef,but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuot slpeling was ipmorantt!

If you cuold raed tihs you deonmsrtaetd you are ideend open minded. Tihs is acutllay iopmtrnat to ptraiicapte in the Scoail Mdeia Adacmey Calss.

Sitll wrroeid aoubt scoail mdeia – hpoe this hepled :-)
Aexl

http://xeesm.com/Axels
(my scoail ntewroks)

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

2008 - One morning…
… a small group of sales and service people from Company-Red realized that they could go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Groups and YouTube and get a list of all the people who were discussing the good, the bad and the ugly about their products. After spending some time and doing some digging, Company-Red realized that this list was not small but more like 50,000+ names. And they were shocked to see how these names looked a lot like their customer list. That was a frightening idea.

One general said “Hey, this is a huge threat – because anybody can get the same information. Frggin Social Media is a wide-open and completely accessible public space. As a matter of fact, this is even worse than publishing our customer list because the comments and postings actually describe our new products, they discuss what we do right and why they bought our products in the first place. Worse, they expose all our weakness – and some of that stuff we don’t even know ourselves.” The Chief of Staff consulted some experts and Company-Red launched Operation “Big Dig”.

Read more »

Indirect partner channels contribute over 65% of the overall business in the tech industry. Vertically or geographically focused integrator, reseller, consultants and other experts are the economic driver behind that industry.

If vendors want to have partners ’ship’ like this:

Than those partners need to have a bridge (vendor bridge) like that:

Asking partners to fill out deal registration forms on partner portals is just no longer acceptable. Successful partner organizations are running big ships and have on average 26 vendors some even 100. Making them successful means: Make it easy for them to navigate around the business oceans.

With the inception of web 2.0 and social media, partner collaboration can be taken to a new height. Not only that the older ways of doing things are really boring – they are also not efficient.

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Much has been said about sales in the social web. All the way to “the end of sales”. The ever selling species may have just tipped over, being so salesy that they are just making no sales anymore. To the contrary they argue rightfully that quota pressure and old processes just don’t allow them to be successful. Regardless, who is right or wrong – sales people are probably the most social people in a company.
I guess sales people will remain to be important middle men and women between customer and a producing organization. But the reason for being important and successful is changing with changes in our mega connected business society. The following white paper may provide some inspiration:

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.

* Lead qualification is nonsense because there are not enough leads.
* Cold calling is less and less effective as nobody returns the call.
* You no longer see inquiries because prospects google their stuff.
* Email lands in spam filters and advertising is ignored
* Reference selling is old because clients find the real users of a product themselves in groups, online communities or blogs like this.
* Consultative selling is limited as you are no longer the most trusted person – nor is media or the “independent” analyst
* When a client comes to you – they know what they want and what price they are willing to pay.
—> Step 6 of 7 “NEGOTIATION” in your old sales book is today actually your step 1 because the other steps were skipped by the customer.

The sales process you follow was developed 20 years ago and it matched with the buying behavior from back then – but no longer today. The CRM systems you are using was built around those old processes – no big help either. There is just no way in heaven that you ever are successful with your old sales tool box.

Or did I miss something?

Read more »

Just a few days ago we presented why John Chambers (Cisco), Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Richard Branson (Virgin) are engaged in Social Media. Every day another of the big leaders is joining – not following but leading into a major change in our hyper networked business society.

Motives include brand protection, information gathering and distribution, understanding and learning from each other. Braking down old competition barriers actually create new ones. If you are more open than your competitor – you will be more competitive.

Social networking was leading into social media which is leading into social competition. And while competition itself is more social there will remain be winner and looser. Like Indra Noovi from Pepsi Co stated “We have to be very careful, one mistake is around the world very very quickly” .

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Read more »

Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.