Social: Enterprise Collaboration using Salesforce CRM and Chatter
I. Welcome to the social networking revolution
It is abundantly clear that social networking is forcing businesses to rethink the way they do everything from prospecting to customer service. Businesses are now finding ways to tap this technology and energy in ways that enable their teams to collaborate more effectively and easily in real time and across geographical barriers. Using virtual platforms and new software applications, teams can now share ideas, conduct research, and plan/implement new programs. Sales managers are now able to more quickly track and coach performance to drive behavior change. Executives can now have the latest metrics at their fingertips in real time as they are being generated by salesmakers. Nowhere is this more evident, not to mention more successful, than with salesforce.com‘s collaboration enablement platform known as Chatter.
II. Chatter enables enterprise collaboration leveraging social media strategies.
Salesforce.com, based in the Cloud and offering real time access to any type of business data your team wants to store and track, offers the perfect opportunity for leveraging social networking to drive business collaboration. It was only a matter of time before Salesforce developers came up with Chatter.
Chatter allows sales organizations to leverage the data that is already resident within salesforce.com to create profiles and groups, give and receive status updates across multiple activities, customize information feeds to help monitor current projects and issues that affect your high priority targets, and share and work on documents with team members from a secure, centralized platform. Using Chatter, sales teams can quickly collaborate on opportunities, accounts, contacts and projects. Managers can "follow" those items most important to them proactively and gain insight into opportunities and obstacles and coach appropriately.
III. Chatter produces measurable productivity benefits
Organizations that have rolled Chatter out to their teams report:
• 39% increase in collaboration
• 52% boost in efficiency finding information
• 56% increase in their ability to effectively manage customer information
• 36% increase in customer responsiveness
• 27% reduction in meetings
• 30% reduction in email traffic
All of these benefits have a direct impact on productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness that goes straight to the bottom line.
IV. Baker Communications leverages Chatter to help enable cloud coaching and sales plays
Baker Communications Cloud Coaches leverage Chatter to follow the activities of each team member over the life of a sales play. They can observe and evaluate what is going on with each team member as they work on each opportunity and provide coaching to them at any point during the life of the play. At the same time, sales managers also learn how to deploy Chatter with their teams, ultimately leading to greater ROI for each play.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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