Igniting a Social, Mobile and Open Enterprise

Though some people seem still not to have noticed, business today is being driven by social networking ecosystems. In the last three years, social networking has rapidly accelerated beyond being merely a digital meeting place where people post pictures of their grandkids or provide regular updates about the temperature on their front porch. Social networks are now being used by customers world-wide to find solutions and meet needs in real time. More significantly, customers initially started doing this with almost no cooperation or support from sales and marketing organizations. It was the customers themselves who proactively formed interactive communities in which product information – including reviews and recommendations – was freely shared back and forth, much like it used to be shared in local neighborhoods when friends bumped into each other down at the corner market.

However, it didn‘t take long for savvy sales and marketing professionals to recognize the opportunity – indeed, the necessity – of joining the conversation and leveraging the power of social networking to reach new customers and drive more revenue. The reality today is that, almost over night, social networking has revolutionized the way companies interact with customers in a way that is transforming every customer- facing activity from marketing to sales to customer support.

However, there is another side to this revolution, one that until recently has been flying under the radar to some extent. We are talking about the way that the social networking revolution is changing the internal operations culture of many corporations. There are three components to this new cultural revolution, and together they can ignite the efficiency, effectiveness and, most of all, the bottom line, of your organization.

1. Social – This is clearly a critical component, drawing, as it does, on the technology and the energy of the social networking culture. 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.

2. Mobile – The social networking revolution was born on the PC/Laptop platform, but in recent years it has grown wings and migrated to handheld devices, beginning with smartphones (think iPhone and similar devices) and, just within the past year, to tablets (like the iPad.) These handheld devices make it possible for the tools and platforms referenced above to be accessed by team members anywhere, anytime. This next generation of social collaboration creates incredible boosts in productivity by enabling teams to share vital information more quickly and adjust critical activities in the need of the moment, eliminating delays that can lead to missed opportunities and lost revenue.

3. Open – This final component may be the most important one, because it is the primary driver of success in this brave new business world where rapid access to accurate, important information drives your competitive edge. These new social, mobile technologies make critical content immediately accessible to everyone on the team regardless of time zone or geo, which in turn generates valuable feedback and intel across the entire organization. Training, coaching, planning, data harvesting, assessment, and redeployment of important assessments and activities become simple and seamless.

Many organizations, including salesforce.com and Baker Communications, are developing proprietary solutions that take advantage of this new emphasis on social, mobile and open strategies. In future articles we will address these in detail, but for now it is clear that organizations that are moving the fastest to take advantage of social, mobile and open strategies in their operations are already gaining a significant competitive separation, and that gap will only continue to grow over time.

Action Items:

1. What use is your organization making now of social networking tools for internal operations?

2. Does your organization have a strategy for leveraging mobile technologies to help boost your team‘s ability to collaborate and share information?

3. How accessible is your social and mobile platform to your entire organization?

4. Describe the plan your organization has for expanding your social, mobile and open strategies over the next 12 months.
 

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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