Category: sales effectiveness

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Mmmm…Dogfood. Introducing “Haystack.”

(Please note: Haystack links in this post have been updated since the original posting, in order to point to currently correct sites.)

If you look over to the right, you see the Social Customer Manifesto. It’s all about putting the customer in charge. REALLY putting the customer in charge. So, we’ve built something that lets customers take a significant step, and allows them to explicitly define and state the types of relationships they want with their service providers. Most significantly, this gives a customer the power to navigate profiles of individuals in an organization and choose with whom they want to work, as well the ability to be matched with individuals within the selling organization based on similarity of their backgrounds and interests.

We’re calling it “Haystack.”

What’s been broken with so-called “Customer Relationship Management” systems so far is that, well, they don’t really focus that much on the customer, do they? Under the rubric of “CRM,” there have been three primary classes of systems: sales force automation, customer service and call center automation, and marketing automation. All of these look at the world from the seller’s point of view. And all of them focus on how the vendor can crank more customers through a particular process in a given unit of time. They don’t necessarily help to truly build relationships between individuals. In fact, they are more likely to commodify it.

There has been a considerable amount of research done in this area, and there in an increasing body of data that suggests that building this kind of “enterprise social network” has measurable benefit for both customers and vendors alike. Perhaps the cornerstone of recent work in this area was done by Lichtenthal and Tellefsen, and is called “Toward a Theory of Buyer-Seller Similarity.”

“These findings suggest that internal similarity [perceptions, attitudes, and values] can increase a business buyer’s willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson’s guidance, and therefore, increase the industrial salesperson’s effectiveness. In contrast, the literature also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity [physical attributes and behavior] will exert a negligible influence on a business buyer’s perceptions or a salesperson’s effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to ‘think alike’ than ‘look alike’.”

(n.b. The Lichtenthal and Tellefsen paper has an outstanding reference list that significantly confirms their findings.)

In a nutshell, here’s how Haystack works:

Howitworks_1
(click to enlarge)

In addition to trying this out ourselves, we’re starting to have some great conversations with folks like Collective Intelligence and Seedwiki about how this idea can grow.

Similarly to how Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are developing their book, Naked Conversations, out in the open, we are following a similar path with Haystack. We want customer feedback. We NEED customer feedback. (And we don’t want people to think we suck.)

Why we’re doing this? I think Peppers said it best here:

“Companies are faced with commoditized products. They’re faced with well-informed consumers who are bidding them against the competitors and are less loyal. The only real defense is creating a relationship with customers.”

To date, there just haven’t been tools like this aimed at the enterprise, that take this idea of creating real relationships between individuals and providing a means for customers to explicitly state their case, and determine with whom they want to do business at a real, interpersonal, non-synthetic level. So, we built one.

Naturally, a blog just for feedback about Haystack has been set up, and it is located here: Haystack Feedback Loop

[update] The Cerado Haystack Forum can be found here.

In particular, we’d love thoughts on:

  • Business Feedback
  • Technical Feedback
  • And, of course, (eeek!) bugs

This is going to be fun. Acorns. Oaks.

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Thinking About The Customer

Two great posts from Paul Greenberg at the PGreenblog, relating events during and after last week’s CustomerThink conference in Santa Cruz.

Paul writes, eloquently, about “the need to create the collaborative environment and tools to give the customer control over his own experience with the company.” (He also uses the word “betwixt” in the same post, which is reason enough to read it.) This really is the core, isn’t it? The core of relationships, of blogging, of podcasting, of all the different changes that are afoot with respect to social media, all relate to the fact that “control” by a company over a customer’s experience is an illusion. Ultimately, it’s the customer who is going to make the decisions…and the company that gives that flexibility in control to the customer will have an advantage over the one that doesn’t.

He also writes:

“Each person I meet has a story, a dream, an aspiration or twenty, a life, and just a complex sort of goodness and I don’t know, something very attractive about them as human beings. Sometimes I as well as I’m sure every single person reading this and those not reading it, tend to box them in to whatever they ‘do.’ ‘Paul is a CRM expert with a book,’ for example. That’s fine, but don’t you actually want to know more about many of those people?”

So well put. The “positioning,” the “brand,” the “story,” may pique initial interest. But it’s the messy, complex depth and reality of the individuals involved that builds the relationship.

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In Search Of Failure

“I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don’t work…Albert Einstein said ‘Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,’ and it’s a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal.” – Warren Buffett

Just tripped across the above-quoted sentiment and it just resonated. Am (still) reading Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect, and have just embarked into what is, so far, the best chapter I’ve read in a business book in a long time. It’s entitled “In Search Of Failure.”

Why don’t more folks take Buffett’s approach, and examine failures (both business and personal) more aggressively? Two reasons (says Reichheld):

  • Fear
  • Incapacity

Examining failure is culturally taboo. It means that “something went wrong…and talking about it might make me look bad.”

Get over it. Things happen. (Remember Windows 2.1?) Only by examining where things went wrong, can a business figure out what not to do the next time around.

This is of critical import with respect to customers.

  • Did the customer defect? If you don’t have a process in place to analyze that defection (an indictment of the organization’s inability to meet the customer’s needs), how can you prevent the next defection?
  • Did the prospect choose a competitor over your organization? Talk to them, and find out why. That way, the next time a similar opportunity comes up, you won’t make the same mistakes again.

We’re currently working on a large win/loss analysis project for a client. And…surprise…better conversations are actually taking place with the losses than with the wins. Better insight. More candid conversations (hey, the deal’s already lost…why beat around the bush?).

This approach is applicable not only to the win/loss process, but product development as well. We’re currently working on some new things (watch this space!) and, far and away, we’re learning more from the constructive, critical feedback we’re getting from customers than from the attaboy’s.

The bottom line? Listen to the customer. Embrace the failures when they happen. Learn from them. Make things better.

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Ow, That’s My Foot I Just Shot

Another great nugget from Fastlane from the post referenced here:

“My wife and I have had our share of issues with different dealerships. During our last purchase, in 2001, we were ready to close the deal on a Trailblazer. The salesman was great. However, before we could close we had to talk to the warranty salesperson. She would not take no for an answer. Good thing too. She convinced us that the vehicle was of such poor quality that it would require a $1000+ extended warranty. In fact, she was so convincing that we decided against the purchase and walked out of the dealership.” (emphasis added)

Heh. Oops.

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Internal, External Business Conversations

Hugh writes a great post about why business blogs can help organizations improve customer connections. (Updated to later illustrate that the concept is relevant in intra-organizational discussions as well.) The metaphor is that there is a membrane that surrounds every organization, and that membrane impedes real information flow and, with it, learning. The nugget:

Hugh: “The more porous your membrane (“x”), the easier it is for the internal conversation to inform the external conversation, and vice versa.”

In other words, if there is alignment, or “equilibrium,” between what’s happening inside the organization and what’s happening in the customer base, both sets of stakeholders will be better off. Customers will be getting what they want, and organizations will have happy customers. And, presumably, reasonable profits.

This triggered four thoughts:

  • The theory above sounds a lot like this.
  • For this to work, it can’t just be “conversation,” it has be the RIGHT conversation.
  • There is a flow to this. Flow 1 is “out to in.”
  • There is a second flow to this. Flow 2 is “in to out.”

So, first off, this sounds a lot like thermodynamics. I had to go look up the thermo stuff to put this post together, and then it made my head hurt (again, like it did mumblysomethingsomething years ago, the first time I saw it in school), so I closed that page quickly. But, I think a way to characterize this model is through paraphrasing that law into something like this:

“Insight spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered.”

Insight is good. Knowledge is good. Knowledge of real customer needs can help an organization do the right thing for the market. Knowledge of what a supplier is doing can help a customer make better decisions.

Another way of putting this…communication in this way changes the game from being zero-sum to being collaborative. Things tend toward zero-sum when information is withheld, and power and manipulation come into play. This changes that.

Moving onto the second point above, the idea of “conversation” needs some clarity. We’ve come to use the word “conversation” as shorthand for “folks who ‘get it,’ and want to work collaboratively, and want to share information, etc.” However, all conversations are not the same. More importantly, all conversations are not equal.

For this model to work, some conversational structure may need to be in place. If customers are clamoring for something (let’s say, a fad-ish feature in a product that may have long-term detrimental effects), the company can react in two ways. In the first case, the company can listen to those customers blindly, and deliver exactly what they want. In the second case, the company could try to explain some of the shortcomings of following that approach, and try to reach a middle ground where both parties agree, that results in a longer-term positive outcome for both sides.

Both cases reach equilibrium, but they are certainly not equal conversations.

Which brings us to points three and four above, the flows. There will be an increasingly strong “out-to-in” flow if a company is not meeting the current needs of its customers. If there is a flood of feedback going across that membrane from out-to-in, and nothing is being done about it, there is a sure bet that at some point in the future that organization will be in trouble. However, if that out-to-in flow is moderate and steady and is responded to with an equal in-to-out flow of information about how the company is responding, you can bet the company is marching ahead in step with where its customers are going.

The “in-to-out” flow, on the other hand, is a quite interesting one. Assuming the in-to-out flow is information-rich (and not a flood of the same-ol’-B.S.), the company is providing some insight and novel ideas to the marketplace. This is good. However, similar to the example above, if this flow gets too strong, the company may be outrunning its customers, and providing products or services that require change the market can’t yet absorb or isn’t ready for yet (see the Apple Newton for an example). In this case, the company should take a step back and perhaps slow down a notch and listen to what’s coming back in from the outside.

Food for thought.

Others commenting on this:

Lee LeFever
BlogSpotting (Heather Green)
Fredrik Wackå
Scoble

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Business Podcasting As A Competitive Intelligence Tool

The fine folks over at B2BMarketingTrends were kind enough to ask me to contribute to an article on the business uses of podcasting. In particular, they were interested in an answer to the question “How can podcasting be used to enable customer-facing personnel to stay abreast of what’s going on with competitors and to provide market intelligence?” The full article is here.

The four most salient points:

  • Podcasting delivers the information to users automatically, typically via a combination technology called RSS (for “Really Simple Syndication”). It is a simple program that regularly checks to see if any updated information is available. The user’s device automatically downloads this competitive information when it becomes available. This is in marked contrast to a “competitive intelligent intranet” that you must check regularly and navigate for updates, or a process that requires an individual to locate, print, and organize electronic or paper documents or e-mail messages.
  • The flip side of this is that individual users can choose to “subscribe” to only the particular podcasts within their organization that they deem relevant. So if an individual only wishes to receive information about a particular set of competitors, he/she can easily specify those preferences. With an individual’s attention already stretched thin as a result of e-mail overload (not to mention the problem of unsolicited messages, or spam, and a seemingly endless number of voicemail messages), the ability to receive only relevant, selected podcasts can aid not only in significantly improving productivity but also assist in reducing some of the challenges that information overload causes for sales team members.
  • Competitive intelligence information has an exceedingly short shelf life. Since podcasting ensures updates automatically, a sales team has the assurance of having the “latest and greatest” information that may be available. They can also update their podcasting platform by checking out resources like Agora.io for further information on this as well as see how they can better connect with their audience, customers, clients, etc.
  • Podcasts are, by their very definition, portable. But, more importantly, they allow people to “time-shift” to better fit their own schedules. Similar to audiobooks (which, according to National Public Radio, experienced double-digit growth in 2004), you can access competitive intelligence podcasts during a morning commute, on a subway, or while engaged in other activities such as jogging. So instead of needing to carve out time in an already hectic schedule to review and study the latest competitive information, this information can now be accessed whenever it is most appropriate for the individual (and it can be paused, rewound, and replayed as many times as desired).

Link: Listen To Information About Your Competitors…On Your iPod?

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Vespa To Launch Corporate Blogs

Article today in the WSJ regarding how Vespa will be launching a corporate blog ($), which will be penned by U.S.-based Vespa owners. According to the article, VespaBlogs.com will have “four bloggers will be selected to regularly contribute content about the products and broader lifestyle topics.”

A couple of salient points:

  • Initial statements seem that the bloggers will be be given relatively free rein — a “code of ethics” to which they will adhere, but it doesn’t appear that Vespa will have editorial control.
  • This is a great application, for the right company. Vespas evoke emotion and passion, and Vespa owners will be apt to build a community around these blogs.

This is similar to the work that was done for Knight Ridder Digital’s That’s Racin’ property, which is home to four racing enthusiast blogs:

(disclosure: Manifesto co-conspirator Lisa Stone worked with KRD on setting up the TR blog network)

Hopefully, Vespa will be emulate what was done here (in freedom-of-expression and clueful-ness, not in content, naturally), and the Vespa blogs will have the same type of authenticity and no-holds-barred direction that KRD has allowed their customers/fans/evangelists to pursue.

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Cerado Launches Business Blogging Practice

It appears that there must be some sort of as-of-yet undocumented “conservation of blogging” law. (Did you read that as “conversation of blogging,” the first time through? I did, and I wrote the thing. Funny how much power the word “conversation” has in this context.)

Rick Bruner has retired from Business Blog Consulting. Rick’s work in this area has been nothing short of impressive, and he states that “I think the mission of the blog has to a certain extent been accomplished.” For Rick and his blog, maybe. For the broad market, absolutely not. The work’s just beginning.

Through this blog, I’ve been writing about the customer-facing aspects of business blogging for a long time. Been thinking about it for longer. Been doing it through this forum, and sometimes here, and over here as well. Throughout this process, have been helping others get blogs up and running, in an ad-hoc manner. And now, it’s time to formalize things a bit.

With that long-winded intro (yes, I know I’m totally burying the lede here, but the context is important), it’s time to announce that Cerado has launched a formal practice around business blogging. This practice assists organizations in getting right the strategy, implementation, training, technology, execution, and continuous improvement metrics that are needed to use blogs as a tool to connect more closely with customers. Additionally, effective blogging often results in particularly strong SEO. This constitutes even more reason for businesses to embrace blogging. Due to the many positives of doing this, many businesses are looking to set up a blog on their site.

Aiding us in this effort will be Lisa Stone, who set up this blog network, and also set up this one, and who blogs over here (and here, and here), and who was instrumental in starting this as well.

This is going to be fun.

It’s been a blast figuring out the right ways to apply the rapidly emerging capabilities (both technical and social) of the blogosphere in the business context. (Things like applying the underlying concepts of podcasting behind the firewall are a particularly salient example of this.) And we’re continually figuring out new ways to bring the customer conversation into the enterprise, in an effort to connect customers and organizations more closely together.

This evolution is another step along this journey. And we’re excited to be taking it.

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Great Business Blogging Article From CIO Insight

Ed Cone has just published an in-depth article on enterprise blogging, entitled “Rise of the Blog” in CIO Insight.

A very well written piece. A particularly spot-on assessment was:

“By enabling comments on its blogs, Sun can get a look at what mix of customers, partners, developers and employees is frequenting its sites, and respond to them. Customers who used to interact only with their salesperson can now communicate with members of the product team.”

DING! This really is the meat of this conversation. Sun’s folks seem to agree.

Jonathan Schwartz – “There’s an immediacy of interaction you can get with your audience through blogging that’s hard to get any other way, except by face-to-face communication. There’s no other way any individual, never mind someone who’s running a company as large as Sun, could speak face-to-face with that large an audience on a regular basis.”

Tim Bray – “This is a fantastically effective listening device. Customers are coming to us directly as bloggers. People see us do something wrong or stupid, or missing a chance, and they tell us. We get dozens of comments a week that can help us, and they go to the right people—how else is a smart guy in Cleveland going to find the relevant person at a computer company with 30,000 employees?”

This is the vanguard of this thinking, and really is presaging a move towards real customer interaction, as opposed to the things that have been called “CRM” but are really tools for managing sales teams and the Street.

Another bit in there that really stood out was the reference that Jared Spataro of Open Text made regarding the internal use of blogs as a communications medium during the integration phase of M&A activities. (Would have liked to have seen more depth on this; it sounds like a great application.)

Of course, David Weinberger gets the digging quote, saying that “public-facing blogs with voices that sound recognizably human will kill the ‘pompous and inhuman’ tone used in much corporate-speak.”

Indeed.

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BusinessWeek Business Blogging Cover Story Nails It

The cover story of the current issue of BusinessWeek sums it up well: “Blogs Will Change Your Business.”

Reading through the article, the one quote that resonated (and continues to do so) was this one: “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.” It definitely feels like we’re at the inflection point; about to hit Geoffrey Moore’s chasm with respect to business blogging.

A couple of interesting tidbits:

Tidbit 1 – BW has launched blogspotting.net, their own actual, honest-to-goodness blog to cover the emerging area of blogs and business. To Heather, Steve, and the rest of the BW team…nice job!

Tidbit 2 – They also did a nice job pulling together a quick list of things to consider when launching a business blogging initiative. (Unfortunately, BW buried the link in a place requiring serious excavation in order to find it.) The highlights:

  • Train Your Bloggers
  • Be Careful with Fake Blogs
  • Track Blogs
  • PR Truly Means Public Relations
  • Be Transparent
  • Rethink Your Corporate Secrets

Boilers are stoked. Pressure is right. It’s time for this train to leave the station.

Although the quote noted above is spot on, the customer angle, and the “how are people really addressing business blogging” aspects were glossed over a bit in the article. (However, considering the article’s breadth, that’s understandable.) That being said, still would have like to have seen more case studies, and more examples of the different ways organizations are using blogs to connect with customers.