Corporate social network for sales service
Our Russian corporate client is as cunning as you are. If you think you can fool him in anything, be sure that he thinks the same way. The sales manager is an intermediary between the customer and the production service, so he must work on two fronts. Here are some ways to save his time and energy with a corporate social network.
We continue a series of publications on the application in various industries and for different roles of corporate social networks (CSS). We have already written about the use of KCC for banks , distribution networks and the oil and gas industry . But about the use of role, we wrote a little, only about project management . Today we are restoring the status quo a bit - we are talking about scenarios for using the KCC for the sales service. My experience as a sales manager almost all the time lay in the field of corporate sales. In this regard, these examples mainly reflect the work with corporate clients. But we will also mention examples from retail sales.
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So who is the sales manager? First of all, it is the person who has to convince the customer to buy your product. This is the face of the company, the more meetings he has with the customer, the less time he spends in the office. But it happens that the number of internal issues is comparable, or even exceeds the number of external issues by an order of magnitude. It:
It turns out that the sales manager is the face of the company, and he is also the intermediary between the client and the production service, so he must work on two fronts. This is a significant investment of time and energy. What will help save time / energy and succeed in sales? Below are a few examples of using the KCC.
The life of the corporate client team. Suppose you work with large corporate clients - you have several such clients in the list or one. You sell him everything your company can produce, as you go along, from a few people to a few dozen people in the sales process. Each new person needs to explain the context - with whom and how to communicate, what can be said and what cannot. You can spend tons of time on these explanations, or you can simply create a group to work with this client and keep all internal communications in it. Each new person brought to the group will look at the previous history of working with the client - and he is already in context. Just tell him what you shouldn’t put on paper and go ahead.
Another aspect of working with a large client. Our Russian corporate client is as cunning as you are. If you think you can fool him in anything, be sure that he thinks the same way. Here is a typical client-side divorce: he tells you that your colleague promised him an additional discount, and he told your colleague that you promised to sponsor a pilot project, or that you support his additional discount. If a client communicates with you and your colleague faster than you communicate with each other, he enters disinformation faster and leads his game. You will be saved by the fact that you are in the same information field with colleagues using a corporate social network. It is even more interesting when they change the sales manager himself - the new client’s manager will tell you that it turns out you owe him money, not him. I personally observed stories when millions were lost due to inconsistent teams or simply misunderstandings of the context.
Search for information at the request of the client. Suppose you want to sell your innovative product to some large customer. Until you show him that the risks are minimal and someone has already bought this innovation, you will not sell it. In general, it is important to find not marketing, but real, information on sales of your product anywhere in the world. Where do you find her? In a large organization, it is almost impossible to break through all sorts of hierarchies and find bits of real information, rather than distorted marketing slogans. In this situation, the corporate social network saves. At the moment, it is the only search tool for the entire organization in any large company.
I will give an example from practice. I needed to learn the experience of our foreign colleagues about new sales methods. For example, I wanted to know why the largest oil and gas companies acquire corporate social networks. But the problem was that it was almost impossible within a reasonable time to find someone who 1) was in the subject line, 2) worked with the right customers, and 3) was ready to answer your annoying questions. This is in the presence of several hundred corporate portals and multiple mailing groups. It was impossible to find the necessary portal of the society working with the oil and gas sector, and questions to the mailing group ended in either silence or angry “Stop reply to all!” Replies, and with a copy for all. Of course, it was possible to catch the right people at corporate events, but this is a question for several months, but I wanted to quickly. I was saved by our own corporate social network. I threw the question into several groups in which, it seemed to me, there was a chance to get an answer, and waited. And for a couple of days, through the second or third hands went out to the right person.
Meetings Read about an effective way to conduct meetings here . Applies to the sales service in the same way as the other divisions.
Sales forecasts. Suppose you are the head of product sales. Your product is sold by sales of several sales departments. This week they have already reported to their leaders and are very reluctant to meet at your meetings. Then you make an Excel file, post it on a file resource and ask everyone to enter their piece of information, which they do. But here Kuziavra (*) appears, and at the very last moment it turns out that the data has disappeared somewhere. Saves laying out a report in the corporate social network. You just post the document to the network group for the sales department and that's it! Now all versions are tracked, any disappearance of data now has its surname, name and patronymic. Personalization of responsibility greatly helps to improve the quality of sales forecasts.
Exchange of experience between sales managers. Departments and directorates for working with corporate clients hold regular meetings. During the meeting, smart salespeople listen attentively to what their colleagues say, they don’t need a corporate social network. But in retail organizations, salespeople (also called the front office) make up half of the company's employees. And most of them are remote, they are at headquarters, it’s good if they appear once a year. The corporate site does not save them, because they are not worried about the formally official, but internal insider information - who, what, how successfully sold, what actually helped to calm the frustrated client, and why this product is not to be offered, and what products are asked more often at the central office? And so on, you know.
I remember the story from Microsoft. Sellers have learned to ask questions in Yammer and answer in the same place. And one of them wrote about his positive experience about the client, whose top management regularly makes visiting sessions, discusses the current state of affairs there, plans a strategy, etc. Since the times of crisis - the client is not a sin to save on the road. And then Microsoft offers to visit its Technology Center. We agreed this way: for the first two hours, Microsoft representatives talk about their innovations in the customer's industry, and then top managers are left alone in the conference room reserved for the whole day, have their discussions, pick up the flipcharts at the end and run home from Belorusskaya metro station, by the way . The idea is so simple and elegant that I still wonder why no one ever thought of it before? Even more surprising, if it were not for Yammer, I could never know about it!
Adaptation of new managers in retail. Imagine that you are a young student who wants to make money on a new iPhone. You go to a retail distribution network and hire a sales manager, such as mobile phones. Come to your workplace on the first day ... and get into a vacuum. The store manager forever settles any questions on the phone, your colleagues are busy themselves, you are a competitor for them, because yesterday there were two of them, and with you there were three of them, sales per person became less. What to do in this situation and how to talk with a client - you have not been taught yet, in a couple of weeks you realize that you don’t really need this iPhone, and in general the work of a sales manager is some kind of stupid. And leave.
Leaving new employees during a trial period is a big loss for retailers. To avoid this, you can install an application on mobile devices of new employees, which is essentially a corporate social network, only supplemented with training scenarios. And if all of a sudden you didn’t cope with the task of today, your manager will know about it tomorrow morning, break away from his business and help you with advice. And on the same mobile phone you will see that before the award you have two more iPhones left to sell during the current week. And then you can buy your own!
The last example is a bit of the future and requires creative refinement of your corporate social network. But all the others cited in this article are real and easy to implement. Use on health.
Vladimir Ivanitsa
viva@supereon.ru
(*) Kuzyavra is a character who eats everything in your fridge and remains unnoticed, because if you interrogate all your family members, they will tell you that no one touched anything. Nobody ever saw Kuziavra. If you put video surveillance on the refrigerator, it will leave. No one will then blame everything.
We continue a series of publications on the application in various industries and for different roles of corporate social networks (CSS). We have already written about the use of KCC for banks , distribution networks and the oil and gas industry . But about the use of role, we wrote a little, only about project management . Today we are restoring the status quo a bit - we are talking about scenarios for using the KCC for the sales service. My experience as a sales manager almost all the time lay in the field of corporate sales. In this regard, these examples mainly reflect the work with corporate clients. But we will also mention examples from retail sales.
')
So who is the sales manager? First of all, it is the person who has to convince the customer to buy your product. This is the face of the company, the more meetings he has with the customer, the less time he spends in the office. But it happens that the number of internal issues is comparable, or even exceeds the number of external issues by an order of magnitude. It:
- Reporting, sales forecasts, pipeline review, forecast meetings, etc .;
- Presale - when it is necessary to raise the resources of the company in order to carry out work for which the customer has not yet paid and may never pay. Run this entire insider and get people to work for your customer;
- The need to resolve disputed issues between the customer and all other representatives of your company: engineers, technical support, consultants, even the project manager.
It turns out that the sales manager is the face of the company, and he is also the intermediary between the client and the production service, so he must work on two fronts. This is a significant investment of time and energy. What will help save time / energy and succeed in sales? Below are a few examples of using the KCC.
The life of the corporate client team. Suppose you work with large corporate clients - you have several such clients in the list or one. You sell him everything your company can produce, as you go along, from a few people to a few dozen people in the sales process. Each new person needs to explain the context - with whom and how to communicate, what can be said and what cannot. You can spend tons of time on these explanations, or you can simply create a group to work with this client and keep all internal communications in it. Each new person brought to the group will look at the previous history of working with the client - and he is already in context. Just tell him what you shouldn’t put on paper and go ahead.
Another aspect of working with a large client. Our Russian corporate client is as cunning as you are. If you think you can fool him in anything, be sure that he thinks the same way. Here is a typical client-side divorce: he tells you that your colleague promised him an additional discount, and he told your colleague that you promised to sponsor a pilot project, or that you support his additional discount. If a client communicates with you and your colleague faster than you communicate with each other, he enters disinformation faster and leads his game. You will be saved by the fact that you are in the same information field with colleagues using a corporate social network. It is even more interesting when they change the sales manager himself - the new client’s manager will tell you that it turns out you owe him money, not him. I personally observed stories when millions were lost due to inconsistent teams or simply misunderstandings of the context.
Search for information at the request of the client. Suppose you want to sell your innovative product to some large customer. Until you show him that the risks are minimal and someone has already bought this innovation, you will not sell it. In general, it is important to find not marketing, but real, information on sales of your product anywhere in the world. Where do you find her? In a large organization, it is almost impossible to break through all sorts of hierarchies and find bits of real information, rather than distorted marketing slogans. In this situation, the corporate social network saves. At the moment, it is the only search tool for the entire organization in any large company.
I will give an example from practice. I needed to learn the experience of our foreign colleagues about new sales methods. For example, I wanted to know why the largest oil and gas companies acquire corporate social networks. But the problem was that it was almost impossible within a reasonable time to find someone who 1) was in the subject line, 2) worked with the right customers, and 3) was ready to answer your annoying questions. This is in the presence of several hundred corporate portals and multiple mailing groups. It was impossible to find the necessary portal of the society working with the oil and gas sector, and questions to the mailing group ended in either silence or angry “Stop reply to all!” Replies, and with a copy for all. Of course, it was possible to catch the right people at corporate events, but this is a question for several months, but I wanted to quickly. I was saved by our own corporate social network. I threw the question into several groups in which, it seemed to me, there was a chance to get an answer, and waited. And for a couple of days, through the second or third hands went out to the right person.
Meetings Read about an effective way to conduct meetings here . Applies to the sales service in the same way as the other divisions.
Sales forecasts. Suppose you are the head of product sales. Your product is sold by sales of several sales departments. This week they have already reported to their leaders and are very reluctant to meet at your meetings. Then you make an Excel file, post it on a file resource and ask everyone to enter their piece of information, which they do. But here Kuziavra (*) appears, and at the very last moment it turns out that the data has disappeared somewhere. Saves laying out a report in the corporate social network. You just post the document to the network group for the sales department and that's it! Now all versions are tracked, any disappearance of data now has its surname, name and patronymic. Personalization of responsibility greatly helps to improve the quality of sales forecasts.
Exchange of experience between sales managers. Departments and directorates for working with corporate clients hold regular meetings. During the meeting, smart salespeople listen attentively to what their colleagues say, they don’t need a corporate social network. But in retail organizations, salespeople (also called the front office) make up half of the company's employees. And most of them are remote, they are at headquarters, it’s good if they appear once a year. The corporate site does not save them, because they are not worried about the formally official, but internal insider information - who, what, how successfully sold, what actually helped to calm the frustrated client, and why this product is not to be offered, and what products are asked more often at the central office? And so on, you know.
I remember the story from Microsoft. Sellers have learned to ask questions in Yammer and answer in the same place. And one of them wrote about his positive experience about the client, whose top management regularly makes visiting sessions, discusses the current state of affairs there, plans a strategy, etc. Since the times of crisis - the client is not a sin to save on the road. And then Microsoft offers to visit its Technology Center. We agreed this way: for the first two hours, Microsoft representatives talk about their innovations in the customer's industry, and then top managers are left alone in the conference room reserved for the whole day, have their discussions, pick up the flipcharts at the end and run home from Belorusskaya metro station, by the way . The idea is so simple and elegant that I still wonder why no one ever thought of it before? Even more surprising, if it were not for Yammer, I could never know about it!
Adaptation of new managers in retail. Imagine that you are a young student who wants to make money on a new iPhone. You go to a retail distribution network and hire a sales manager, such as mobile phones. Come to your workplace on the first day ... and get into a vacuum. The store manager forever settles any questions on the phone, your colleagues are busy themselves, you are a competitor for them, because yesterday there were two of them, and with you there were three of them, sales per person became less. What to do in this situation and how to talk with a client - you have not been taught yet, in a couple of weeks you realize that you don’t really need this iPhone, and in general the work of a sales manager is some kind of stupid. And leave.
Leaving new employees during a trial period is a big loss for retailers. To avoid this, you can install an application on mobile devices of new employees, which is essentially a corporate social network, only supplemented with training scenarios. And if all of a sudden you didn’t cope with the task of today, your manager will know about it tomorrow morning, break away from his business and help you with advice. And on the same mobile phone you will see that before the award you have two more iPhones left to sell during the current week. And then you can buy your own!
The last example is a bit of the future and requires creative refinement of your corporate social network. But all the others cited in this article are real and easy to implement. Use on health.
Vladimir Ivanitsa
viva@supereon.ru
(*) Kuzyavra is a character who eats everything in your fridge and remains unnoticed, because if you interrogate all your family members, they will tell you that no one touched anything. Nobody ever saw Kuziavra. If you put video surveillance on the refrigerator, it will leave. No one will then blame everything.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292232/
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