Last week I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion on SocialCRM and its uses by experts and practitioners at The Harris Products Group, CRM Essentials, and Bentley Systems. I warned the audience that our topic lent itself to waxing a bit creative.
Greg Langston, VP Sales at Harris Products Group, shared valuable insights on Sales Discipline, Sales Leadership, Partner Channel Management and how those disciplines are enhanced with SocialCRM enabling processes.
"For example, take a pipeline of 15 opportunities Sales is working on, with a gestation period of 'good start', 'stalled', or 'monetize that' assigned to each. Pushing the information about how many "stalled" opportunities exist - and then providing key data, actionable resources, and enablement of collaborative selling can move the opportunities forward."
Greg shared how he sees SocialCRM as the ability to push to the customer, information about on-time shipments, returns, and quality issues, for example, all without the customer having to ask for it.
Brent Leary, Partner at CRM Essentials, our resident SocialCRM think-tank in one person, shared his view of SocialCRM:
"Its how you find, catch, and keep customers in a social world." That's a maxim to memorize and keep close at hand. Brent favors a systematic approach to SocialCRM - where many are focused on the "flash" of social; he recommends sticking to the meat and potatoes: getting sales right, getting marketing right, providing excellent customer service, and using emerging best practices in social as your guideposts.
Leary also presented an executive session at the Insider 2011 event, on "Why CRM Champions Must Embrace Social Media Concepts" where he emphasized the importance of trust in Social Media; he also called "Customer Service: The New Marketing." I spoke to participants in the event from Bridge-X acknowledging Brent Leary: "his presentation and that quote was one of the most gripping takeaways from the conference."
Kiran Koons, Strategy and Architecture for CRM at Bentley Systems, shared Bentley's own creation: "Be Communities" strategy anchoring their SocialCRM initiatives. Be Communities is the Global Network for Infrastructure Professionals where practitioners share their experience. Bentley employees can internally see and share from a common knowledge base - minimizing duplication of effort - while promoting customer loyalty. There are ready solutions at technician's disposal for handling issues. With Be Communities, "followers", "Likes", and information about service tickets are easily tagged, and content sharing is socially friendly. Sales request can be made from within Be Communities, tracked in CRM, and ratings & rankings may follow.
So there you have it: three experts, SocialCRM served up three ways: opportunistic, succinct, and creative!