Having implemented your Social CRM marketing strategies, it’s time to complete the Virtuous Cycle by implementing a few strategies around sales. The marketing to sales handoff has always involved a certain amount of drama in my experience:

VP of Sales:  “I don’t have enough leads!”

VP of Marketing:  “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”

Much of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. (And no, I’m not going to dive into the even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to sales). That’s up to each organization to decide – but unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there’s going to be trouble.

Clearly, the sales team is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like lead nurturing communities with lead scoring can help identify the buying interest before the sales team contacts the lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from marketing to sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold.

What do I mean by “more personalized information?”  The idea of ‘question asking’ comes readily to mind, but I am not talking about all questions. Many times leads will ask the same kinds of questions because the information they seek is not readily available. Answering those questions that are common across the entire market or at least across vertical markets should more likely be the purview of marketing.

But there will be some personalized questions or information needs. They go to the particular combination of business problems each prospect wishes to solve in the context of how they’re thinking about things. When the need for information becomes sufficiently personalized so that the answers are less and less useful to a broader audience, sales should take over.

Providing a social business process that facilitates the questioning and sharing of answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM for customer service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the expertise of your best subject matter experts – just as in customer service.

Imagine a living social “RFP answering” community. What if you took every question that came with an RFP and put it into your online community as a question (along with the answer) and the ability for others to ask more deeply about the question, or even to answer and discuss?  You’d have a powerful tool in your sales and marketing process! Ideally, your prospects and leads could self-service this rich information buffet. However, even if you’re filling out detailed RFP’s, such a knowledge base makes your own people that much more efficient at it.

Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment. Others would be the sorts of things you would make available only after you validated the person asking very carefully (don’t want to give up too much proprietary information), and so on. But being able to rapidly gather and disseminate the best possible answers would be a rich source of content. We follow similar practices at Helpstream. For example, after holding our Geoffrey Moore Social CRM Chasm Crossing Webinar, we published all of the questions asked, including many we didn’t get to answer during the webinar, including the answers as part of our HelpExchange Community.

What to do about the more personalized information that doesn’t make sense to go into the mainstream “RFP answering” community?  Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for the work products of professional services engagements and training. It beats the heck out of email, and creates a nice personalized information store where each customer shares their Helpstream-specific knowledge in a way that they can collaborate with us and any participating SI’s.

The same principle can be applied to the sales process. Imagine delivering RFP’s, price quotations, professional services SOW’s, marketing collateral, contact Information for key players and all of the other materials that make up the personalized responses to a prospect’s information needs. By gathering such information in one place, it becomes easier for everyone participating in the buying cycle to share information. When the prospect becomes customer, the same VIP Room can search for the ongoing needs of the private collaboration I’ve already described. The sales rep effectively becomes the coordinator and manager of the VIP Room during the sales cycle.

A good social platform needs a variety of capabilities to carry out such a vision. At the very least, it will need very fine grained permission to control who sees what. You don’t want to have to create full communities for each VIP Room. Rather, these should be easily created (hopefully automatically provisioned) gated sub-communities. Imagine a process that works like this:

• The Lead is nurtured until their lead score reaches a critical mass threshold (a lead score) of buying interest based on the content consumption in the Nurturing Community.

• Once the lead score triggers the threshold, a sales rep is assigned to that lead. The rep is automatically subscribed to the activity stream associated with the lead so they can see what they’re doing in the community. This makes it easy for the rep to start naturally engaging right in the community as needed.

• When the rep decides through direct observation and interaction that it’s time, the lead is promoted to an opportunity. A VIP Room is automatically provisioned and the lead is notified of their new VIP Room.

• Interaction proceeds with all the normal channels – email and phone –but the VIP Room is also there to facilitate. Ideally, all slide decks, Webinar recordings and other work artifacts go into the VIP Room for reference by the prospect.

At Helpstream, we refer to the opportunity for sales to understand much more context as “customer awareness.”  Interaction with a community brings about an unprecedented opportunity for customer awareness. Used properly, it makes it much easier to understand who is a near-term focus for new business, and who should be further nurtured before engagement. The days of being able to badger customers into becoming new business through constant hard selling are drawing to a close. Smart organizations are helpful, and they certainly ask for the sale… but they never badger.