Confessions of a technophile

I recently caught up with the folks at Oracle who gave me a glimpse of the company's Social CRM products that integrates the social networks of sales reps into existing CRM systems, even those from Oracle's rivals.

Oracle's Social CRM portfolio comprises the Oracle Sales Prospector, Oracle Sales Campaign and Oracle Sales Library. Sales Prospector is now available, while the other two are expected to be released at a later date here.

CRM is often seen as the most likely candidate among enterprise applications to be enabled by Web 2.0 tools. As customers become more comfortable with social media, they'll be using Web 2.0 tools to seek out information about a company's products and services from others in their community. Indeed, such platforms to enable conversations among customers about products and services are beginning to emerge.

Several months ago, I was approached by ProCompare, a New York City startup that has built a platform to link technology buyers, consultants and IT experts in the SMB market, for potential opportunities. With communities like ProCompare, sales reps will be pressurized to seek as much information from their colleagues. Employing social media tools to tap into the collective knowledge of the enterprise will reduce prep time and effort in meeting the needs of sales prospects.

According to Sathya Prasad Rai, senior director for Oracle CRM On Demand in South Asia, Asean and India, Oracle Sales Prospector is aimed at sussing out this information from the an enterprise and its partners.

Leveraging on network effects, Oracle Sales Prospector uses business analytics to combine internal customer data (such as purchasing history and product profiles) with external information sources to propose qualified sales leads. IMHO, the next phase of development for any kind of social CRM application would be to find a systematic way of mining conversations on external business social networks such as ProCompare and LinkedIn.

While Sales Prospector is focused on sales leads, Oracle Sales Campaigns lets you create, share, manage, and track the effectiveness of email campaigns. Users can build campaign templates from scratch or use a colleague's templates for a similar campaign, complete with tags, comments and ratings. Similarly, sales reps can also share presentation slides with others through the Oracle Sales Library.

Before you jump on the bandwagon, remember the most important thing is to first foster a knowledge sharing culture. The success of the social CRM assumes that sales reps will share information with one another. Competitive pressure to top the sales figures for the month is likely to discourage sharing. What companies can do is align the reward structure for sales reps with collaboration. This will provide incentives for knowledge sharing and collaboration since each sales rep will want to increase the overall revenue and profits for the company - and their individual share of it.

Also, consider appointing an Enterprise 2.0 champion to communicate the benefits of social CRM. If sales reps feel that social CRM is a just another management fad, adoption is likely to be lackluster. Finally, it's important to develop metrics to gauge success. Some potential metrics to consider include lead conversion rate, sales cycle time and quota achievement rates as a result of the use of social CRM.