This morning at the Sales 2.0 Conference, Michael Dunne (Research Vice President, at Gartner) gave a powerhouse presentation densely packed with ideas. In part, he talked about how to best approach business strategy and sales team operations/processes in today’s environment of social CRM. Michael discussed the potential of social CRM in two ways:
External opportunities: prospecting, collaboration with customers, researching prospects, social listening (often in more business-centric sites to pick up ideas and contacts), frontline research (grabbing and pulling information on events and accounts, and distilling them so that a salesperson can “have a level of credibility that is better than a five-minute Google search).
Internal opportunities: look to subject matter experts (i.e.product managers, contract management team, or other peers), LinkedIn to recruit new hires.
As far as leveraging social CRM for internal use, Dunne cautioned that salespeople need to be set up so that they don’t get “overwhelmed by participating in too many communities.”
