It's no secret that many industry sectors are still plotting ways to get the best out of social media. Whilst many view it as a way of promoting themselves to a big audience the opposite side of the story is it allows the audience direct access to your dressing room after the show (so to speak). Whilst performing in front of millions is one thing, gaining crucial feedback after the set is just as vital.
The problem is it's difficult to take all the feedback. Look at the England team for example. Some fans can probably offer some genuine insight into where they went wrong. Most fans would probably just offer some expletives. Sieving through this has always been a problem but imagine the power in the hands of a pharmaceutical company, or a retail giant, if they could get valuable feedback directly from clients without the need to set up workshops or expensive market research projects.
With automated media monitoring sieving becomes possible and therefore so does listening to the consumer, as opposed to just yelling things at them from the rooftop. Being able to search quite literally for a needle in a haystack without any of the manual work is quite simply a priceless tool. Imagine the power of spotting a few complaints of side affects after taking a drug, early after release, or finding out a crucial component of the product you sell doesn't seem to work, before losing millions on the production line. So, as a platform for exposing your company, yes, social media is powerful. But as a platform to listen from, and to put yourself in direct contact with the consumer, social media is invaluable.
We've all done it (at least I hope we all have, otherwise I'll come across quite weird here...). Say you're at a party somewhere and someone starts talking about a holiday to Cuba. You're pre-empting everything they're saying because you've already seen the pictures on Facebook, you read the Twitter updates. As a matter of fact, it feels like you were on this holiday! You start jumping in adding your two pennies' worth to stories 'remember when you smoked cigars on the beach front?' before realizing you should probably calm your enthusiasm somewhat.
But knowing where to lead a conversation can be really, really useful, especially in a sales scenario. I saw an example a while back where a sales manager's potential customer had appeared on a television show and won a pretty competitive competition that of course, he'd be dining out on for some time to come. It got a small mention on a local online resource but no where else, no where major. Now if you're a sales guy and you've got a meeting with this potential customer would you normally know that? If you hadn't read the source (a likely chance) and you hadn't seen the programme than why would you?
But automated sales intelligence picks this up and gives you the knowledge just days before you meet. Of course, if you turned up, met, and just didn't mention it, that's not to say the meeting wouldn't go well. But imagine how much better it'd go, how much more he'd take to you, if you mentioned the show and sent him down a road of retelling the events. It's personal. It's shows you care. The next sales guy then might not mention it at all and just go about his business with no personal interaction. Who is the potential customer most likely to remember?
There are many ways to illustrate a point, but seeing as it's Friday, I believe a hapless bunch of individuals trying to load a jet ski into a van is the way to go. This video is proof that if you don't plan things, prepare, think things through, you're never going to get anywhere. Know what you're up against...In this case weight and water.
What's known as a landslide. You're about to see another one
Prepare yourself for an alarming fact...Or at least a mildly interesting one you probably already knew. 86% of enterprise users are not satisfied with their search experience, and that's according to Google! 86%! Believe it or not, 86% aren't happy trawling through endless data, killing hours and hours of time which could be spent doing something much more productive...Actually, when you put it that way, how are 14% happy?!
Knowledge workers, still in the opinion of Google here, waste an average 2 hours a day trying to find the info they need. That's 25% of an average working day and 10 hours a working week. Quite simply, far too much time.
This trend can not continue. Data will only continue to grow and eventually it'll be impossible to track manually (if it isn't already, which arguably, it probably is). Improving search is not the answer, improving software is. Making it easier for consumers to sift through the data is not the answer, delivering relevant insight directly to them is. Manual search is not the answer, automated search is.
Watching the screen flash up this morning to one of my most frequently visited news sources telling me that they too had decided to hide behind a pay wall was extremely disappointing. What I don't like at all, is the way we're being made to feel like we were stealing before, shamelessly consuming content and offering nothing in return.
I'm sorry though, that simply isn't the case. A pay wall, in my opinion is an absolute cop out of a solution to a problem that has been rumbling on for some time now. Yes, I know that papers are struggling to survive on advertising revenue alone and yes, I appreciate that without changes there could be nothing at all, but simply barricading yourself up behind a pay wall and hoping for the best lacks creativity and goes against everything the Internet stands for. It's the free and vast information on the web that has made it such a glorious success.
It gives consumers a negative vibe to your product, it seems desperate and most importantly it gets regular viewers looking around for alternatives. That's certainly what I'll be doing for the aforementioned site. We need to be really careful what road we're going down here. Everyone seems to have started jumping together and quite simply, where does it end?
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A recent debate on Linkedin saw 147 responses to the question 'what is the number 1 critical mistake sales people make in the sales process?' 30% of respondents claimed 'lack of listening caused by too much talking' was the issue. This is a fairly understandable issue as the natural instinct when faced with a high pressured meeting is to defend your product and promote the positives.
But let's be honest here, the customer doesn't care about your product. The customer cares about solving the problem they have. That's their number one priority. It doesn't matter if it's you that solves the problem, they just want it solved. So going in all guns blazing telling them how wonderful your product is and how well it's benefited others is never really going to impress, because for this particular client, past successes are irrelevant. If you can't deliver on their problem, they're not interested.
Which is why using trigger events immediately gives you the upper hand. You've arrived at the meeting knowing roughly what the problem is, where the gap in the organisation lies. It's then up to you to learn more about the issue, gather intelligence as to what the real pain is and adapt your product to suit the need, rather than fit a square peg in a round hole. The number one advantage of your product might not necessarily fix this problem, but another element might just. Entering a meeting with the focus on the customer's trigger event, apposed to your view on your product, instantly puts your mind in the right place to think this through.
Read a really interesting post on the Inflexion point blog today comparing a sales pipeline to that of the somewhat troublesome BP pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico. Whilst Barack Obama may not want to tie your sales pipeline around your neck and squeeze real tight (an action he'd happily pursue with the BP version and their directors), I can see the correlation. There are leaks, there are clogs and as BP are finding out to their considerable cost, things don't always go to plan.
Naturally, I scoured the advice to prevent these issues, looking for where sales intelligence and automated media monitoring had a space in the solution. It came with the point 'Qualification should be a continuous process'. The principle here is that nothing ever stays constant. The company you pitch to will ultimately be a very different company you eventually sell to. Actions and events will occur during the sales cycle that will change relationships, needs, wants and desires.
Research you do on a company before the initial contact will be outdated by the time you come to closing the deal. It is up to you to keep on top of events and continue to track elements that could make or break your deal. BP didn't have the luxury of monitoring their pipes deep under water, and only noticed the structural flaw in design once the chaos had started. And make no mistake, this will cost them billions. Businesses are fortunately in a position to react much quicker, and make no mistake, they can save a heck of a lot money doing just that.
In a world where 'interacting with the customer' has supposedly never been so easy it's amazing how many companies still have absolutely no idea how to handle feedback and discussion on the mass scale of the social media filled web. It's all too easy for someone to say go track Facebook, or Twitter, or the blog network but just because these things are there and available doesn't necessarily make them easy to navigate. 8 million people walk around London everyday. You wouldn't ask someone to go out and gather insight from all of them would you?
The social networks are platforms for people to communicate opinion, but ultimately you're only interested if it's opinion on your product. Joe Bloggs might only ever make one comment on your product, but it might be a very valuable one. Problem is, you can't manually track Joe Bloggs forever, waiting for that moment of user feedback.
The sheer scale of content like this is giving organisations a big incentive to use automated media monitoring software. In an ever increasing space finding your customer will become a pivotal tool for companies looking to respond to user feedback. Yes, you can set up places for people to share their views but that means they have to come to you first. By simply using automated spiders able to detect key content at key times you're going directly to your customer's insight. That is very, very powerful indeed.
To have Gartner recognise you as a 'cool vendor' in their CRM sales category is pretty cool in itself. Not that I've taken the cool thing to heart or anything, although I have been on Urban dictionary this morning catching up with my slang so don't be surprised to see some street lingo coming at you from now. Word.
But in all seriousness it's fantastic to be noted for what's described as our use of semantic matching technology accelerating business sales performance. This is becoming a really exciting market space and daily developments are showing staggering solutions to the very real issue of data overload.
Someone recently (apologies, I forget who it was so you can't take the credit!) described being fed automated sales intelligence as constantly being on the offensive, rather than just holding your own, or worse still, being on the back foot. The value of having exactly the right information at exactly the right time is swiftly being realised and well, we're cool now, oh yes. To quote the famous wordsmith Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli (aka 'the Fonz') Eyyy!
This is hands down the least technical quote that'll you probably ever hear on this blog (you can hold me to that) but I recently asked an Ipad buyer the advantages of the new Apple device and their exact quote was 'well, it's just like a big Iphone isn't it.'
Make no mistake, if the draw of an I-PHONE was to make phone calls, bigger would certainly not be better. Apps are compatible for the Iphone, and are therefore easy to use, so that's not the 'needs to be bigger' issue. So that leaves web access being the key reason as to why bigger is better in this respect. Using the Internet on the Iphone has always been clunky and the IPad provides a greater platform on which to browse whilst on the move.
Apple yesterday announced 2 million unit sales since the launch of the IPad. And that's before it's released in many countries. That doesn't bode well for print media. The message here is that people are happy to consume web news on the go and with automated web search now able to hone in on news relevant to the user, this trend is only going to go one way.
