The Business Problem

In many companies today, the sales force is mobile and distributed. Most road warriors need instant access from their mobile devices like the BlackBerry® to updated information that is locked behind the corporate firewall—and they need it fast. They need to know when critical sales information, such as Pricing Guidelines, Product Specifications or Product Launches have changed. And because one sales transaction typically involves multiple interactions with people, they need to be plugged into various teams across your organization—and even the world—for support: marketing for collateral; services for customer support; technical sales engineers to help with demonstrations and customizations; and domain experts to help them close deals.

The IGLOO Software Solution

Using IGLOO to create a corporate social network for your sales team is a cost effective and efficient way for your sales force to access and contribute to rapidly changing information, and connect with vital resources at any time, from any place. Mobile sales staff can quickly and easily build an online sales support network to help them close deals faster. It also prevents them from wasting time looking for the most current version of:

• Pricing guidelines
• Product specifications and new release information
• Contracts
• Corporate policies and procedures
• Terms and conditions
• Marketing collateral, such as presentations, demos,brochures, and more…

Since the average person spends 3 hours a day looking for information, this adds up to potentially 720
wasted hours per year, or 90 working days. Add to this the sales opportunities lost and this significantly
impacts a company’s bottom line.

Manage your Knowledge, Expertise and Business Relationships

Blogs and forums are great tools to share customer stories, customer recommendations and win/loss insights which can be reused by any employee who has contact with your customers. A recent report cited that sales reps are most likely to connect with subject matter experts through unstructured, peer to peer exchanges, such as blogs and forums (Aberdeen Group: Sales 2.0: Improved Productivity Through Internal Collaboration).

Wikis–online pages that can be collectively edited and modified in real time–allow sales reps to share knowledge and collectively generate databases of supporting materials like training manuals, for example, to bring new representatives up to speed, improve communications and close deals. Wikis present sales reps with a flexible forum for informal Q and A's, and more.

Every sales person in your organization can create and update their own professional profile, outlining specific knowledge, skills and expertise related to their work. This vital information is accessible through a private LinkedIn-like social directory–so that experts within the sales team or your entire organization can be easily located, contacted and even added to an individual’s peer list to help do their job more effectively.

All information within your corporate social network can be searched, bookmarked, commented on and subscribed to (email or RSS) by any authorized sales person. This allows your entire team to be “in the know” when relevant information, such as pricing or product specifications, change. Your sales team is guaranteed immediate and secure access to the most up-to-the-minute information and to the people they need to help them do their jobs. So less time is spent looking for relevant information, and can be spent on building important relationships and closing deals.

Integrated Calendar functionality can be added to the sales support network to coordinate, organize and track business meetings, tradeshows and other events. Use IGLOO to schedule a yearly calendar of events and store and share any information related to an event. Your sales team can subscribe to the event calendar and receive email updates (instantly, daily, weekly or monthly) when new events are added. After an event has happened, information about the event can be stored to build a “best practices” repository—reducing a duplication of efforts and providing valuable “lessons learned” for your sales force.

Sales managers can monitor individual activity within the network such as who is blogging, commenting, contributing and accessing vital sales tools. There is no more “I didn’t receive” the memo or email update. Managers can set up private areas for storing, managing and collaborating on highly sensitive materials such as sales forecasts, commission plans, strategic planning documents and performance reviews.

Links to supporting technology, such as customer portals like salesforce.com, can be added to your corporate social network, to round out your corporate social network to gives the sales team instant access to critical customer information.