All About Us

It seems to have happened overnight – a revolution in how we communicate with each other. It’s affected every aspect of business, and selling is no exception. While in some ways B2B selling may be the same, the plain truth is that today the old “advertising + marketing + selling = sale” model no longer works for many businesses. So much so that many companies, big and small, are utterly rethinking their approach to sales.

“I wouldn’t even call it selling anymore,” says Steve Mann, a onetime global vice president at SAP who now runs AbleBrains, a New York-based marketing consultancy. “It used to be ‘me’ and ‘you’” – that is, companies and customers – “and now it is all about ‘we’ and ‘us.’ You have to get that.”

In the Internet era, the playing field is indeed leveled. Small companies can fight it out with big ones, and the Davids can slay the Goliaths. But savvy big companies, too, can play the game and, increasingly, they are firing back and winning.

Although, most companies are probably stumbling as they implement community-selling campaigns. “I would say 90 percent of large companies are struggling to grasp the power of social media, but 90 percent of corporate leadership believes social networks are important to their business,” says James R.F. Berkeley, director of Berkeley Burke International and a London-based expert on social media.

“Few companies get this. The transition into community selling is often painful,” says Mann.

In reality, there is no textbook for succeeding at community selling. Companies are learning by doing and studying others that have made headway. And, yes, some companies get this right.

NEW COMMUNITY SELLING
Case in point: enterprise-software company SAP (scn.sap.com), whose online community numbers more than 2 million users drawn from 200 countries, says Mark Yolton, SAP’s senior vice president. SAP is active across a broad Internet spectrum. “We extend to Twitter channels, LinkedIn groups, Facebook fan pages, YouTube channels, Flickr groups, and much more,” says Yolton.

Most interesting about SAP is, in lots of ways, its home-brewed online communities, especially EcoHub (ecohub.sap.com), “an online, community-powered marketplace where customers can now more easily discover, evaluate, and initiate the purchase of software solutions and, increasingly, services from SAP and its partners. It is approaching 600 solution storefronts today,” says Yolton.

Here’s the irony: While EcoHub was intended to be a place to shoot the breeze and discuss issues, problems, and solutions, it’s turned into a significant point of sale. EcoHub, says Yolton, is ringing the cash registers at SAP partners: “Partners report higher visibility and a flood of leads they hadn’t seen from SAP before.”

And keep this squarely in mind: These are big-ticket purchases. “Some customers are spending twenty to thirty million dollars due to EcoHub,” says Dan Maloney, the SAP vice president who runs EcoHub.

Maloney adds that the real plus to EcoHub is that it’s a place customers go to for information that may eventually lead to a purchase. The draw is the information, the give-and-take. Conversations can get spirited, says Maloney, who adds that a safeguard is that participants are required to register with real names, a requirement that many business-oriented sites impose because it cuts down on the trash talk that overwhelms many online groups.

Another SAP tool: EcoHub now lets users rate solutions and advice offered by community members. Over time, this system lets the best community members gain more visibility.

The biggest stumbling block EcoHub presents for SAP executives is probably answering to nonemployees, i.e., partners, customers, and run-of-the-mill community members. Maloney acknowledges that there was much anxious head-nodding at SAP headquarters at first, but over time it’s become clear that the users genuinely want a community that is informative, where selling is very soft and the best solutions win. That, he says, creates exactly the kind of place where selling, in fact, happens as a by-product of the information the community shares.

Information, Please
At Logicalis, a provider of integrated information and communication technologies, Lisa Dreher, VP of marketing and business development, says that, unlike SAP, her company is not putting much energy into pursuing online community-based selling, but Logicalis nonetheless is very active online in terms of “trying to provide customers and prospects with the information they need to reach a buying decision.”

Plainly put, SAP’s EcoHub goals include hearing the cash register ring; Logicalis is focused more on the prelude to selling.

Logicalis gets to its goal in part by posting informative content on its own site, such as “Hope Is Not a Strategy” and “Data Centers: Best Practices.” But the company is also active on LinkedIn, as well as on Facebook, where the goal is to gain attention for thought leadership. The requirement to keep a high online profile ripples throughout the company. “I personally spend an hour or two a day in online communities,” says Dreher.

Many other Logicalis employees are similarly tasked; the company wants to keep itself in front of buyers. But just as important to Logicalis right now is helping buyers understand cutting-edge IT topics, such as data-center management and unified business communications. Both are important, but ignorance and worry are common regarding these issues, even in IT circles. An articulate, helpful online presence just may be the way to pave the road to more sales, suggests Dreher.

Blogging for Dollars
At Citrix Systems, a provider of virtualization and cloud-computing technologies, the company pursues an entirely different strategy for building an online community. At Citrix, it is all about the blog, says Chris Fleck, vice president of community and solutions development. By Fleck’s count – and three years into Citrix’s online-community push – Citrix now has 300 employees who regularly blog. “We started with twenty; now it has grown to three hundred,” says Fleck, who adds, “This is a very soft sell. It’s about information exchange. We do not call this selling.”

Employees are given few guidelines. Mainly, they’re required to keep the blog posts short and not violate Security Exchange Commission disclosure regulations. Otherwise, Citrix takes a hands-off position.

“Over half our blog traffic comes from people searching on Google,” says Fleck. That number rocks. What it means is that beyond the core community, Citrix’s blogs are winning new eyeballs that happen to be searching for trends in cloud computing, virtualization, and the rest of the Citrix blogging themes.

And Citrix builds community in still more ways: “Beyond the blogs, we have a number of employees who are very active on Twitter. They refer back to blog postings and, as appropriate, they also tweet about technical issues of interest to our community,” says Fleck.

Are the blog readers turning into customers? Again, right now Citrix is more focused on raising awareness than on closing sales as a direct result of the blogs. But, of course, there is also the belief that those who read the blogs are much more likely to buy Citrix.

Bring on the High Rollers
Skeptical that the top corporate decision makers scan blogs and Twitter feeds? There is proof that they do. “We have been very successful attracting C-suite executives to our online communities,” says Nicholas Kinports, digital innovation manager at Maddock Douglas, a Chicago-based agency focused on helping clients innovate. Maddock Douglas aims at very big businesses.

“We work for 25 percent of the Fortune 100,” says Kinports. Its contracts are big, often signed off by C-suiters, and the goal of the company’s online community, he continues, “is to enter into dialog with those executives, and we are doing it.”

No selling occurs on the site; that would happen in person. The site’s purpose occurs earlier in the pipeline: raising awareness of what Maddock Douglas does and possibly seeding relationships between prospects and key agency executives.

At Maddock Douglas, the highest-level executives themselves blog and post comments to the agency’s boards. In addition, Kinports says, “[Maddock Douglas bloggers] work hard to produce content that will engage top executives.” Puffery and hard selling are out. Thoughtful, detailed analysis of current business problems are in.

“We want to help people understand what we do, so we provide examples of how we think and why,” he explains. “We are investing in community at this site, and we are measuring the ROI in years.” Kinports stresses that he knows high-level executives – prospects and clients – are using the site. “We study the data, we see the traffic, and we know we are reaching our audience.”

Public Blogging
Most companies prefer building community on their own sites. LincWare, a small Rochester, New York-based developer of electronic forms (to replace paper), says it is getting good traction going another route. Daniel O’Leary, LincWare’s vice president of global solutions, explains: “We have seen really great leads and good discussion through an independent community site [aiimcommunities.org] that brings together our customers and competitors. We’ve had a few leads come directly from this.”

Adds O’Leary, “We don’t promote our products directly, although we regularly post links to our product pages. How we have infiltrated the zeitgeist of the content-management community is through providing quality, relevant information, based on what users are already looking for, that highlights our products. For example, there are repeated discussions about how to go paperless, so as a first step we often highlight our technology that replaces paper with electronic forms. My advice for other vendors is to find community sites that prospective customers visit, and provide quality information to them. If you do that, they will also want to learn more about your products and services.”

A reality for LincWare, which competes against such giants as Adobe and Microsoft, is that it does not have a large following. It is a scrappy upstart. That fact alone suggests that public forums, already trafficked by large numbers, might be the shrewder place to look for prospects, rather than try to lure viewers from a comparatively small base of users and prospects.

O’Leary also swears by Twitter, which he uses to drive traffic to the company’s blogs, but he says he also recently made a sale because of Twitter. “I saw a large medical center tweet that it was looking for a paperless vendor; they’d put out an RFP. I requested it. We pursued the business, and we won it. There is work to be found on social media.”

LinkedIn
Call LinkedIn the fast track for connecting to existing communities – no construction required on your part. Joe Melle, CEO of Throttle Media, a company that specializes in data sales and call-center marketing, says he personally belongs to 40 LinkedIn groups, which he mines relentlessly for contacts and leads. He also blogs and, of course, posts notices about new blogs to pertinent LinkedIn groups.

“What we are doing is relationship marketing through online media,” Melle explains. “It works. It is not easy; it takes a lot of time, but when you work at it, you see results.”

Jacqueline Schaeffer, director of compliance for Interactive Data, a Duluth, GA, seller of skip-tracing information to financial-services institutions and other lenders, says that LinkedIn is also key to her company’s selling. “LinkedIn is our number one online tool. We use it to build relationships. We meet people at trade shows, then back at the office our sales reps connect with them on LinkedIn. It’s a tool we use for staying in touch. It works.”

Fueling Word of Mouth
USAA, the big financial institution that serves the nation’s military, is proud of this number: “We have 100,000 Facebook fans, and we have done no advertising to get them,” says Rhonda Crawford, USAA’s vice president of digital media and innovation.

USAA’s other reality: “We have always been about word of mouth. Now [word of mouth] is online. For many years it was person to person, but it’s still word of mouth,” says Julie Finlay, a marketing manager.

USAA is aggressive about building its online communities. Up to 9 million members log on to its Website monthly (usaa.com), and many stop into targeted message boards to discuss USAA’s diverse portfolio of financial-services products – everything from checking accounts to car loans to life insurance.

But unlike, say, SAP, USAA has found that when members have questions, they want answers, not from other community members, but from USAA experts. So the company now has a staff of seven full-time digital experts, plus expert bloggers (blogging about, say, estate planning). Where appropriate, members can chime in with opinions and advice, but USAA is also quick to offer corrections to what it deems as off-target advice.

“We take our mission of member service very seriously,” says Crawford. She adds, “We are comparatively new to this space, but we are online because our membership is. Serving military are heavy online users, and they want us there, so we are.”

Crawford stresses that USAA does not see itself selling – not online, not over the phone. “What we do is provide information that helps our members reach decisions about what works for them. We do not sell for the sake of selling.”

Importantly, Crawford says that to date USAA has not trimmed other marketing budgets to find the money to fund online activities, “but that is something [USAA] may look into.”

The Paradox of Control
Easy as all this sounds, there is one obstacle: you, or your bosses.

“Traditional marketers look at all this, and they are troubled; they are afraid because they fear the loss of control,” says SAP’s Maloney. His advice: Learn to love the lack of control. “Relax, and watch what happens,” he says.

The reality is that control has already been lost. There are many, many online sites and forums on which users can talk negatively about any company. Trying to stamp it out is akin to trying to kill all the red ants that come tumbling out of a disturbed New Mexico anthill. It won’t happen. So understand that there is no control anyway, and enjoy the ride. “That’s how to start liking online communities,” says Maloney.

Whither the Sales Rep
Is this RIP for traditional sales roles? Don’t believe it. Roles will evolve (reps need to spend more time online, less time making cold calls that go nowhere). But the age-old adage still holds: Nothing happens until the sale is made. And that sale, pretty much all online-community experts concur, will continue to be made by reps, either on the phone or in person, especially for big ticket B2B and B2C items.

That may be the ultimate irony; despite community selling, the old-fashioned sales rep will save the day. Community selling may make it easier to sell by building strong ties to customers even before the first sit-down, but when the signature hits the dotted line, there will be a sales rep there. •