Business
Finding the right person within your organization
Understanding who knows what inside today's modern organizations can be an exercise in frustration, especially when you're trying to get things accomplished in tight timelines. Social software that delivers insight into the community can help by making it easier to find the right person. SAP's Scott Lawley explores how, by leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured, computed, and put to good use to improve collaboration.
Note: The following is a guest post by SAP's Scott Lawley that explores how to find experts in an organization in a social intranet/community context. I will be running guest posts on social business and Enterprise 2.0 topics a couple of times a month going forward. While the commentary is the writer's own, I am selecting them if I believe they have an important point of view. - Dion Hinchcliffe
As a manager of the SAP Community Network, my relationship to the Sales and Marketing organizations within SAP is very close. While marketing understands the value proposition of online communities, values such as customer support cost reductions, lead generation, brand awareness, go-to-market campaigns, and etc., the sales organization is often left scratching its head. At a very basic level, online communities almost by definition provide a solution to the demands of a Marketing organization (i.e. grow the brand).
As a manager of the SAP Community Network, my relationship to the Sales and Marketing organizations within SAP is very close. While marketing understands the value proposition of online communities, values such as customer support cost reductions, lead generation, brand awareness, go-to-market campaigns, and etc., the sales organization is often left scratching its head. At a very basic level, online communities almost by definition provide a solution to the demands of a Marketing organization (i.e. grow the brand).
Sales, however, has a different story. The sales organization is rewarded for selling. Period. Sales reps are generally held accountable for deals closed and revenue targets on a quarterly and annual basis. In this case, online communities do not provide a solution.
Well, perhaps that is not entirely true. I know that online communities can play a significant role in the solution. The challenges the Sales organization have are a general misunderstanding of online communities, lack of business practices to allow for outside-in influence, and lack of tools necessary to make sense of the complex information and relationships that exist. At the surface, these problems seem to be fundamental and easy to solve. Any IT person would simply offer to implement a Jive community system to provide the tools necessary. Community managers could provide extensive hands-on training to sales reps. Sales executives could change their reward structure to motivate their sales reps to be more active in online communities. But at the end of the day, the sales rep still will not use the online communities. Why? Because online communities as they are today do not help sales reps close more deals. About a year and a half ago I was on a team that explored this problem in detail. The key objective was to deliver real value to the sales organization. We conducted a series of interviews with various sales reps across multiple geographies to discover how they work, the challenges they face, and specific problems with current practices and information systems. The key findings were very enlightening.- Sales reps only spend about 20% of their time at a desk. The rest is spent traveling and in front of customers. They specifically expressed the need for better mobile-enabled solutions; traditional desktop applications will not work. They also expressed the need for real-time access to information. Because they are travelling and visiting with customers, timely access to information is often critical in order to successfully close deals.
- Sales reps primarily look for two things within the organization: topic experts and answers to questions. While sales reps have broad understanding of the products and solutions that they sell and can help customers throughout the buying decision, they may lack in-depth, technical knowledge to address all of the questions a customer may have. Additionally, sales reps often want to have topic experts participate in customer visits. Therefore, access to the right topic experts within the company is essential.
- Trustworthiness: This is a measure of a person’s connectedness within a social network. Connecting with individuals is an expression of trust. For example, connecting or following people on a website is an explicit connection. Comments or likes on a blog or forum post are implicit relationships. This data is used to compute a person’s connectedness, which in turn infers the level of trustworthiness.
- Extent of Knowledge: exhibited by the quantity of content contributed by a person on a given topic relative to the rest of the community population.
- Communications Skills: a composite measure of grammatical correctness of all published content and total number of internal and external speaking engagements.
- Willingness to Help: a composite measure of the total number of contributions, including posts, comments, and ratings, and the organizational closeness of the expert to the person seeking an expert.
- Experience: a measure of the total time of postings and projects on a given topic.
- Currency of Knowledge: a measure of the most recent postings on a given topic.
- Awareness of Other Resources: a composite measure of connectedness within and outside of the organization and the number of systems / communities to which a person contributes content and participates as a member.