The first thing to recognise with pre-sales intelligence is that much of it is likely already there.

How to unveil it?  Well at Gilead, we provide training services.  And perhaps our interests would be served by concentrating upon the message that the technical training we provide in respect of sales research and social media will open the doors to many new customers.

However…

The secret to unveiling pre-sales intelligence potential really relies on something more traditional.  It is a thing called sales culture – organisational sales culture. 

In an age when front line resources have never been spread so thin, it is sales culture that will make the difference.  This is  especially applicable to small to medium sized enterprises. 

When we look for sales intelligence we seek to harness the energies of the best and brightest in any organisation.  If the people with these characteristics live outside the formal sales organisation we suggest that executive managers reach out to them.  We should discover available plurality leveraged off our brightest minds in order to grow our organisational sales and social intelligence base.

If we continuously exercise the minds of our best and brightest, the strongest benefit will always be the nurture of organisation-wide sales culture.

The optimum point from which to start nurturing that sales culture is during the build of pre-sales intelligence. 

The latter won't be best served by sending around an email asking the brightest among our young managers, operations, and customer service people for sales leads.  It means engaging and exercising those minds; and drawing out contributions by means of direct engagement in the pre-sales research process.

Therein we have yet another old idea writ new.  Moreover, the question we return to again, is whether large organisations have outgrown good ideas?

And how might small-to-medium sized organisations profit from it?

Recently, we spoke of the idea that social media derived intelligence gathering will inevitably decentralise.  

Corporate customers have rightly been wary of the potential brand consequences of the unwieldy combination of poor personal choice making among sales people and off-the-official record intelligence creation.

Some of the cloud based social media driven sales prospecting software providers appear to have noted that the corporate sector may be the lesser of their growth opportunities.  These cloud based software providers appear to have prioritised their market audience as the individual sales representative, and hence may sidestep organisational management decision making.

In our reading of the marketing material of the HootSuite platform we see such signs in the pitch of dashboard product to the individual sales rep:   http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-selling-white-paper-for-sales-executives/

After reading white papers similar to those above, there may be fears:  about the preservation and containment of sales prospecting intelligence corporations have funded; the manner in which their sales reps choose to conduct themselves when employing social media derived intelligence; and concerns with the notion that individuals may send their qualified prospecting intelligence – a process which makes more useful verified intelligence out of social media derived guesswork - into a cloud database operated by company with whom your organisation has no contractual relationship. 

But let’s also recognise that our sales people have always carried their own book of intelligence, and even with the greater efforts of a marketing communications department arming itself with policy manuals, and the legal gymnastics of employment contracts – much of that intelligence has remained off-file and off-balance-sheet (so to speak) before and after the period of employment.

One of the first calls to make when assessing how to engage the overall issue is to get a handle on the situation. The issues of potential, security, and hence policy guidance, require such situational awareness.

In order to help managers grapple with these issues I will create some aggressively postured scenarios.  I am here to convince you that the distance of these scenarios from market reality is a matter of the extent of risk taking your employees are engaging in rather than one of accessibility.

In my last blog post I mentioned the potential use of social media derived (or created) associations based upon the employ of emotional philosophical appeal to aid in the establishment of relationships with prospective customers.  In my aggressive tactical scenario I want to link the build or association of “Using Social Media to Promote Awareness for a Good Cause” such as HootSuite has kindly prepared a case study on:  http://blog.hootsuite.com/pacific-wild/

In my tailored scenario, I am suggesting that your sales rep has personally decided to associate with a feverish animal rights campaign to “save-the sharks”.  In response to the Western Australian government hunting for large sharks in the vicinity of recent shark attacks, this contemporary environmental campaign has seen street & beachside demonstrations across Australia and media reports have followed around the world.

Before I proceed, my disclaimer is that as a teenager in the late 70’s I was trained and certified as a PADI open water scuba diver.  My instructors (a husband & wife team) were both marine biologists by training who abhorred the killing of sharks, and moreso those TV personalities that killed them for the purposes of selling fear-based underwater entertainment.  I have never killed or attacked a shark and have always had a healthy respect for them in terms of both my security and their conservation.

However, if a sales rep has successfully associated themselves with a mass moral social movement such as “save-the-sharks”, there is existing potential for them to employ that social-philosophical association in tandem with a technique called “stabbing-in” (no pun intended) when cold calling on an organisation.  Using the “stabbing-in” technique, the sales rep doesn’t necessarily seek to contact the decision maker in an organisation directly, but rather looks for an introductory channel that bypasses fortified gatekeeping processes, and elicits as much empathy and association credibility as possible as they do so.

And how would they associate those people with an organisation that the sales rep is cold calling?  Out on the social media frontier GPS coordinates and mobile devices could well do that trick for them…

www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/socialradar-is-out-to-combine-all-social-networks-into-one-20140131-31rw3.html

As in the contemporary social meet-up software, or the peer-to-peer taxi hire software doing the rounds, the prospect of a sales rep moving down a street outside a prospective customers’ premises in the real world (or applying GPS remotely) could light up a number of contact possibilities.

This is the point of time that we may wish to reflect upon the number of commercial employees currently out there that are already accessible by means of social issue connectedness.  Before there were few, yet they were significant and meaningful in traditional sales craft, but now, by means of exploiting positioning – technology – and accessibility there are many. 

How will we react to the emergent social media world?  How will our organisations and customers respond on matters concerning their privacy?  Is it likely that persona disclosures will become more guarded?  Will there be more qualitative and quantitative separation among tiered levels of social associations?  How many sales staff are already using social media dashboards and uploading commercial sales intelligence to cloud based providers without the knowledge of their employers? 

At Gilead we don’t pretend to have ready answers to each and all of these questions.  Our market research relies upon presenting organisational commercial intelligence in the first instance.  At this time, our employ of social intelligence is limited to nominating the closest point of association with decision maker contacts we can determine from the public domain and social media.  We can, however, help with quality research, and we can help explore social media derived potential and unfolding policy issues.

We will leave you today with an article referring to a legal case in the UK in respect of the control and ownership of social media content delivered for commercial ends.  In the cited case below we are refering to judicial case involving a Linked-In Group activity.  The issue, however, will no doubt continue to bubble up in many forms as more precedent law develops:

www.smartcompany.com.au/legal/35422-linkedin-passwords-to-be-handed-over-following-court-orders.html

In our last blog post we talked about sales and marketing landscape changes brought upon us by changes to the volume, breadth, and accessibility of commercially useful intelligence. 

We also talked about not being able to leave such available intelligence on the table if is already in the public domain.

We at Gilead make no statement in respect of the systemic merits (or otherwise) of surveillance.  However, we plainly hold that employing the means to access and filter material information from that social intelligence is irresistible for sales professionals.

Twitter is by no means the only source of such social media intelligence, but the tools available and the public domain information may be useful if employed effectively.  Having the tools and the available intelligence doesn’t, however, necessarily lead toward a successful sales programme.  

Software tool providers are not shrinking violets when it comes to making claims about the essentiality of their products as the following illustrates: 

http://blog.socialbro.com/2014/01/what-cia-can-teach-your-business-about.html

However, as is the case for most software systems, the makers and marketers are often the least effective in providing the lead in successfully deploying their systems in commercial enterprises.

When employing social media for sales and marketing purposes, there are two critical aspects to be weighed ahead of assessing the quality of information derived from them.  The first one concerns identity, and the second one is the question of whether the content is an honest admission, or otherwise.

In the sales & service sense, if you have a contact or candidate, and you can confirm that the social media identity you have located is a match for that contact, then you have a start.  Then you must assess whether that social media contributor chooses to volunteer genuine information, and if that information is material.  In other words there are a lot of ifs.

And there are no lesser amount of buts.  Consider a situation where SocialBro became a hit and is deployed widely in the transportation sales market, and you have deployed that system in your organisation.  Your sales person has assured you that the twitter identity and your candidate are indeed one and the same, and they are volunteering private information…

Then follows the question: it may be material, but is it useful?  And if it is - how will you use it?  Will you inform your sales call contact how you came across the information?  What do you anticipate their reaction will be?  What happens when several sales people from competing organisations all access the same intelligence, and perhaps many employ it clumsily?   It is rather obvious to many that initiating calls & campaigns based solely upon intelligence derived from surveillance is fraught with hazard.  

The most useful information gathered from social media, however, may be that which informs the parties of existing common ground and interests within the parties 3 degrees of connectedness.  For both parties, the value of existing connectedness (in social, philosophical, or commercial terms) surfacing stands on its own merits - as it always has done.  

It is obvious that the sales person will try to associate themselves with the orbit of their prospect, but it is important to recognise, that in a maturing social media derived surveillance world, that prospect is defining and leading the presentation of that orbit on a voluntary basis.  If they are a critical decision maker, they will come to carefully manage their identities and what information they release in the public domain.

On another day, we may discuss twists and turns in respect of the personal identity issue in social media.  As SocialBro itself states above, the process of commercialising marketing ideas developed by intelligence agencies is well underway.  The idea of social media identities being out there building followers based upon their advocacy of a fashionable moral crusade for the expressed purpose of later selling that identity for commercial interest should not shock or surprise a marketing professional.