We have exciting news!

We have merged with Sococo, a real-time collaboration solution provider with ground-breaking technology… and a bald-headed guy wearing a headset for a logo.

Like Postwire, Sococo’s mission is to transform information sharing and collaboration in a way that supports more effective and successful working relationships. Together, we now have a broader and deeper set of resources that will enable us to enhance our collaboration offerings and bring even greater value to our customers.

Sococo creates a better way to work together. By co-locating online with others in a virtual space, Sococo allows users to spontaneously interact with colleagues, partners or clients, wherever they are–on the same or different floor, city or country. Getting together with nearby or far-flung colleagues is as easy as knocking on their door and popping into their virtual office, thanks to the unique way Sococo integrates video, audio and chat. Teams assemble for meetings and fire up multiple screens to share information without any clumsy logins, pins or transfers of the presenter role. Then, when the meeting is over, participants return to their private virtual offices or join others in another meeting space. Using Sococo, people visibly gather and disperse as work unfolds each day, connecting everyone to their shared purpose.

So, by combining the engaging and highly fluid live collaboration capabilities of Sococo with the powerful information curation and personalization capabilities of Postwire, our solutions now encompass all forms of business communication and will help you strengthen business relationships and work processes to achieve your desired business results –  be that through personalized information sharing, or real-time audio, video, and chat-enabled conversations, or an integrated combination of both.

For a more detailed introduction to Sococo, we’ve created this Postwire for you that includes a demo and user stories.

When we first started Postwire, our goal was to transform information sharing into something special. Over the years, we have been rewarded by the successful experiences of our customers. But there is still more to be accomplished, and we believe that the addition of Sococo’s capabilities will advance our solutions in many areas.

Thank you for the continued support that has brought us to this exciting new stage in company growth. We are eager to introduce the Sococo solution to you in more detail in the days to come.

Come fly with us!

Drumroll, please…

Say goodbye to ugly default PPT thumbnail images!

Now when you upload a PowerPoint document to Postwire, the first page of the PowerPoint document is pulled and made as the default thumbnail image. (The same behavior as when posting a PDF document to Postwire.) This saves you from having to create an image by taking a screenshot and uploading it.

Note that the first-page image will not be pulled if the size of the PowerPoint document is larger than 50 MB. As always, users have complete control to edit the thumbnail image, if desired.

Stay tuned for more coveted, time-saving features coming your way very soon.

…and make a smart decision fast. Nice!

Wishing you a joyful holiday season and a collaborative new year. We hope you enjoy our holiday video.

Giddyup!
The Postwire Team

It’s virtually impossible to disagree—and foolish to disregard—that buyers today are in control. They search the web and connect with their social networks way before they connect with salespeople. So, as you’d expect, many CEO’s and C-suite executives are challenging their teams to develop strategies that reflect this seismic shift from seller to buyer in control.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) breaks from entrenched seller-in-control tactic

I recently read that one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies announced its plans to stop the time-honored practice of paying doctors to give promotional talks. GSK is the first company in its industry to adopt this stance in exchange for what it believes is a more collaborative sales process. The pharmaceutical giant predicts other companies in the industry will follow given buyers and society’s desire for transparency.

Boston Globe’s Robert Weisman interviewed Patrick Vallance, President of Pharmaceuticals R&D at GSK, and reported in a September 19, 2014 article, “The research chief of GlaxoSmithKline PLC said that the British drug giant is becoming a more open organization, moving toward greater collaboration in developing medicines and building confidence with the public by halting payments to doctors for giving promotional talks about the company’s products.” Instead, the company plans to share information about its drugs online and through the company’s scientists.

Is your company embracing your buyer’s clout?
What time-honored industry practice is your company clinging to that fails to recognize your customer’s power position? Rather than hold on to outdated sales practices, think about what your organization’s sales and marketing teams can do instead to help buyers make informed decisions.

You’ve likely seen the research from The Rain Group, International Data Corporation, and Sales Executive Council/Corporate Executive Board Company that helps organizations recognize the importance of assuming the buyer’s perspective and break down institutional barriers that thwart change.

Many sales consultants, including Jill Konrath, Andy Paul, John Jantsch, Kevin Davis, Keith Eades, and Timothy Sullivan have recently published books to share strategies and techniques for how to let customer needs and processes drive interactions. Many are likely on your shelf.
Please share your story with me so I can share it with others.

Cliff Pollan is the Founder of Postwire, a Cloud-based sales tool for creating private digital spaces to exchange information and ideas with buyers so they can make smart decisions quickly. It takes only minutes to customize a Postwire with critical content for each stage of a customer’s buying cycle. Postwire also encourages post-sales collaboration, giving the client an easy-to-find place to access up-to-date intelligence over the lifetime of the relationship.

Have you ever been to a Pinkberry’s? When you go, take note of how your server presents your cup of frozen yogurt palms-up as if it were something very, very special. Pinkberry’s teenage servers have been trained (with mixed results) to create this WOW! moment–akin to how Apple carefully crafts the experience of unboxing a new MacBook or iPhone.

Thinking about this, I asked our team to help me brainstorm equivalent Postwire WOW! moments with the goal of ensuring Postwire users and their contacts experience them early on and often to accelerate adoption. Out of that discussion came several action items, including fast-tracking several new product features. Here are a few just released.

Specially Made for You – WOW!
We frequently hear that people are WOWed by Postwire’s personal and visually engaging format. Well, why not do a better job of amplifying this WOW! by drawing attenton to it? To this end, we changed the default title from “A Postwire” to the more personal “A Postwire for You” and added default text in the description field: “Let’s use this as a place to share information and ideas. Click the Share button below to privately share with others.”  The intent here is to suggest how the title and description of each Postwire can be leveraged to create a “palms-up”, specially-made-for-you WOW! moment. We even added a new setting so that you can set the default text using your own words. WOW!

Streamlined Sharing – WOW!
When your contact shares on information with others, it’s typically a signal of increased engagement and an action we want to encourage. However, prior to our latest software release, when your contact clicked the Share button on a Postwire, she was prompted first to sign in or register, and, more often than not, never followed through. What should have been a no-brainer share mechanic wasn’t.

We changed that. Now, when your contact clicks “Share”, it’s as easy for her to share your Postwire (one without secure privacy settings) as the article she just read on her tablet. All she needs to do is enter the email addresses of the people she wants to share the information with, along with her name and email address as the sender, and off it goes. This Postwire-sharing activity is recorded and a real-time notification informs you whom the Postwire was shared with. WOW!

Link to Existing Postwire from Email – WOW!
Here’s another WOW! moment teed up. A best practice we’ve observed from power Postwire users is to include a link to the Postwire you’ve created for each contact in every email you send to him or her so that it’s always readily accessible. To better support this workflow, the Outlook and Gmail plugins now offer a third function–“Existing Postwire”–in addition to”New Postwire” and “Copy Postwire”. This new function allows you to select an existing Postwire and then insert a thumbnail image and link to it in your email message body. WOW!

We’re cranking out WOW! updates rapid-fire. Stay tuned for more coming very soon.

In my recent interview with David Meerman Scott, around his just published book, “The New Rules of Selling and Service”, he shared how foundational a change we are experiencing in selling and service .  Also, the  challenges felt by Sales VP’s (and the executive team) in accepting the change and implementing new strategies reflecting this change.

Here, David shares that the strategies are easy, it is accepting the change that is hard:

Transcript

Cliff:  Are we talking about an incremental shift in mind-set here or complete foundational change?

David:  “This is huge. And this is a big shift that parallels the shift that we’ve seen over the last 10 years in marketing and public relations.

“I used to tell people “it’s no longer going to be about press releases; it’s no longer going to be about traditional advertising and how big your wallet is; it’s going to be: the best content wins”, and I had traditional advertising people crossing their shoulders and saying “what are you talking about? You’re crazy! We’re an ad agency. We’re not a web marketing agency”.

“Now every single ad agency you see on the planet would never call themselves one. They’re ‘digital agencies’, or they’re a ‘content agency’ because they’re all doing content and public relations – sure they still do press releases, but there’s a lot better ways to reach people – your audience, than the traditional tools of public relations. Back in the day that was a really hard slog to get through. It was a huge communication revolution and that same revolution is happening again now. I see it. I smell it. I taste it, as do a lot of other people – it’s not like there’s only a couple of people talking about it. It is as big a sea change as we saw over the last 10 years.”

Cliff:  We both worked at Thomson where you saw this and it wasn’t accepted.

David:  “I got fired! The best day of my life.

“Companies have a hard time with change. With individuals it’s easier to change, although it’s still tough, but companies have a hard time to make a change, and there’s so many institutional barriers to this change. I’ll give you a great example of an institutional barrier: most companies have expensive Salesforce automation platforms that they use to run their sales departments and some of these things are really expensive – it can be millions of dollars for large companies. These systems are all built using the old rules. The algorhithms that make them run, the data they deliver, the metrics they deliver, the ways that the executive manages the individual sales people are all built on the ways we sold in the past. Can you imagine going to a sales VP and saying you’ve got to kick out your sales system because it doesn’t work.”

Do you think the buyer/seller relationship has changed?  If so, what changes have you made?

Last week, my colleague Carrie Kuempel and I took a very short trip (it’s a 7 minute walk) over to David Meerman Scott’s office to interview him about his new book – The New Rules of Sales and Service. In my view this is a seminal work, much like his book – The New Rules of Marketing and PR.

That changed how many people thought about marketing and I think this work will do the same for sales.

We discussed the challenges being felt by Sales VPs who have “grown-up” without the tools of content and social media. In this inspiring excerpt David recounts an interesting experience of booking an expedition to Antarctica:

Transcript

Cliff:  So, David, give us one of the great new selling examples form the book.

David:   “The book opens with the story of going to Antarctica. I always wanted to go to Antarctica as a kid, since I was 6. I said to my wife “this is the year we’re going to go to Antarctica” and she said “I don’t really want to go to Antarctica, it’s scary. I have to cross the Drake Passage and I might throw-up” and so on. So, we went online and we found a half dozen expedition outfitters and we looked at all their content and the most famous expedition outfitter was National Geographic – a great brand, and they were trying to sell to me on their home page – with a big fat button on their page saying “book a reservation”. I’m looking for information. I’m not ready to buy a ticket, yet. Then there was the one that had the best SEO. Then there was the low-cost operator. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to go two days sail from the most southern city in the world to a continent that has no inhabitants on a low-cost provider – this is not the way I want to do it.

“Then I found Quark Expeditions. They had great content. I was totally engaged. They had YouTube videos; Twitter. I tweeted the company. They tweeted back. The CEO of the company tweeted me. When I was then ready to engage one on one, I reached out to them on their “contact us” form. My “polar advisor” Paul contacted me. He knew very well I’d already gone through the website start to finish and he was there to be helpful not to close me in the traditional sense of wrestling me to the ground, but close me from the perspective of “what more can I do to help”, and I said “well, we’re worried about throwing-up on the trip because of the Drake Passage and he helped by sending us links to blog posts and links to YouTube videos. These tickets are $20,000 a pair to book a cabin on an expedition ship. And, so, they closed the deal because they had the best content and the best sales person. He wasn’t trying to close. He was curating content. He knew that I had near-perfect information. I got to the point where I needed his help and he knew that.

Cliff:  Was it the sales experience that won that deal, then?

David:  It was the content that won the deal. It was the fact that they were the most engaged and they had the best content, but once it went from me as the “vast unwashed” to me as a named person on Twitter communicating with the company, reaching out to an individual sales rep. At that point it was the selling process, but it was still the content. It was still the fact that when I asked a question he didn’t try to sell me “oh you don’t have to worry about throwing up! No-one throws-up”. The answer was “you might throw-up, but here’s what our doctor tells you are the best ways to prevent it.”

While this may feel  like a business to consumer sales story by a very active user of online tools, I think it captures many of the changes that reflect a B2B sale, including complex sales.  Quite simply, a prospect doing research online, then still having some concerns to sort out (getting really sick) and asking for validation and encouragement to make a good decision and proceed.  Connecting with a person who did feel like an expert, had good resources and knowledge at hand to think from a buyer’s perspective  was what David needed to make a go decision.

Does this story resonate with you?

What is different for the sales rep?

 “So, marketing and public relations has changed significantly, but what’s interesting is most people get that.

“What’s the difference? The difference is that when companies communicate through the web through marketing and public relations they’re communicating to a lot of people at once. So, a company communicates through a video, a blog post, a great website, and thousands, tens of thousands, or even a few hundred people can see it and that serves as marketing and public relations.

“What’s completely revolutionising sales and service, especially selling, is that companies can go one-to-one using web content; a sales person can engage with one particular prospect; a client service rep can communicate with one particular customer.”

What’s the dynamic for the buyer now?

 “The buyer’s in charge. That’s what’s happening. It used to be the salesperson had the upper hand in a relationship because they controlled the information; they could decide. They could say “ok, well, I’ll tell you the pricing model when I’m good and ready; I’ll give you access to the CEO to have a quick conversation at the appropriate time in my sales cycle”.

”Now, as a buyer, I can connect with a CEO on LinkedIn. I can find out from blogs what your pricing model is. I can find out what your competitor’s pricing model is. So, what was once a sales cycle has now turned into a buying cycle.”

How do sales reps react to the loss of “control”?

 “I actually think most sales people think it’s great – not all, but “most”, because it gives them more power in a way, because, if a buyer comes to a relationship 80% along the buying process and getting very close to making a buying decision they’ve educated themselves – you don’t have to do that as a sales person. They just want to have some context around their particular situation. What a great prospect that is compared to making cold calls. So, the individual sales people, I think, are embracing it.”

In my previous post, I highlighted steps we’ve taken to enhance the experience for Postwire Sharers. Before my tan completely fades, I want to draw attention to some other new features we’ve added this summer that marketers and sales ops managers will LOVE.

• You can now update all reposts of a content item in one click!

  Summon the sounds of horns blowing, fireworks exploding and people applauding! The release of Postwire’s Update and Replace feature deserves such fanfare!

  The Update Content and Replace feature allows a Postwire Admin to update an original (source) content item and at the same time choose to update globally all copies. Any or all of three attributes of a content item can be updated: Title, Image & Content.

  So what? Let’s put the power of this feature into context with a real use case. Our Salesforce.com installation instructions changed once the Postwire Connector was added to Salesforce’s App Exchange. For months, our team reposted the instructions to the many Postwires we shared with clients.

  Each time we reposted the instructions—or copied the “Getting Started” Postwire where the instructions were initially posted—copies were made of this content item. Over time, multiple copies of the original got reposted to multiple Postwires.

  As an Admin using the Update and Replace feature, I uploaded the new instructions to replace the original source content. Moving forward, all reposts–and copies of our “Getting Started” Postwire–will include the new content. At the same time I made this update, I also elected to update all copies that are currently “out there”. So with one click, I was able to update the original content and all of its reposts on the umpteen Postwires previously shared by everyone in our organization. In other words, with one click I was able to ensure that all employees, partners, customers and prospects have our most current Salesforce.com installation steps!

  Play other scenarios over in your head–unfortunate ugly typo discovered on a data sheet that’s easily updated and replaced everywhere, new company branding updated on key collateral for a consistent new look, product tutorial kept synced with current release of software–and you can see just how powerful this update and replace feature is!

• The Postwire Daily Digest has been improved so that now when a user clicks on the link to a new content item in a daily digest email, the user is taken directly to the content item.

  So what? As a reminder, The Postwire Daily Digest automates for you the task of communicating the availability of new content. It helps Marketing keep Sales teams, Customer Success teams and other employees apprised of the latest and greatest content available to them and also is a great way to ensure prospects and clients (who register for a free Postwire account) are notified when new information is shared with them, too. Previously, each link to a content item in the digest took you to the Postwire where the new content resided, but not directly to the item. Now we have implemented “deep linking” so that when a user clicks on a new content item in a daily digest email, the following will happen:

  • If the content item is not in a collection, the page will scroll to the content item and the border/text of the content item will blink.
  • If the content item is in a collection, the page will scroll to the collection, the collection is opened, and the border/text of the content item will blink.
• We’ve given you the option to display a Download button on content items.

  There is a new Advanced Setting for each Postwire: Download – Allow viewers to download individual content items from this Postwire. When set to ON, a Download button appears for each content item when hovering over it. Note that:

  • Only PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and image files can be downloaded. An error message is shown if the user attempts to download any other file types (e.g. a video file or a web link).
  • If the privacy setting is set to HIPAA, no download buttons are shown (when hovering over a content item) even if the Download option in the advanced settings is set to ON.
  • On the iPad and iPhone, no download buttons are shown (when hovering over a content item) even if the Download option in the advanced settings is set to ON.

  So what? We make it that much easier for you to easily share content in one place with others like employees and Partners who may not be reposting content and sharing it via Postwire or want access offline. And, when you invite Partners and employees to be “Members” of your Postwire Organization, you can track their consumption of this content via Postwire’s content analytics and Salesforce.com reporting.

• We added the Organization-Wide Notification Settings feature so that an Admin can globally turn on/off comment emails and The Postwire Daily Digest.

  From the Organization/Notifications page, an Admin can select one of the options below for daily digests and comment emails:

  • Send to everyone.
  • Send only to People in my Organization.
  • Don’t ever send.

  So what? By providing this option, we give more control to organizations who deal with email-wary clients and constituents and want to stop Postwire’s automatic email notifications.

• For Google Apps users, we suppressed the Postwire opt-out footer text and now allow you to add your own email footer text to the default invitation emails Postwire creates.

  So what? The emails sent by people in your Organization can look even more personal. Choose not to include any email footer text, or use the customized footer option to set up your own global opt-out language or branded message.

• We changed the default Advanced Setting for Copy to ON.

  Set to ON, recipients are allowed to copy this Postwire. So what? This is great for setting up Postwires that can be used as “template” starting points for Sharers to easily copy and personalize to share on. Note: Admins will want to take care to turn OFF this setting for master library Postwires so that the entire repository cannot be copied and shared on.

As you can see, we were busy this summer! For more information on these awesome new features, please check the Help documentation. And, don’t hestiate to reach out to me personally.

Hey, Postwire users! As I head off to the beach for a few vacation days, I wanted to call out some steps our team has taken this summer to enhance the experience of sharing Postwires.

Have you noticed…

• You can establish Personal Email Settings.

  I devoted an earlier blog post in June to this powerful timesaving feature, but I want to call it out again here. Each user can now set defaults to indicate your preference for text-based or graphical (HTML) emails, whether you are automatically cc’d on the emails you send from Postwire and the default text you’d like to set for your email message body and signature.

  Plus, there is one other personal email setting that’s worthy of special note. We now give each user the ability to determine the call to action text associated with the links to your Postwires. Left blank in your Personal Email Settings, Postwire’s default call to action is “Click Here to view your Postwire”. You can (and should!) change that wording to work for your particular use of Postwire. For example, if you’re an account manager, you might change that link label to be “For Your Account”. A Customer Success Rep  might change the label to be “Getting Started Resources for You”. You get the idea, make it look personal and relevant for how you are using Postwire. This particular setting gets set once–you cannot change the wording for each Postwire you send (like the way you can type over your default message body and email signature text) so make the wording generic enough to work for the way you mostly use Postwire.

• The “Share This Postwire” dialogue box has a greatly improved workflow. 

  Basically, we make it very logical for you to compose an email message from Postwire by editing the subject line, default message body text and email signature. Do note: you can now edit–and you couldn’t before–the standard Postwire subject line. The default subject line reads “[Your name] has shared a Postwire with you!”. Who cares about that? You know the email drill: emails need compelling subject lines to get read, so please, please, do create your own!

• It’s super-easy now to send an email from Postwire again and again.

  Simply click a checkbox to send an email to all of the people you’ve already invited to view your Postwire or check the boxes by individual names to send to a selected few. No longer do you need to re-enter email addresses each time. Yea!

• We’ve add a CRM Setting so that each user can enter their Email to Salesforce Address to track your Postwire emails in Salesforce!

  Enough said. Now Postwire emails are automatically added to the activity history of related Salesforce records.Yahoo!

•  We removed the Postwire “opt-out” footer on Postwire email messages for Google Apps users.

  For organizations who set up Postwire to send email via Google Apps, our opt-out messaging is no longer required since the emails are coming from your Google email server, not “via Postwire”. By removing it, your emails look way more personal. And , if desired, an Admin can choose to add their own email footer message to all of the emails generated for users in their organization. So it’s possible to add your organization’s own opt-out language, if desired, or even a general branded message to all emails Postwire creates when users in your organization send email using “Share This Postwire”.

• We changed the default setting to ON for all Postwires to allow COPY.

  Since many users like to create their own Postwire “templates” to copy, we now make this the default setting for each Postwire. You can always go to Advanced Settings and turn this OFF for any particular Postwire.

• Lastly, we are phasing out our use of the other “P” word.

  Over time we are dropping our reference to Postwire “Pages” and replacing it everywhere with simply “Postwires”. If you look carefully in the product, you’ll notice buttons are getting relabeled. Now you click “+New Postwire”, “Search Postwires” etc. The complete transition will take time, but soon our team will drop a dollar in the bucket every time we’re caught saying “Page” instead of “Postwire”.

That’s a quick summary of updates for Sharers. You can read more details in our online Help documentation. And, stay tuned for my next blog post that showcases new features that are live today and that Admins of Team Plans will LOVE, especially an Update and Replace Content (globally) feature! With that teaser, I’m off for vacation! And, if you can’t wait ’til my next post, you can read now about this powerful new feature in Help.