Over the past year, we made a decision to leverage our social networks and heavily invest a significant amount of time in the initial stages of our recruiting process to learn about our candidates and educate them about V2. By adjusting our strategy and tactics we have been able to successfully meet our aggressive hiring goals. As our dedicated recruiter, I continually search our connections and referrals, leveraging our social network and ultimately source best-fit candidates. Once sourced, those candidates must “pass” an extensive pre-screening interview conducted by myself to ensure they meet the minimum job requirements and believe in our core values. Provided the initial pre-screen is successful, candidates will then often meet our President for him to assess a fit and to allow candidates to ask a range of questions about company strategy, core values and the challenges we face in the industry. While this may sound time intensive for the President, he sees it as the most important part of his leadership role in the company. The final step in our interview process requires the candidate present a Salesforce.com demo to the executive team. The added value of this demo allows the candidate the opportunity to understand and gain exposure to what a role at the company entails on a daily basis, and enables us to better measure those skills and core values we are looking for such as general business acumen, knowledge, technical aptitude, presentation and project management skills.

While our collaborative interview process lends to the success of our recruiting strategy, it is just as imperative that I truly embrace and sell the corporate culture consistently from the initial point of contact through the offer stage. This holds especially true when speaking to passive candidates. I have found that by having a consistent message I am able to set myself apart from other internal recruiters and external headhunters. In this economic environment, it is my experience that many candidates are more concerned about stability and long-term growth verses compensation and job title. I am able to describe a clear plan for their role, and the opportunities where they can go within the organization. All of these conversations take place through the interview and offer stages, allowing candidates to feel extremely confident and excited about accepting a new opportunity with V2. As a result, we have been able to better assess fit up front, candidates have a much better idea of what it is like to become part of the V2 family and the onboarding process allows for increased productivity of new team members leading to extraordinary gains for the Company.

Let’s have a discussion, leave a comment below on ways you leverage social networks to recruit top talent.

Social media in the enterprise is here to stay, so how can you express your personal voice while remaining professional?

With Salesforce.com’s launch of Chatter back in 2009 and its more recent “Social Enterprise” re-branding, the concept of a “Social Enterprise” has been steadily gaining momentum. I have no doubt that social media will continue to play an increasingly important and valuable role at the office. From improving internal communications with colleagues to generating new business and servicing client better, the Social Enterprise concept certainly has some teeth.

This shift in business communication had me scratching my head the other day. I’m not talking about how your grandparents, or even your parents would be scratching their heads about social media. I joined Facebook when a college email address was required, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been at the “Social” thing for a while – I get it. The question which keeps coming back to me is, “How do I take my already well-established personal social media persona and merge that with my developing professional persona?”

So I asked my colleague Walter Elly, who recently joined the V2 team from a prior role as Emerging Technology Director at a local agency, about his thoughts on having a split social personality. Is is reasonable to think I can have a dual social media presence with a Chinese wall between them?  His initial response was that it is not a best practice.

As I dug around a little deeper on the Internet, I continued to find proof supporting Walter’s feedback. From what I can tell, the advantages of building and maintaining a single Social persona outweigh the advantages of a split persona approach.  Below I have summarized my findings.

Advantages to a single social persona:

Through interactions with a number of sports franchise prospects and clients over the past few years, it dawned on us that many of these organizations rely largely on ticketing platforms to manage their “fan experience”. More surprising, however, is how many of these organizations have seemingly accepted the notion of being boxed in by the limitations of their legacy ticketing platforms, unable to effectively extend beyond the standard sets of features and functionality which have remained largely unchanged for years. Our philosophy: Your technology tool box should be more capable than just managing ticketing and sponsorship sales and should provide your organization with benefits across various departments.

It has been nice to see the excitement (borderline giddiness) when we outline that there is light at the end of the tunnel by integrating ticketing platforms with a best-of-breed CRM business applications platform such as Salesforce.com. With this integrated approach, what was once a sea of silos becomes a mobile and social-enabled platform across a sports franchise’s operations including ticket sales, sponsorships sales, stadium/risk management, fan loyalty, marketing campaign management and customer service/fan experience to name a few. Social media can bring a sports team’s game to the next level (no pun intended) by dramatically enhancing customer service levels or the “fan experience”. For example, with an integrated CRM tool it is possible to see when Joe Smith, a season ticket holder, posts a negative comment about his stadium experience to his network of 1,000 friends. Rather than allowing this potentially harmful post go unanswered, a sports organization could reply to Joe and offer a courtesy drink or hot dog thus enhancing the fan experience.

To further illustrate our vision, take this example from a recent conversation with a prospective client. Over the weekend before a big game, the team was forced to postpone the event due to extenuating circumstances. In an effort to proactively notify season ticket holders, they relied on their existing ticketing platform to gather the information needed for outreach. Unfortunately, they did not have the visibility they needed to simply and efficiently reach their ticket holders. Due to the lack of visibility in their ticketing system, what should have been a fairly standard multi-channel outreach ended up taking employees an excruciating number of hours to execute via phone. Possessing the ability to effectively execute such an exercise (I’m sure you could think of your own scenarios) in an agile fashion is what could make both a short-term and long-term impact on the success of the franchise.

The stories and challenges outlined above led our firm to begin leveraging Informatica Cloud, the #1 AppExchange data integration solution, for integrating legacy ticketing platforms with Salesforce.com. This approach has opened the door to managing a range of processes and data across a sports franchise’s organization within Salesforce.com including:

• Premium Services Management
• Social / Mobile Collaboration Management
• Ticket Operations Management
• Suite Sales Management
• Community Relations Management
• Stadium Operations Management
• Sponsorship Sales Management

Imagine an increased visibility into all aspects of your relationship with ticket holders, an enhanced ability to segment fans for marketing and support-related communications and improved productivity, efficiency and agility across your organization. There are more stories to tell, so let’s have a discussion. Leave a comment below if you face similar challenges and would like to share with others or contact us directly to see a demonstration of our Sports Franchises solution built on the Salesforce.com platform.

Good Afternoon! I trust you have digested last week’s posts and are ready to wrap up with the final two insights today.

Insight 7: Don’t Underestimate the Influence of Middle Management

A lot of focus on CRM success over the years has been placed on “executive sponsorship”. I don’t disagree that it can be extremely valuable to have a person with a “CXO” title espousing the benefits of CRM within an organization, however, when it comes to CRM success I believe strongly that middle management is where it is at. Think “Manager”, “Director” and even “VP” as critical titles. In all sincerity, if your regional sales managers rely on note cards and weekly verbal check-ins to manage relationships and pipelines and have no intention of holding their direct reports accountable, then don’t waste your money on buying a CRM. Wait until they leave your organization and then reevaluate your options. As much as any CXO thinks that what he or she says will change behavior overnight, it simply isn’t true. CRM adoption is about forming daily habits (often new ones) and middle management are the individuals who will be in the trenches, day to day encouraging their direct reports to leverage the system and gathering critical feedback to make improvements.

Insight 8: Never Assume End Users Get It

As convenient as it would be for your salespeople to take what they learned during your CRM evaluation, user testings and training and apply it during those first few weeks after go-live, it doesn’t always happen. Deal with it. As I mentioned above, your middle managers will play a critical role in adoption using both a carrot and a stick. The old adage is that habits take twenty-one days to form – CRM is no different. Remember that you will most likely be introducing both a new technology platform AND making some process changes at one time. If you have done your job right, there will be greater transparency and accountability. Hint: If you haven’t figured it out, this can be a bit intimidating for even the best and technology savvy salespeople. Offer ongoing training on a weekly basis in either a one-on-one or group format during the initial weeks or months (your judgment call) after go-live. Make sure people know where to submit constructive feedback and acknowledge their feedback so they know you are listening, even if the decision is to not immediately incorporate their suggestions. In my experience, there is no silver bullet to CRM adoption and unfortunately there are many factors both obvious an subtle which can negatively affect your post go-live usage. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of gathering constructive feedback and refining your CRM solution early and often in an agile manner to gain the trust of your end users. It just may make the difference between whether CRM is an enjoyable or miserable journey.

Welcome back! As promised, I will take you through my first two insights including “Evaluate Intelligently” and “Establish Strategic and Tactical Goals BEFORE Discussing Features & Functionality”.

Insight 1: Evaluate Intelligently

My firm is a well-established Salesforce.com partner and I admire the fact that Salesforce allows prospective clients to sign up for a 30-day trial. The trial concept shows that Salesforce.com is confident (as it should be) that it’s product is best-in-class and that after you give it a try you will elect to convert into a paying customer. Regardless of whether you are a smaller organization with a few users or a larger organization with more complex requirements, the concept that you can make this critical business decision based on spending minimal time in a trial environment is misinformed. Take your decision to invest in and deploy a CRM solution seriously. Key steps include putting your needs and requirements down on paper, attending public or personalized solution demonstrations, challenging the CRM vendors’ sales reps to demonstrate business value specific to your organization and plan up front how you will successfully deploy the solution. If you cannot take the time to properly evaluate the solution, then I suggest you wait until your organization is ready to gather sufficient data and make a well-informed decision.

Insight 2: Establish Strategic and Tactical Goals BEFORE Discussing Features & Functionality

I’ll share a secret. Day one of almost every V2-managed project kickoff begins with an executive overview conversation during which we discuss business objectives. You would be amazed how few clients have asked themselves or have been asked by others the question, “What are the strategic and tactical goals of this project?”. Strategic goals may include top-line revenue growth, cost containment, improved scalability or improving an organization’s ability to on-board new acquisitions quickly. Examples of tactical goals include improvements in productivity, better access to data or enhanced transparency. My point is that too often people want to dive down immediately into screen designs and features/functionality before addressing up front the critical business objectives and goals which they want to gain out of the project.

Inaugural Post Introduction

A few months ago my colleagues and I huddled in our “Zen” creative room (complete with an Apple Think Different poster of Pablo Picasso) and decided that it was time to finally launch the long-awaited and highly anticipated “V2 Blog”. Prior to that meeting, we had been talking for months (OK, maybe a couple years) about the value of engaging in conversation with prospects, clients, partners and the general business community via a blog. I had shot down the idea so many times in fact, that when my colleague who had joined V2 more recently announced to the rest of the team in an upbeat fashion that we had decided to launch a blog, the more tenured members of the team literally laughed out loud. Message: “We’ve heard that one before, good luck newbie!”

I reluctantly agreed to begin writing an inaugural post and committed to submitting my work for final approval one week ahead of launch. So, in a typical president and sales guy fashion I have been intensely focused on client-centric initiatives over the past couple of weeks and now realizing twenty-four hours prior to our anticipated blog launch that I still have not yet decided upon a subject, let alone submit my post to our marketing team. In full disclosure, I have never written a blog post in my entire life. In order to overcome my bloggers block (is there such a thing?), I reverted back to the most effective tool I know – napkins. My friends and colleagues know that all my best ideas typically start on a napkin, and so tonight I mapped out some ideas which, provided you don’t flood this post with comments asking me to spare you from future posts, will be the topics of our conversations over the coming months.

After much staring at the napkin and internal debate I decided my virgin post would be my own take on possibly the most written about CRM topic of all time: “Why CRM Projects Fail?” I won’t bore you with the details of my credentials as you can read my bio here, but I am confident that after thousands of CRM-centric conversations during my tenure at Oracle Corporation and running V2’s Salesforce.com practice I have earned the right to share my perspective. And you, the reader, have the right to share your constructive criticism, help me and my colleagues grow and hopefully learn a little bit through our experiences. We look forward to the conversations…

CRM – It’s a Journey, NOT Just a Project

The fact that people always talk about “Why CRM Projects Fail?” leads me to believe that we often frame the conversation in the wrong way. CRM is NOT just a project. Without citing a formal dictionary definition of a project, I would define a project as a set of goals and/or deliverables which aim to be achieved through execution of key tasks over a defined period of time. CRM involves people, processes, technology and culture amongst other factors, all of which evolve continuously within organizations (at least with good ones). To think that you can purchase a CRM solution, implement it and then just ‘let it be’ (reminds me of John Lennon style) is shortsighted. Your initial CRM project is the first phase of your journey. In fact, I would argue that the journey actually starts well before you purchase a solution and that the manner in which you drive your evaluation and buying decision dramatically impacts the success of your initiative (more on this below). Most companies don’t go-live with their CRM solution saying, “Oh boy, the CRM project failed!” It is during the months or weeks after go-live when adoption hurdles become more evident and companies make the critical decision whether to passionately invest in the journey ahead knowing there will be peaks and valleys or lazily throw up their arms and start placing blame on “The Failed CRM Project”. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing eight back of the napkin insights to ensure your CRM journey is a successful one.

Come back and visit us on Monday, October 24th for insights #1 “Evaluate Intelligently” and #2 “Establish Strategic and Tactical Goals BEFORE Discussing Features & Functionality” or click here to subscribe.