Happy New Year, all! The New Year brings fresh new perspectives and news stories relative to all-things sales enablement.

According to Chris Bucholtz, unhappy customers are a great source of intelligence about how the business appears to those on the outside -- and provides the opportunity to make tactical changes. In his recent CRM Buyer piece, he detailed how social CRM provides the ability to discover how individual customers view organizations and their behavior.

Bucholtz further notes that:

"The typical business hears from just 4 percent of its unhappy customers, while the other 96 percent simply stop doing business with them."

Social CRM is one way to try and prevent losing those customers. After all, sometimes it’s simply a breakdown in communication. On the flip side, it’s also one of the best ways to promote customers who adore you.


Speaking of social, the Formtek blog covered Forrester’s recent prediction of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) products growing at an annual compound rate of 61 percent over the next five years, with the market exceeding $6.4 billion by 2016.

It is worth noting, while not surprising, that ESS users shared the following characteristics:
 

• Early adopters with a positive attitude towards technology
• Highly paid / highly educated
• Works 2.4 hours longer per week than other workers
• 26 percent of those in their twenties and 35 percent of those in their 30-40’s.

Are you seeing these same trends within your own organization, or based upon feedback you are hearing from others? We want to know!


Are you caught up in process, process, process? IT Marketing World featured a piece about addressing the sales process.

The article notes that sales team members should "Always be gauging!"

"Gauge the level of buy in from your prospect at every stage in your sales cycle. Don’t take someone out of discovery phase until you know you have the right people, they accept that they have a problem, they have the money and the desire to fix the problem, and they think you are a viable option to fix it. Don’t move them out of demo until they have had all their questions answered on integration, they have a feel for the technology, they see the value adds, etc…"

We think the key takeaway here is that sales professionals should not get caught up in the sales process itself, that it should be only used as a guideline and each prospect should be addressed in a tailored fashion.


In closing, we’d like to hear your thoughts and strategies for this year. What are your plans to enhance the effectiveness of your sales efforts? What are you revising this year to get better results?