If you’re a small business or mid-size company that sells through a dealer, rep or VAR (value added reseller) channel, there are some key lessons from Facebook. Right. The online social networking site that your college-age kids are using.
Your challenge with sales channels is to keep your products top of mind. Among other things, you want to make sure that they are using the most-up-to-date customer collateral, have the latest answers to frequently asked questions, can easily keep up with the most successful customer applications … the list goes on.
Below is an excerpt from a post by Tom Evslin on his blog that is spot on for explaining how you can link (work) online more closely with your sales channel.
"Facebook’s mission statement tells the story once you look at it carefully:
Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
Facebook is made up of many networks, each based around a company, region, high school or college.
You can use Facebook to:
Share information with people you know.
See what’s going on with your friends.
Look up people around you.”
Read it again if you don’t spot a significant difference from what most other social networking sites claim to do. Aha, you got it: Facebook is not for FORMING new groups in cyberspace; it’s for serving EXISTING groups."
Why an online community? Because the channel members are already a community, or group (of sorts). They meet at industry events and your in-person (annual) sales meetings, right? An online community, as aptly pointed out by Tom Evslin, is the perfect approach to serve existing groups.
An online community is much more collaborative than your corporate intranet or extranet that you maintain for dealers today. Some examples of activities online communities make it easy for members to accomplish include:
- commenting on issues
- post (share) ideas, problems solutions with each other and with your company
- identify customer and prospect trends
- upload content they themselves have created (user-generated content–think cheatsheets, etc.)
I had the opportunity to hear Tom Evslin speak in my days at (the old) AT&T . He was one of the few, innovative and visionary executives on board at corporate headquarters in the 90’s. He is brilliant and collaborative, among many others. I am a huge fan.
I will share examples of communities used by business to business companies as I find them. What are your thoughts on forming online communities around your sales channel?
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