The timing couldn’t be better.

Smartphone wielding and technology savvy sales teams these days have no shortage of tools and applications at hand to increase their productivity and help them be close to their deals, their customers, their internal teams, and even their competition.   Social networking amongst today’s sales professionals is not a foreign concept.  Harnessing the power of social network technology for sales productivity is a completely different story, however.

Talk to any VP of Sales and ask them what is top of mind and the answer is always related to “the number.”   Removing internal obstacles and moving knowledge from data sources and individuals to the field and inside sales teams is critical to making their teams productive.

This is why they will care about Chatter:

Acceleration of the Sales Cycle: Waiting on a callback from legal on contract updates, or a manager on an approval, or from marketing on a program release can take hours or days in a sales cycle.  Real time collaboration in a feed-like fashion will improve the speed of business and remove key bottlenecks.

Increased Deal Sizes: More eyes on customers and deals mean sharing of perspective and ideas on prospect and customer needs with real time suggestions on potential product and service options.  Users can be “grouped” together so that internal teams can review the updates that are most relevant to their roles and territories.

Real-Time Awareness on Deals and Activity:  This is no eulogy for the Forecast Call, or for the One-on-Ones, or for the dinnertime calls about the status of a deal.  However, when a Sales Director can follow activity on a deal or customer without cumbersome workflows, threads of email, or manual CRM lookup,  this is a good thing.

Knowledge and Power: When is marketing updating that sales presentation?  What is up with my customer’s Support Case that was opened 3 days ago?  Who attended that webinar we put on at 1pm?  What is my Project Manager’s bio and experience profile?  Did any of my prospects respond to that promo campaign?  Let me ask…How many clicks would it take your sales reps to get to the above?

Account Management: Understanding what is going on with your existing customer base, from sales to service and support issues, and feeds of relevant customer news and data enables a much more informed approach to taking care of and ultimately retaining and expanding your base of business.

Leveraging Existing Tools: Reps use productivity solutions that help them do their jobs better.   If the data or information provided by the tool is useful, accessible, and relevant, and internal adoption is high, it will be used by top reps and the supporting teams. Chatter’s integration with the Force.com ecosystem, as well as API tools will enable sales teams to increase utility of existing tools.

Teambuilding: Top Reps are intensely competitive and are constantly wondering how their peers are doing so they can evaluate their own performance.  Sales “banter” is a great motivator.  A big deal closes.  A great sales call.  A competitive win.  A customer reference story.   Reps like to talk about success and if they close a big deal they want to tell somebody, especially their peers.  Top reps like to elevate the success of their overall team and key players. A social network is an optimal platform for this.

Pitfalls Please?

It’s More Stuff: Another tool, another training session, more sales processes, more passwords, more permissions, more policies.

The Firehose:  Too much information can be intimidating and overwhelming, and potentially counterproductive.  Thoughtful setting up of groups and filters is critical to making the constant flow of information relevant to individuals and teams.

The Green:  $50 per user per month.

The Security: The volume and pace of real-time sharing of internal company information means a need to evaluate internal security policies around sensitive data and have some rules.

Tact and Circumstance:  The informality of social network sharing may have some difficulties translating into corporate sales environments, and there may be some awkward moments as the social savvy indoctrinate their less-so peers.

It was inevitable that a truly consumable enterprise solution would emerge building upon the great collaborative power of social networking.   In fact,  Yammer has been around for over a year doing enterprise microblogging, and they claim 50,000 businesses are using their app.  There will undoubtedly be plenty of healthy debate on whether this is a game-changer or another gimmick.  My humble prediction?  Chatter will be transformational to sales teams, and in a couple of years this type of sales collaboration will become as indispensible to enterprise selling organizations as neurotransmission is to the brain.