The Delphi Report

It started sometime in May of 2003. A steady barrage of requests into my e-mail from folks that wanted to be in my network. The volume wasrivaled only by the mounting tide of spam and for a while I dismissedboth with equal dispatch.I was bombarded by requests to join such services asTribe.net, LinkedIn, Ryze, openBC and a long list of other public socialnetworking systems (SNSes). Eventually, I gave in and plumbed thedepths of these systems. After interviewing roughly 100 users of socialnetworking and creating my own network of nearly 638,900 "friends" Ican safely say that 'something real is afoot' in this world of SN.For the uninitiated SN often looks very much likeKnowledge Management (KM).Not that long ago, plenty of people derided KM. Some of thelarger, more expensive, and convoluted KM systems certainly proved thepoint! They had escalated a complex concept (getting knowledgetrapped in brains out to the free world), into a hideously complex sys-tem as they attempted to codify every bit of implicit and explicit knowl-edge that might poke its head out of office cubicles. Other than provid-ing plenty of fodder for Scott Adams KM amounted to little more thanhyperbole. It wasn’t long before many declared KM dead, and good rid-dance. With SN, at least ONE guise of KM has resurfaced with a vengeance, the ability to form communities of interest and to identify expertise. KM was about separating knowledge from people. SN is about connecting people to each other. Knowledge of and about People,Expertise Location, Strong and Weak Personal Relationships – all this isinformation that can be turned towards sales opportunities, job seekingand job placement, market mapping (literally mapping your customersand their conversations), team creation, and so on.

Death of a Salesman?

Birth of Relationship Intelligences.

By Dan Keldsen

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW:

Social Networks (SN) are fast becoming the new killer app of the Internet. But what is thekiller app of SN?In this article Dan Keldsen,Delphi’s resident “guru on theedge” looks at how SNs may change the way organizations selltheir products and services.

The Delphi Report

The SN Sales Play

In 3 to 5 years we will no longer recall when SN tech-nology wasn't sitting next to us (virtually), identifyingand even seeking out relationships through ourextended and shared public and private (i.e. enter-prise) network of contacts. All this makes SN an indis-pensable and irresistible tool for any salesperson pur-suing enterprise software sales.For many reasons, selling enterprisesoftware is a difficult road to travel. Systems are com-plex, and expensive. They potentially touch and oftendisrupt people and existing systems in the process of implementation. Further, the natural inclination formost buyers is to protect their budget, parting with it grudgingly, particularly at this point in the post-boom. With budgets for perks on the decline, it is increas-ingly difficult to win over new clients. The power of solid relationships and personal introductions from a trusted, or at least a KNOWN person to the buyer, may tip the scales in these situations to create a neutral if not positive-leaning attitude by the buyer.Some salespeople are naturally adept at knowing and tracking a wide network of connections,keeping their network active and in touch.Realistically, most people are not willing to put theeffort into ‘doing networking well’. Those who fallinto this camp stand to gain tremendously from SNSesthat do this work for them. Those who are naturally oriented towards relationship management will gainfurther magnification of their networking efforts.Let's be clear about this, we are talkingabout identifying the VARIOUS ways that people may have some relationship, and this is the key to why SNis going to be a part of our IT fabric very soon. Insome cases, ANY sort of relationship at all betweenpeople may be enough to be useful. In other cases, it is a specific type or strength of relationship, or infor-mation about the people involved in these relation-ships, that provide real benefit to those using a SNS.Everyone has some sort of personal network, and between these networks there is at least some overlap. If I know you (in any capacity) and youknow Bob, then Bob is 2-degrees away from me.There is a fairly good chance that you would intro-duce me to Bob and that Bob would accept the intro-duction. There are many SN advocates that would say “And then you close the sale and move on to the next network connection.” I am not claiming that SN by itself will turn anyone into a fantastic salesperson, orimmediately and always discover the people and com-panies that are 100% guaranteed to buy now or in thefuture.However, as most salespeople willacknowledge, cold calling is a frustrating experiencefor all concerned parties. Successful use of SN by BOTH buyers and suppliers (and the intermediate‘degrees of separation’ – think Kevin Bacon), the networks that are formed help create bridges that beginto automatically connect people of like minds, or withat least SOME similarity of experience, background,hobby, prior employer, physical location, etc. Thiscreates a connection between parties that would oth-erwise have no concept of one another’s existence.

It’s Not What You Know,It’s Who

We can use the well known Knowledge Management grid, to illustrate these relationships:In ‘traditional’ KM, this grid representsthat holy entity “Knowledge,” but in this instance, we’re speaking of ANY knowledge, about people. Toillustrate SN for you, assume that you “Know Who YouKnow” (KWYK) – that is, your immediate, directly connected network of relationships. This is no doubt not a very large number, and easily map-able andtrack-able.There are plenty of named people that you “Know Who You Don’t Know” (KWYDK) – for