OGGflow customer collaboration - part #2 - OGGflow lead gen -> proposals -> quoting -> closing

Monday May 13th 2013 - Atlanta GA

Having tools to document requirements, provide teaming transparency and bring everyone together in one workflow is great. In the last post OGGflow customer collaboration - Part #1 - Invitations -> collaboration -> requirements gathering, we showed you how to quickly set-up a team project, colour code everything and get everyone on board and sharing.

In this post we will explore how a sales team working within the customer collaboration landscape of OGGflow can generate new leads, track opportunities, close opportunities and manage the closed and existing account base all while easily identifying and documenting new opportunities.

Lead generation - We saved the topic of lead generation for this step as the processes for lead generation in OGGflow are the same pre/post customer acquisition.

Technique : Social feed hotwords -

OGGflow has powerful search tools implemented for customer and public social feeds such as Twitter, Facebook users and pages, LinkedIn users and company pages and Google+ users and page profiles.

Lead generation projects can be set-up in OGGflow so that at the desired interval all recent posts from the social networks containing specific keywords can be added to the lead generation project for mining;

Like all other objects or events in a OGGflow project feed, potential leads can be farmed from filters applied to social network feeds and then have tasks automatically assigned to the appropriate sales-team member or be further qualified and explored by pre-sales team watching the social feed filters and then manually assigned to a sales-team member with additional customer notes.

Key account contacts identified in social feeds within OGGflow lead projects can even be invited to new or existing customer collaboration projects where the requirements capture can begin before the assigned sales personnel even clicks on the link to join the opportunity specific qualification project.

Separately all social feeds for customers on existing projects can be viewed in a sales management project for the account. Proactively see live updates from your accounts complete social sphere and take social events that hint at or introduce new business opportunities or leads and add follow-up tasks for the account or sales manager who owns the account all right within OGGflow.

Technique : leads generated in the customer support social-sphere -

OGGflow support projects can be configured to receive all inbound support email on a companies support addresses along with customer responses to a companies pages, product pages, twitter feeds, live website chats and even voicemail messages and customer response call recordings and transcripts.

A company's social presence is often used by customers as a support channel, and by prospects as a sales contact channel.

Support and sales queue events in an organizations social sphere can easily be discussed, commented on and assigned to the sales team for follow-up all from within the OGGflow interface. This allows for the quickest possible response from an organizations frontline as a result of the unification of customers, support, sales and operations within OGGflow.

Technique : Leads generated from ongoing existing customer support operations -

One great element of social collaboration is that your internal delivery teams become very integrated with the stakeholders on the customer side of the operations fence. With a good user experience in motion this makes your organization the incumbent go to expert right there on your customers existing team. Additional opportunities in a larger organization will be much easier to spot, and when your account management and customer care teams do see something in their daily work flow to suggest that an additional opportunity is in reach, OGGFlow makes it as easy as clicking ‘assign task’ to get the event into the sales-teams view.

Tracking and closing opportunities with OGGflow milestones -

Sales opportunities are tracked with OGGflow milestones. An unlimited number of milestones, tasks, team members or projects can be associated with a customer / sales target account.

A quick glance at a sales opportunity milestone information page will show the criticals about an opportunity, the sales forecast data and all associated tasks open, completed and verified.

Engineering may be working to add a feature required by the customer. Support may be working to correct an issue the customer discovered during their user acceptance testing. All of these efforts are happening in parallel to the sales and business unit working to execute the required contracts and licenses.

A quick click on an individual task ID from within the sales milestone information page will display the real time feed for the task and an instant view into the status of the work.

A sales milestone page becomes an invaluable nexus of real-time information on an identified / qualified sales opportunity. Even better it only takes a few clicks to set-up a milestone in OGGflow so that the delivery teams can begin creating, assigning and working tasks.

OGGflow was built on a principle that redundant information does not need to cost an organization as much time and money as it does with other overly complex sales CRM solutions. Once an opportunity owner sets up a milestone the rest of the detail record and audit trail is self generated by employee and customer activity. Your sales team should not be burning cycles copying and pasting their notes and or typing updates and reports about meetings. OGGflow lets you capture everything automatically so that the valuable time of your internal teams and people can be spent doing what they do best as a part of the customer team.

It is commonplace for a large and complex customer organization to have several opportunities, projects and teams interacting with your organization in parallel. Never before has it been so easy to see an up to the second status update of every sales opportunity and real time detail on every dependency an opportunity has across multiple parts of the customer organization as well as your own.

Further, forecasts and territory sales goals can be captured and tracked in quota and territory milestones-

The goal of OGGflow is to reduce human interaction complexity and provide the most real time view possible into any aspect of an organization's processes and progress.

Account management and customer care with continuity and opportunity -

Once a customer acquisition is complete, OGGflow continues to add value by maintaining a searchable history of the collaborative team efforts back to day one of the relationship. With the immortalized relationship history, and real time activity feeds for the ongoing support and relationship management needs it is always easy to find relevant details about any topic or opportunity within the customer organization landscape.

The customers usage of OGGflow to interact with and gain support from your organization will continue to present trackable opportunities for your organization to add more value to the customer relationship.

Some additional reading around the web;

Forbes - Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales: Sales Turns to the Cloud for Quick Relief

Forbes - Whats hot in CRM applications?

Computerworld - Gartner: SaaS market to grow 17.9% to $14.5B

Entrepreneur - Lead generation

Social Media Today - B2B Lead generation on LinkedIn

InformationWeek - CRM News: Sales: Lead Generation in the Social Revolution

CMS Wire - Lead Generation News and Articles

PC World - Tech support goes social

Huffington Post - Social media

Businessweek - Lead generation

Entrepreneur - Sales forecast news

Social Business News - An Overview of the Social Customer