Bursty Saves the Day!
by Zia Zaman
Echoing Tom Mandel’s recent post and with a nod as well to Anne Zelenka, I want to try to give a concrete example of how a traditional enterprise workflow (closing a deal) can be augmented with Enterprise 2.0 technologies, breaking down organizational boundaries and letting users uncover associations and gain new insights.
We go back to the world of Enormabus and meet Bursty:
Bursty employee finds a way to adapt outside tools into his work-life to give himself an edge, in the process reinventing how he works and leverages information.
Bursty works for Thogwheel and is trying to close a big deal at Enormabus. Bursty is browsing Facebook and finds out about Eargot, a potential influencer at Enormabus through a fellow MIT grad. Bursty then uses a social networking search service to identify two possible links or shared tags between himself and Eargot. He investigates one by email; no response. He investigates the other by IMing a friend who says he’s lost touch but offers a cryptic clue: Geneva. He searches for Geneva across all of Thogwheel’s CRM repositories and finds that Eargot (misspelled) is based in Geneva even though his office location is Toulouse. Inside his company, he uses employee search to find fellow employees in Geneva who might be able to secure a meeting with Eargot.
On another front, Bursty discovers through a search of his channel partner’s wikis that one of the critical decision criteria for the deal is making the Enormabuses fly longer with less maintenance.
Meanwhile, Bursty gets a personalized alert from his search portal telling him about a materials study that may help alleviate one of the deal’s sticky points. He posts the doc to the group wiki and flies to Geneva on his way to Toulouse. At the critical meeting with Eargot, he has the author of the materials report on the phone, his local contact whom Eargot plays tennis with, and a just-in-time proposal that shows the link between Thogwheel’s product and the life expectancy of Enormabus. Eargot walks away convinced, adds Bursty to his network, and writes an influential report to the decision-makers advocating Thogwheel.
While some dealmakers are already using these tools and infrastructure, many others are not. At the end of the day, the winning proposal will be what matters in driving behaviour at Thogwheel and beyond.
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