Salesforce Chatter: Top 10 Tips

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Note (1-Dec-2011): We’ve supplanted the below list of best practices with our all-new list of top Chatter tips.

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Can Chatter, the new collaboration application for Salesforce.com, help your CRM program?

To find out, Pervez Alam, part of Innoveer’s Salesforce.com practice, recently took Chatter—currently in beta—for a spin.

Here are his top 10 tips for how to use Chatter:

1. Target CRM adoption. The number-one challenge for any CRM program is adoption. Chatter helps by being another way to engage salespeople with the CRM system. Consider the addictiveness of Facebook on a smartphone; many people check it hourly. Now consider how a similar tool, such as Chatter, might act as a gateway drug to more effective SFA, especially for young salespeople.
2. Understand the role of Twitter-like tools. Don’t worry if information relayed via Chatter is ephemeral; that’s the point. Indeed, one Twitter study found that the majority of re-tweets (re-posting a Twitter message) happen within one hour of a message first being posted. After that, the value of the information decays dramatically.
3. Channel client details. Savvy salespeople trying to close a deal are likely already following their contacts’ LinkedIn or Twitter feeds, to glean clues into what clients are seeing, hearing or doing, to help create better pitches. Think of Chatter as just another tool for sharing client-related intelligence.
4. Build a 360-degree customer view. If I’m a salesperson working on a deal—particularly a large opportunity—and a colleague of mine “Chatters” that he had a great meeting with someone else at the client, that might provide me an edge for closing the deal. In other words, timely updates help busy salespeople seize limited-time opportunities they might have missed.
5. Push important but fleeting information to salespeople. Beyond seeing people’s off-the-cuff updates, you can track documents or data via Chatter’s Facebook-like updates. So every time an opportunity, contact or account materially changes, you get updates without having to go into the system.
6. Create plug-and-play triggers. In the traditional CRM world, creating event triggers—for example, to email an alert whenever a specific client’s opportunity status changes—often requires some manual coding. But with SaaS CRM applications such as Salesforce.com, trigger functionality is typically built in; just click a button. (Same goes for Oracle CRM On Demand.) Now, Chatter extends that alert capability even further, with its Twitter- or Facebook-like interface.
7. Finesse the filters. Will Chatter have fine-grained filters for ensuring that you don’t get too many alerts, or that you only get the information you need? That remains to be seen.
8. Channel non-obvious information. What else might you relay via Chatter? If an opportunity status or the value attached to an opportunity changes, make that change inside Salesforce.com. In other words, don’t broadcast the information via Chatter, since anyone following those accounts will automatically see the changes. Chatter is for more impulsive broadcasting, akin to Facebook—layering additional, timely intelligence or perspective over hard data.
9. Train salespeople to Chatter. With the above in mind, consider training salespeople to use Chatter as an outlet for sharing non-obvious but helpful information. Sales managers and executives can also lead by example. Sample post: “I’ll be in Atlanta this week, I’ll have 5 hours on Tuesday and can visit some clients. If you need me, tap into my calendar.”
10. Test Chatter. If Chatter doesn’t cost extra, why not turn it on, just to see what it can do?

Pick an Approach to Chatter

Don’t expect Chatter to remake CRM or social networking as we know it. But if it helps augment your CRM program, even a bit, that would be worth investigating, no?

That’s the attitude at one Innoveer client, which has a relatively young sales team that’s well versed in using Facebook and Twitter, at least for fun. Recently, after asking us about Chatter, the organization’s head of sales told us that since Chatter will be built into Salesforce.com, he’s planning to activate it when it becomes available, then encourage his salespeople to use it. Because if a CRM-based social networking tool such as Chatter helps his sales force more fully embrace CRM, he’s all for it.

Learn More

Who’s using SaaS? Increasingly, large enterprises as well as small ones.

How can you rapidly adopt SaaS and ensure that it meets business requirements? By first ensuring that SaaS CRM will automate business processes, improve the customer experience, and increase overall levels of productivity and profitability, preferably using a CRM accelerator.

Which SaaS applications are best? Read our CRM smackdown to find out.

What’s the best way to use SaaS? Be sure to integrate with SaaS CRM.

Finally, learn why SFA failure rates will increase as more organizations adopt SaaS.

One More Thing

Innoveer is now part of Cloud Sherpas -- come visit us on our CRM insights on the Cloud Sherpas' Base Camp blog.