CSO Insights Blog Posts

Hey Batter, Batter, Batter!

I played a lot of baseball (Midget League through high school Varsity) and fielders chanting "Hey Batter, SWING Batter!" was part of the game. For those not familiar with the sport, it's called "chatter." And it's intended to distract the opposing player at bat.

At Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com extravaganza held each year at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, the company unveiled their latest development: Chatter. This latest feature brings Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media to you in the Salesforce desktop. This is an attempt to answer the question so many are asking these days: Can businesses monetize social media?

The driving force behind this question is the mind boggling numbers of Twitter tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn messages that are created each day. If companies are able to tune in to this on-line chat, they'll have a real-time ear to the voice of the customer. If you have any doubt about what customers are capable of saying about you and your company, check out "United Breaks Guitars" on YouTube.

It should be noted that this video allegedly came after a year of trying more traditional approaches to communicate with the airline. My question, and caution, is whether a steady stream of chatter serves to tune a company into the marketplace, or serves more the purpose of our baseball banter: to distract and interrupt an individual's focus.

Distraction is a thief of productive time, and a corruptor of selling time. "Got a minute?" is the familiar opening when a friend or colleague wants to quickly run something by you. But it's been suggested that there is no such thing as a momentary interruption. By the time you stop what you were doing, deal with the question and then remember where you were and what you were doing just before being interrupted, a minimum of ten minutes will have elapsed. Do this a few times a day and you've lost 6% of an 8-hour workday. Have a steady stream of chatter served up on your workspace and you could be losing a big chunk of each day.

It's for this reason that time management gurus suggest dealing with key tasks before even opening email in the morning, and that you not leave email on during the day. According to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, these distractions cause you to deal with what's urgent rather than what's important.

In Virtual Selling*, Tom Siebel presented an equation I'd formulated about sales productivity:

Activity of sales force X Quality of that activity = Productivity
Length of Sales Cycle

My partner, Jim Dickie, further refined this formula adding the notion of distractions:

                                      Activity of sales force X Quality of that activity         = Productivity
                                                      Length of Sales Cycle__
                                                            Distractions

So the final formula becomes:

                                                           Activity X Quality
                                                             ____Time____                   =   Productivity
                                                               Distractions

So as sales distractions go DOWN, productivity goes UP.

Will chatter be a boon or bane to sales productivity? Time will tell, and I've been wrong about this sort of thing before. Although I am willing to be proven wrong, my initial reaction is that having chatter served up immediately, continuously and personally will steal more time and value than it will present.

Grab a dictionary and you'll find this final thought:

Chatter: to talk fast, incessantly, and foolishly.

Good Selling,

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