I've been thinking about a new (at least I think it's new) area where klogging could take wing namely as a way of augmenting a Sales Force Automation (SFA) suite.

I've got a little experience here and in particular with some of the pitfalls of an SFA.  For example an SFA will typically only work well if:

• Everyone who should be entering data does so
• In a timely fashion
• The data is good
• The data remains good

Where an SFA implementation is not working I think the reasons are often both psychological and technological.

On the one hand there are reps who do not want to share information.  They will actively try to avoid or work around the SFA system where possible.  The solutions to this problem are probably not technical in nature.  Klogging has nothing to offer these people since their whole mindset is the opposite of a klogging mindset.

However I think there are also a lot of reps who, all things being equal, would use the system properly.  So what stops them?  I think it comes down to one or both of:

• They are not technically able to master the interface of the SFA
• The perceived benefits of the SFA to them (i.e. to their commission levels) do not justify the amount of work required of them to be good users.

And then I started to wonder whether a klogging system might not be able to help bridge this kind of gap.

Here's how it goes:

I think that a Radio based klog is, after the installation is over, very easy to use.  Okay templates & categories can cause confusion, but neither are required to use Radio for klogging work.  Company level IT people can do the installation and configuration.  Every sales person I have met could handle posting to a klog.

Our rep would klog entries whenever they have contact with suspects, prospects or customers.  They would do this instead of making entries in the SFA.  One immediate benefit for the rep is that they can do this whilst disconnected (not many SFA systems seem to have a workable disconnected mode).  A good example might be klogging the results of a meeting with a client whilst sat in the car outside the clients premises -- not having to wait to get home or back to the office.

Every activity that could go into the SFA could also be klogged and much more easily.  Telephone calls, meetings, even emails could be copied & pasted from Outlook (Yes, don't look so horrified!).  The k-log interface is so simple that I think you could achieve untypical levels of rep activity.  klogging in this way would build up a considerable database of information about each contact.  For a sales manager this begins to pay off immediately.  By subscribing to the klog of each of their rep's they would immediately have great visibility into the current pipeline.

But what about the SFA?  Okay imagine we have someone else working back at base who is also subscribed to the RSS feed of one or more of the rep's k-logs.  Their job is to extract from those k-logs the information that the SFA needs to do it's job.  With the correct metadata being applied to each k-log post this would be a pretty simple clerking task and could even be automated (I can imagine using "templated" posts to help with this).  In addition the SFA should be linking back to the k-logs so as not to duplicate information unncessarily (this makes the k-logs more closely part of the CRM solution).

I guess what I'm suggesting is using klogging for effective data capture by the reps and to build the database of suspect/prospect knowledge.  Then, as a separate step and done by someone else, updating the SFA as much as required to enable the overview & forecasting functionality that an SFA gives you.  

Does anyone have any views about this idea?

It's a sad day.  I knew it would come though.  I guess a month isn't too bad.

My new Novissio email account received it's first piece of confirmed spam!

Luckily SpamNet was there to catch it :-)

Here's a thought.

As a klogger, over the past 3 months or so, I have recorded & published tens if not hundreds of thoughts.  I doubt if I shared one quarter of output during the last 6 years I worked at various companies.  Oh I would probably have emailed here and there, spoken up during meetings.  But I wonder just how much knowledge is being lost, second by second, in most companies by each employee.  Then multiply up...