Texas Instruments: Integrating Community into Sales Strategy — Live from BlogWell

Coverage of this session by DGdesign’s Danielle Glick. Connect with her by following her on Twitter at @SocialMediaDFW and at @Dallas_Foodie.

1:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Erin McDaniel introduces Texas Instruments‘ Worldwide Manager of Community & Social Media, Aimee Kalnoskas and Worldwide Community Program Manager, Forrest Lymburner.

1:31 – Aimee: Asks the audience “Who is TI?” Audience member answers, “Semi conductor chips.” Aimee says that’s right, “calculators” is the usual answer but that is only 2-3% of their business.

1:32 — Forrest: The strategy they use is: Understand, Integrate, Amplify.

1:32 — Forrest: Step 1: Understand. To integrate community in the sales force you must ask: How do you sell, what is the process, how are our sales forces organized, where are the sales offices, do you have central support, what tools are the field using, and who were your largest customers? You must have a targeted strategy.

1:33 — Forrest: Their findings were that “deja-vu email was king.” Email chains would go on for months sometimes. The minute the problem was solved, everyone hit delete on the email. This knowledge was lost in email.

1:34 — Forrest: They found lost treasure, lost content in the emails that was dying a slow death. They want to get this content out so others can benefit from it.

1:34 — Forrest: The old way of thinking is [sarcastic voice] “How is Facebook going to interact with our sales strategy?”

1:35 — Aimee: Step 2: Integrate into existing processes. This is the key. You won’t get adoption if you don’t make it a part of everyone’s job; it’s not “extra” work to people’s job descriptions.

1:36 — Forrest: It’s best to keep strategy behind closed doors before you introduce it to your team.

1:37 — Forrest: The process to integration: start with internal first, focusing on field to factory support, then launch an external pilot with a few product segments (only work with those departments willing to experiment). Write a success story to start selling the idea to higher-ups.

1:39 — Aimee: Social media is scary for traditional companies. Use social media to solve a problem, gain gratitude from internal people. Use the momentum of success and never stop selling your success story internally.

1:40 — Forrest: 75% of their company that is participating in their social media program today originally said NO to it.

1:40 — Aimee: Progress will be slow, but keep trying.

1:40 — Forrest: Step 3: Amplify. “If you build it, they will come”: this strategy DOES NOT WORK.

1:41 — Aimee: You have to reward advocates and early adopters, use competition with physical and virtual awards programs to encourage adoption. Example: reward people who answer a question in the community with points.

1:42 — Aimee: The people who answer questions are 50/50 TI employees vs. customers who are so passionate and knowledgeable they can answer others’ questions.

1:43 — Forrest: How they implemented the Amplify strategy:  Combine internal and external web sites into one web site to create one shared knowledge base. Take the pilot web site and slowly include the entire business. This process happened very slowly. Roll out social media principles and public speaking training to employees so they will know how to answer customer questions online.

1:45 — Aimee defines some terms from their presentation: “Internal” community is their field and factory employees. “External” is TI employees as viewed by the rest of the world.

1:46 — Aimee: We visited our offices in other countries for 2 weeks to figure out how a web site would appeal to our workers there. The graphics and approach that works here did not work there. Certain words and numbers mean other things in other countries. Their cultures are different, so build a site that will make sense to that country and will make them want to use and adopt it.

1:48 — Forrest: There is no Facebook in China. For 3 and a half years TI sent emails to Chinese employees with social media links in the footer, but they could not click on it (Facebook).

1:49 — Aimee: We admit we may have not nailed a perfect strategy, but we are always evolving it, and we feel we have something that works for us. It may not work the same for you though.

Q&A:

Q: What exactly did you implement, Yahoo Answers? How is it social?

A: Aimee: It’s www.TI.com/EDE. It’s primarily for online technical support. They are still working on integrating the social media community into it.

Q: Do you do anything to encourage customers to help each other, or TI employees?

A: Forrest: We try to get customers to help customers. To top-tier community members we try to establish personal relationships with them. We send them swag. One of the biggest challenges when starting up a community, for our first year we had very, very little customer interaction. You know you have a “community” when customers start answering customers’ questions. 30-40% of all customers have a customer interacting that was not the original asker.

Aimee: Particularly in China we have a lot of customer-to-customer interaction. Their cultue is more based on reward and recognition. They love technical documents that are translated into Chinese; that is a gold mine for them.

Q: How do you manage confidential issues in an open forum?

A: Forrest: There are always challenges for that. It’s a gray area whether things are proprietary or common questions. We protect ourselves with a disclaimer in the footer. It’s up to the customers to censor themselves. For TI employees, we monitor their responses and train them on how to respond, but most communities police themselves.

Q: How are you using community for support and sales? How are you measuring the sales?

A: Aimee: We are still working on making it an integrated part of our sales strategy. If we find a customer needs a product and the engineer doesn’t know that area of expertise, we try to suggest somewhere else that person can get help. Currently we can’t translate a purchase back to a specific community interaction. We make this a part of employee’s performance review every year—to help out customers.

Forrest: When someone engages in the community they don’t know what point in the sales process they are currently at (researching, new owner, long-term customer, troubleshooting).

Q: What is the software engine you are using?

A: Aimee: Intelligent platform.

Q: Have you integrated this as part of a CRM portal or billing tool to measure your success?

A: Forrest: Billing no. CRM yes. The system looks to see what companies users are with and where they were when they created their account or post. Then they can use that data to connect them with the right sales person.

Q: How much value does all of this bring? How valuable is it to the customers? There is no direct ROI, so subjectively, what is the value?

A: Aimee: To date, the customer was getting help from a finite number of TI Engineers over the phone and email. Now that customers can come in and search a web site, they can find the answers on their own in the community knowledgebase, instead of trying to find the answer online or hoping to get a knowledgeable engineer on the phone.