Let’s look at the facts: Only 14% of people trust advertising; 93% of marketers use social media for business. Big Shift #1: we’re moving from customer relationship management (CRM) to customer engagement management, aka Social CRM. Tech research firm Gartner predicts that by 2012 the Social CRM market will be more than $1 billion with 100+ companies competing for this rapidly growing pie. The three leading vendors are Jive, Salesforce, and Lithium.

If you’re still unclear about how to approach sales success strategies in a social and mobile world, picture your office water cooler going global, enabling B2B sales conversations in real time, 24/7. Here are the numbers:

• 175 million users log on to Facebook every 24 hours.
• 65 million access Facebook through a mobile device and they share 30 billion (billion!) pieces of content every month and that number includes 3 billion photos and videos.
• 84% of Internet users watch videos online.
• YouTube visitors watch 2 billion videos every day.
• LinkedIn attracts one new member every second.
• Econsultancy reports that over 25 billion tweets were sent last year.

Big Shift #2: Prospects care more about what their peers think than what companies think. Chest thumping is dead. Even the largest companies have to abandon the old script, “me big, you little, I tell, you listen.” Smart companies have handed the controls over to the community by offering different levels of autonomy, engagement and collaboration. Notable examples: amazon.com, and mystarbucksidea.com.

Initiating and leading great conversations online is only one side of the story.  Gen Y salespeople consider email a thing of the past: they no longer cold call; they shifted to social calling; and they are far more productive. They also embrace new online video tools like iMeet.com and have discovered that the best way to persuade is by looking into a prospect’s eyes — online.

Since social media is accessible on most mobile devices, real-time collaboration is the new rage. A VP of Sales shared the story of driving in a cab to visit a client. He posted the following question on Salesforce Chatter, a social network for businesses offering secure collaboration and knowledge-sharing for CRM:

Q: Visiting XYZ in London, any thoughts that I could share to enhance our relationship?

Within minutes the company’s CFO shared:

A: Yes, they owe us $400,000 that’s 60 days overdue.

The result: the VP was able to eliminate the bottleneck in the company’s payment process. Problem solved.

The social media world is slowly moving in a new direction. Let’s say you are working in a company that employs 600 salespeople. Would you want to follow everybody in that company on a social network? No. You’d follow the top 10 thought leaders and learn what’s important to them. Big Shift #3: the emphasis is moving from quantity connections to quality connections. Social learning companies like Saba benefit from this new trend by continually refining social learning tools.

Someone recently told me: “I consider the iPhone as an extension cord to my brain.” Social media has become a second brain for everybody. Why not use it more effectively to serve the community and serve your business?

-Gerhard Gschwandtner, blog.sellingpower.com, twitter: gerhard20

After taking the audience’s pulse at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference, I realize that Greenberg’s definition is already a traffic light behind Main Street. The rapid rate at which companies integrate social media into their business operation is astonishing.  Search Engine Journal reports that in 2007, only 17 percent of companies used social media. The prediction for 2012 is 43 percent. Today, more than 80 percent of companies use social media for recruiting. One company represented at the conference reported that 20 percent of its new leads come from its social-business strategy. Another company reported that leads created through social media are three times more likely to close than leads generated by marketing.

While individual social-media tools add little value and offer no ROI, a social-business strategy leads to quantifiable results. Here is my definition of the new face of social business: the alignment of content, conversations, and collaboration with the comapny’s business strategy.

On a tactical level, a social-business strategy relies on three core elements:

Content. Ownership of a product or service is always preceded by ownership of the related content. Content is like a currency that companies share to earn interest in the marketplace. Good content leads to better conversations. Good content educates customers. Good content catches customers. For example, at HubSpot, all 100 salespeople are asked to create and maintain a blog. The results: more traffic to the company’s Website, higher search-engine optimization ratings, and unprecedented sales growth year over year.

Conversation. In the new world of social business, the sales pitch has been replaced by a fluid conversation between equal partners. The focus is on situational fluency. If the prospect has already completed 80 percent of the fact finding in the purchase process, it’s the salesperson’s job to deliver the remaining 20 percent within the allocated time frame set aside for the conversation. In their one to many conversations, smart companies have shifted their strategy from thought leadership to community leadership. Good community leaders set conversational boundaries that prevent members from going on rabbit trails or engaging in Wild West behavior. It takes a well-managed community with clear boundaries to close more business.

Collaboration. New social CRM tools, such as Jive, Lithium, or Salesfoce Chatter, have given companies the opportunity to collaborate across the organization, eliminating silos while maintaining a steady focus on business at hand. Smart companies extend the collaboration pipeline to include their customers. Be elevating customers to the status of equal partner, companies can co-create their future.

While the benefits of transforming a company into a social business are clear, what’s not clear is the path to get there. While the Internet has the potential to replicate on a screen our mind’s agility, the number of available tools to create an effective social-media strategy is staggering.

Success doesn’t depend on choosing the right program like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but on business leaders’ embracing the fact that social media isn’t a choice, but a mandate for business survival.

-Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power, Twitter: gerhard20

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A custom metal fabrication shop/vehicle assembly facility had an arduous process for each unique vehicle they produced. Engineering would send the drawings down to the metal fabrication shop for the unique cut pieces from plate (including diamond pattern), and the structural angles for construction of the vehicle frames. The metal fabrication shop used a cut optimizer program to get the most shapes out of each stock plate used.

The cut pieces were then marked by chalk with the corresponding number from the drawings that the operator needed to discern from the drawings. Often there would be similar appearing pieces, maybe one for the right side of the finished assembly and one for the left that would be mismarked by chalk, resulting in problems upstream in the forming process or during assembly and welding. This resulted in making additional cuts from plate in the metal shop, thus slowing down the assembly process, wasting extra material and production time, while losing the material optimization from the use of additional raw plate stock.

Remaining usable plate stock was often set aside in hopes of being used for other cuts, but the optimization program was only capable of being used for new, whole plate stock, so large stacks of off-cuts were left unused within the shop. The off-cuts were often left unmarked, so the potential of using them in the future was minuscule, due to not being able to positively identify the metal’s properties for future jobs. Hence, much waste metal resulted within this plant. An average of 500 pounds of metal scrap was generated for each vehicle produced, not including the additional usable off-cuts that piled up unused and unmarked.

Although this shop’s operations may be similar to many other manufacturing operations, their product was unique in almost every case. Many opportunities for improvement existed beginning with: The receipt of raw materials and subsequent transfer of raw materials to work in process, tracking jobs at major fabrication points, managing raw material components and component shortages, capturing serial numbers and process comments, cutting and staging components and subassemblies, and managing Q. A. and final inspections. They included:

Reduce manufacturing costs by eliminating non value added labor
Reduce direct manufacturing costs
Reduce indirect and overhead costs
Significantly cut material waste
Improve work flow management
Streamline QA and inspection processes
Optimize and track off-cuts for future use
Increase production capacity
Improve inventory control
Improve asset utilization
Improve customer service
Improve profit without increasing revenue

SOLUTION:

A key element in the cutting process was that of the optimization of plate stock. ADI developed a program to work in unison with the plate optimization program wherein a bar coded label identifier was generated for each cut from the plate, including a schematic for the location and shapes on which each label should be placed, along with any remaining usable off-cut(s). Using the schematic generated from our solution, the operator labeled each cut. The labels were then scanned before use upstream to assure that the correct pieces were being used for forming and fabricating.

The off-cuts were also prioritized through the program for use in subsequent jobs, where that material would be the first choice for cuts that would fit within the dimensions of the material size of the off-cut. Hence the waste from unused off-cuts diminished considerably. Waste from using the wrong pieces up stream in fabrication and assembly reduced to a very low amount and were no longer generated from misidentification.

Likewise, metal angles at the cut saw were bar code labeled and tracked to make certain that each piece was subsequently used in the correct way during upstream fabrication. Significant savings were again realized, not only from reduced scrap, but more so from:

1. Automating the process of preparing raw data from the existing system and presenting that data to the panel optimization software.
Replacing inefficient methods with a robust optimizer that included:
a. The ability to be imbedded into other application software or the ability to be utilized in an automated fashion.
b.  The ability to keep track of, manage and utilize off-cuts.
c. The ability to produce output compatible with downstream system requirements for displaying cut sheets, producing labels and allowing machine operators to prioritize cutting and label printing.
3. Creating a SQL database schema that would provide a foundation for the management of the cutting data and for part and raw material IDs to be associated to job IDs. This database would become the transaction repository for all data collection efforts going forward.
4. Data links to item and job data as appropriate
5. Creating user interfaces to interact with the developed application for administrative and functional interactions.
6. Creating labels and user interfaces that allow the machine operators to select and prioritize which cut sheets they are working on and in what order and by what method labels are printed.

Implementation of this system resulted in:
1. Elimination of direct labor previously used to prepare data cutting.
2. Elimination of errors that cause downstream cutting problems linked to manual data preparation.
3. Elimination of the lag time between the time raw job data is available and finished cut sheet and labels are ready.
4. Elimination of labor required to print and distribute cut sheets and labels
5. Elimination of rework required to replace misplaced cut sheets and labels
6. Elimination of wasted labels (only labels required will be printed, no wasted blanks)
7. Easier to read labels that include a bar code to facilitate subsequent data collection processes
8. Better visibility and management of sheet and tube inventories, including off-cuts.
9. Reduction of scrap by way of more complete use of raw materials (tracking and use of off-cuts)

The results were impressive, delivering significant additional profitability to the ADI customer. An additional benefit was that the productivity of this facility significantly rose due to these added efficiencies, allowing them to sell more vehicles through the year and raising greater revenue. The lead time for vehicles also improved delivering even greater satisfaction for their customers.

- Written by John McBride, ADI employee