Social networking and CRM are a fit waiting to be used but I believe it must be about individual relationships with customers.  Commissions are a strong driver in the sales process and whenever a sales person feels threatened by sharing information with others, its translated into a commison split or loss of a deal.  These are realities that must be recognized by management.

One of the benefits of social networking and CRM can be to help the sales person shorten the sales cycle and increase their depth of knowledge of their personal prospects and customers.  It needs to be baked into the tools they use, the heirarchy of approvals they require and provide visible benefits to them - individually.

If these experience these payoffs, they will get excited about it and embrace it.

Ian Gilyeat

Agreeing with Ian's statement of "Social networking and CRM are a fit waiting to be used but I believe it must be about individual relationships with customers," I feel Social Networking has not had it's share of focus by the Corporates.

One of the 50 Best Management Thinkers C K Prahalad has brought out a book called "The New Age of Innovation" Co-authoring with M.S. Krishnan in which he says "to succeed in the 'new age of innovation,' firms must partner with individual customers to co-create customized experiences. This is to say that Ford Model T concept will not work anymore as the only Strategy.

The authors explain that many companies are not structured to capitalize on co-creation, but rather built around the old model of creating products and services and then offering them to consumers. However, they outline examples of several companies that do adhere to the co-creation model, such as Starbucks, Facebook, ING, and Google.

The authors also outline how the co-creation framework allows the consumer's set of choices to be infinite, not limited as they are in the current model of mass-customization.

Google mentioned above as such does not have an army of sales people to sell their adsense or adwords. It's the customers who have done it, and it's happened because people fundamentally do not take decisions without "help - the reference way."  It has allowed google to think  differently, which has made them the largest internet company in the world, with 1Q08 ~45% of all U.S. Internet advertising revenues, which is up from ~42% in 2007, which is up from 35% in 2006, and which is up from 30% in 2005 -- according to base numbers reported by IAB and Google.

• This means that in a few quarters, Google will control over 50% of all U.S. Internet advertising; the antitrust rule of thumb is that if a company controls 50% share of a market, it is considered "dominant."

• If the market is defined more narrowly, like search advertising, Google commands ~75% of U.S. Internet advertising revenue per eMarketer, and ~80% market share of the European search market per ComScore.

          o 90% market share is the rule of thumb when a company is considered a "monopoly."

In 1Q08, Yahoo commanded ~22% of all U.S. Internet advertising, and their U.S. revenue was slightly down/flat sequentially 4Q07 to 1Q08 -- suggesting that smaller Internet advertising competitors are the ones losing big share rapidly to Google.

• This also means that in 4Q08 the proposed Google-Yahoo cartel now commands 67% market share of all U.S. Internet advertising. 

          o If one were to add the online advertising revenues of Google's other Internet advertising "partners," the potential cartel's revenue share could be over 70% of the U.S Internet advertising market. 

(The above numbers on Google are sourced from Scott Clelands Precursor Blog)

Now, the question is if the Social Networking will work for Corporates? It will. Are they ready? They are not.

The Competitive Dynamics will drive the change. Those Corporates who adopt Internet and Social Networking will get far ahead and become dominant players. Those who don't will be a "reference" for things not to be done "their way."

Ann,

Just got redirected to your post from another site. I completely disagree with your post and title. No sales person can sell without a community or network and no sales means no commissions.

In pre-IT days they used rolodexes and the prospecting algorithms ran in the sales guys mind.

These days the prospects are in the CRM or affiliated systems (or at least a large part of it) and tools like Sales Prospector help sales folks easily model and identify prospects.

Disclaimer: I work at Oracle but not on Sales Prospector and these views are my own.