Look, I realize that the majority of salespeople would make a sour face at that suggestion — keep the peas and mashed potatoes separate — as this takes them away from the traditional ABC model, but its a more holistic way of building/selling/supporting products. Everyone needs to take responsibility for improving the product/service, just as everyone needs to be responsible for improving the customer experience. How you implement that in your company is up to you.

You can track things like blog/web trending, event leads, downloads, registrations, etc through various campaign management tools and methods, but this does not always give you the entire picture/value/importance of this role.

How do you measure influence? Here’s a scenario:

1) Three people see you speak at a SharePoint Saturday
2) One of them also sees you at the Best Practices Conference
3) Someone else at the company downloads your whitepaper
4) A partner comes into contact with that customer and recommends you as someone who might be able to answer a specific question, and the customer emails you
5) As the customer starts the product review process, your company is mentioned, and several people mention that they are familiar with you, your presentations, and your industry expertise
6) The customer reaches out to you to ask some additional questions, which leads to the scheduling of a full demo
7) A demo is held, led by sales
8) A sale is made

Time after time, sales is unaware of steps 1-6 (viscerally they understand it, but they really don’t “get it”), and the value of the evangelist role is lost in the afterglow of the sale.

In short, we all have this issue, and I’m looking forward to more feedback, and discussing possible shared solutions.

Note: I agree with Lee’s points. So this is focused on individual benefits.

To a SharePoint Salesman:
- Community events can be a source for leads. As can community contribution. Not always immediately, but I can say from experience that it definitely generates leads.
- Community contribution (events or online) doesn’t necessarily have a strong lead correlation, however understanding the pulse of the community, market trends, and the scenarios/issues people encounter with the Technology allows you to have a higher close rate.
- If you are selling services:
Having community presence, brand, acknowledgment, and understanding will lead to higher bill rates. Hopefully because you truly care about what you do, your customers, and the community. In addition see the above items.
- If you are selling products:
Having community presence, brand, acknowledgment, and understanding will lead to more awareness of your products and higher levels of interest. This makes closing much easier. Not only that, but showing community support shows that your organization has a human, caring, and supportive staff. Leading to more value in them purchasing additional things like multi-year support from your company.
- Learning, sharing, and vetting your ideas with the community will make you more effective at explaining technology value propositions, challenges, and help you improve your professional skill set.

Quite frankly with the way the technology industry is maturing, the way social is becoming a dominant influence on purchasing, and that passionate vocal people can now easily share: If you don’t start to get ‘involved’ in community your sales can’t be as successful or high as those who are.

Hopefully this helps give you some ammunition Mark and helps anyone sitting on the fence,
Richard Harbridge

P.S – There is a BIG difference in involvement/contribution and meaningful involvement/contribution. The way to tell the difference is by what motivates you. In the long run maybe you get started for those personal reasons – but eventually if you really care then it becomes about helping the community or helping others not about helping yourself. What motivates you? :)

I stayed with EUSP because of the community itself. I have often been put off by the negativity, and destructive attitude of some other communities, where is seems cutting down the author of an article was some form of sport. At EUSP the community is positive, we are appreciative of the time and effort an author puts in to an article, we do not expect a contributor to be perfect, nor do we cut them down. In fact we tend to take an idea and run with it, adding to it, suggesting improvements, or other ways the idea can be used. How many new articles and ideas have been fostered by an article someone else wrote? We truly collaborate, and it creates a positive and welcoming environment.

What is more the community empowers its members. Because you don’t have to be perfect, or some famous SharePoint author, community members feel secure in submitting their ideas, which other members can use, and/or improve upon starting the cycle all over again.

To sell in a community where people freely offer their time, knowledge and experience you have to rethink your approach. You need to be a part of the community, contribute to the community, and then offer your company’s expertise to take the solution to a higher level. Because of all the wonderful solutions I learned from EUSP, my company was willing to spend money on the EUSP workshops. I also have used some of Bamboos free solutions, which lead to purchasing some of their products. Seeing a trend here? When it came time to spend some money we knew we would get our money’s worth.

Just my two cents. :)

Reducing the barriers to purchasing your product is important. So, for how sales can get involved in the community, , I would say be facilitating the sale more than directly making the sale will be a reality. Since sales isn’t likely directly improving the product, but by playing a sales engineer role – be available via twitter or your company’s forum, answering and routing questions. A need that is unmet, play the role of a customer advocate, pushing your team to add that feature to the product so that the sale can be met (part of ‘trial closing’?)

See a recurring theme here? Sales people often are focused on individual goals (usually theirs), not the goals of the entire sales force in their company.

A collaboration and community mindset requires one to: 1) value the community goals over individual goals, and 2) contribute to a movement or group without the expectation of receiving something in return (the antithesis of sales).

Those who are active in the SharePoint community can be generalized as ‘givers’, people who give of their time, knowledge and talent in the hope of assisting or influencing others. Those who give with the sole purpose of receiving are easily found out and are often avoided while those that give from their heart, based on their passion, attract people to themselves.

Not all sales people have large egos or contribute to something with the expectation that they will receive immediate benefit in return. Most are extremely hard working, dedicated professionals. Often, however, they don’t see the benefit of joining a community, especially one as passionate as the SharePoint community, and, if they do, they are oftentimes avoided.

I contribute to the SharePoint community because of my knowledge, my passion, my belief in the people working within the community and because, in some small way, I hope to make the lives of those using SharePoint a little lighter and easier. I can do all of this, however, because I do not have a huge sales quota that’s increased every quarter.

As one of my friends, who is a passionate sales person, often said, “Nothing happens without a sale.” Sales allows me to do the fun things that I get to do each and every day and, for the benefit that I am able to realize due to their work, I will continue to not expect sales to wade into the SharePoint community pool. I’ve got that covered for them.

There’s my Jerry Maguire-esque Manifesto…..