Consumerisation of the Enterprise

I have been considering an idea called ‘Consumerisation of the Enterprise’ which seems to be a fundamental paradigm shift happening right now. The younger generation, just entering the workforce, is more accustomed to the use of technology and Internet enabling tools. They are the Facebook, Youtube and mobile phone generation who have grown up with expectations around what technology can do and should do for them and have driven our ‘instant digital gratification’ culture. This is what is helping drive the Web 2.0 and Sales 2.0 movements in part. But the enterprise probably has less sophisticated enabling technologies at play than individuals are accustomed to in their personal lives. There does seem a gap here and one that organizations could do well to acknowledge, especially given the fact that their prospective customers are now more knowledgeable and discerning about what they want even before they come into contact with a vendor organisation. What am I taking about you ask yourself? Here is an example that relates to sales effectiveness of companies. Companies have spent millions on deploying CRM solutions in the expectation that their top line sales revenues would improve. Not always the case. Whilst CRM solutions have been useful at managing business processes, structured reporting and analytics, they have fallen short at getting improved sales results, shorter lead times and better order-to-bid ratios. In an effort to address the shortfall, organizations plan the typical annual religious sales kick off or the traditional classroom based training. That’s great, but what happens a week, two weeks or two months afterwards? How much of what has been taught is remembered or deployed in the field? What seems evident is that organizations need to consider alternative approaches that appeal to the modern workforce and work the way they like to work. Here is a scenario. What if you could ask a question related to a sales situation on your mobile or within your email system or on the web or even within your company’s CRM system and you were delivered short, quick hitting best practice advice you could put into practice straight away. Advice that you could consume any way you liked – text, audio or video. No committing to memory, no time away from the field and no lengthy curriculum. Just practical advice you could apply to improve the ‘how to do’ of the sales equation rather than just the ‘what to do’. That would be compelling. I don’t have the evidence to hand but would be willing to bet that this is one of those ‘unarticulated needs’ where once you had seen how such a solution could solve your problem, there would be no turning back.. And imagine taking this another step further. What if you didn’t even have to search in the first place? What if you could build intelligence such that the right knowledge could be pushed to you at the appropriate moment in time in a sales workflow (i.e. combining that with a CRM solution and your organization’s typical sales workflow process)…… There are significant opportunities I am sure and consumerisation of the enterprise is here and the boundaries between how people use technology in their personal lives will continue to drive how we use enabling technologies to better solve problems within the enterprise.