This is a liveblog of the online seminar The Recession-Ready Wiki, conducted by Aberdeen Group and eTouch. A quick summary with my advice is below, followed by the full live blog transcript.

Quick Summary

1. A wiki can help your sales staff build a living knowledge base of product information, gather and monitor trends in customer interaction, reduce the time sales staff spend looking for relevant information, and help new sales staff learn products and be ready to work with customers more quickly.
2. Choosing the wiki tool that’s best for your organization should come before sparking employee adoption.
3. Getting adoption right is a process that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Tying wiki use to performance reviews, and giving out rewards should only happen after the wiki has a healthy level of participation. These steps should be seen by employees as reactions to their proactive use of the wiki, not as a prod to use the wiki. Why? If you tie wiki use to performance reviews too early, people may only do the absolute minimum to necessary for their performance review.

Live Blog

Entries with Aberdeen in italics are the comments made by Aberdeen during the presentation, and entries with Stewart Mader in italics are my own analysis.

• 11:08 AM: Aberdeen Increased need for better and more sales intelligence – the source of information a co. can use to improve sales pipeline: competitive intelligence, analyst reports, etc.
• 11:09 AM: Aberdeen Explosion of online info has leveled the competitive landscape. Sales staff need access to information that helps them respond to specific customer needs instead of a “canned” sales approach.
• 11:11 AM: Aberdeen Unless you have good information to put a wiki, it’s not necessarily useful. The quality of content is king.
• 11:15 AM: Stewart Mader Shortening the time sales staff spend searching for relevant information can translate to more time available to work with customers, interact in online communities, prepare better sales materials, presentations, etc.
• 11:21 AM: Aberdeen Survey of wiki users – How are wikis used? Respondents said: project collaboration & communication #1 use (67%), followed by documentation (63%), FAQs (61%), training (46%), and forum for new ideas (41%).
• 11:22 AM: Aberdeen How high a priority is the use of internal collaboration tools? 59% of respondents said either high or medium priority. However, 22% said not important at all.
• 11:27 AM: Aberdeen What are strategic way companies can improve sales? 48% – improve sales reps’ knowledge of products, 34% – reduce time spent on administrative tasks, 28% – reduce time spent looking for information
• 11:31 AM: Stewart Mader Where can a wiki help? Sales reps can build a knowledge base. Contributions from multiple people can produce more comprehensive information, reduce errors, correct misinformation, and keep knowledge current. This will also help new sales reps get onboard quickly, learn about the products, and be ready to talk about them with customers.
• 11:35 AM: Stewart Mader Maintain a wiki page to track interaction trends with prospective customers. This doesn’t necessarily replace a tool like SalesForce for tracking progress with each customer. The wiki should be used for tracking general trends like most commonly asked questions from prospective customers, etc.
• 11:38 AM: Stewart Mader A company could integrate CRM tool (SalesForce, etc.) with a wiki and feed information between the two, but this is not necessary for initial wiki adoption. It may prove useful for some organizations, but let the wiki grow on its own, and decide later on, with input from sales staff, whether wiki and CRM need to be linked.
• 11:42 AM: Aberdeen Aberdeen’s 4 Steps to Sales Success: 1. Incorporate Social Media tools into Sales Collaboration Plans 2. Prepare at the organizational level before introducing tools to staff 3. Proactively spark adoption of tools and provide training (Aberdeen suggests tying wiki use to performance reviews, giving incentives like iPod to best contributor to wiki) 4. Find the wiki tool that’s best for your organization (do you want to manage the wiki yourself, or use a hosted tool?)
• 11:46 AM: Stewart Mader #1 – 2 of Aberdeen’s 4 Steps are out of order. Choosing the wiki tool that’s best for your organization should come before sparking employee adoption. #2 – Getting adoption right is a process that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Tying wiki use to performance reviews, and giving out rewards should only happen after the wiki has a healthy level of participation. These steps should be seen by employees as reactions to their proactive use of the wiki, not as a prod to use the wiki. Why? If you tie wiki use to performance reviews too early, people may only do the absolute minimum to necessary for their performance review.