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Beyond The Cloud Play #28: Build Street Teams and Leverage Testimony
By Steve Tsai, Managing Editor, Internet Journal
07/06/09
Editor's note: Marc Benioff's book, Behind The Cloud is a very interesting book to read. This article is the first of a series of plays from the book that I expand it to the online world.
This is one of the plays from the Event Playbook. Marc's idea for cultivating a group of salesforce.com enthusiasts did not come from the technology community, it came from the hip-hop community. He
borrowed it MC Hammer who shared with him the Street Team concept - building a local networks of people to back you. So Marc incorporated it to its City Tour as a vehicle to extend the salesforce.com message, ignite
passion behind the idea, and help build salesforce.com Stree Teams to get customers out and selling for them on the local level.
As Marc described
it, each City Tour stop included a keynote address where he talked about CRM and the pain that drove the prospects to seek a new alternative. There was also a dedicated time for Q&A and a live demo for the product.
He assumed that he would field the questions, but instead the customers chimed in with the answers. He discoverd that people attend these events not to meet the vendor but to meet toehr people using the product.This is the same phenomenon that Geoffrey Moore talked about in his book "Crossing the Chasm". When making important purchases, people tend to trust those who have bought and use the same products a lot more
than vendor's own words or advertisements. This concept is also evident and has been used in the online world as well. It is the word of month viral marketing.In a sense those who voucher for your products
online are your Street Team. There is a bit of twist about the online Street Team. It may more likely to be grouped not by locality but by industry sector.Those dicussion groups and forums are essentially the meeting
places where people interested in the product can walk in to listen and those who have used the product will chime in to give their personal experience. So the
concept of building online Street Team is something that should be explored.
About The Author
Steve Tsai is the Managing Editor of the Internet Journal http://www.intnetjournal.com. Internet Journal provides the insights and analysis on Internet marketing, eCommerce, mobile communications, eSecurity, and global e-Business. If you have any
comments about Internet Journal, please send email to stt@intnetjournal.com.
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