How would I drive sales people to be engaged with a WIKI?

[Nick Marshallsay]

Hi

 

Am toying with the idea of a WIKI for sales folk where they would post their advice and tops tips on selling our solutions.

 

However I am concerned that "If you build it they will come" might not turn out to be the case.

 

3 Questions:

 

1. Has anyone done anything similar?

2. If yes what are your learnings on engagement?

3. More broadly does anyone have any additional insight on how I'd get them involved and learning?

 

Insight from sales people audiences and real life experience as opposed to theory and opion preferred!

 

Thanks very much

 

Nick

[Jane Hart]

Nick, it's very simple - they will only use something like this if there is a real need or reason to use it. If you are sure of that, then you also need to help people to use it. This is some basic stuff I advise (from http://c4lpt.co.uk/academy/ism/wikis.html)

DON'T just set up a blank wiki page, and tell your people "Here's the wiki for the course" or "Here's our project wikis" - that's just not going to work". They need some structure or guidance how it is to be used.

DO provide some guidance on how it is going to work, e.g.
o Explain the reason or purpose of the wiki, and how important or necessary their contribution or participation is. Create a framework for the wiki - the main pages, sections, sub-sections
o Provide some clear guidance on how to create and edit pages, a separate document might be better than having them struggle with a number of open web pages trying to work out how to do it

Hope this is of some help

[Philip Richards]

Hi Nick
My advice is that you need to persist and not to lose heart.
In our company, less "sexy" alternatives to a wiki which have been available for years (e.g a simple database that allows discussion and file sharing) appear to have more or equally attractive features. That may frustrate those of us trying to push social media, but I guess we need to wind our heads in a bit sometimes. We used a wiki tool called Confluence and found it rather clunky and had some annoying problems (e.g you couldn't always mark your posting on the wiki to allow any responses to be instantly notified to you, and had to remember to go back into the wiki every time to see if anyone had responded).

We have actually now gone back to using the simple database but I suspect it is not all the tool's fault - there are probably a whole host of useful add-ons which the wiki has which just needs someone to spend time exploring and then (as Jane says) explaining properly to the community.