Grassroots and Top Down (Part II)

More on selling internally. Continued from previous post:

Remember. All of this takes place in 2004.

Before we launched the QuickBooks Online Community, it was clear that the company had limited experience with online communities or truly online interaction with customers.  We had a small support community. We had played around with live chat as a customer service tool. And we did a few other things in the area of community.

Even though we are located in Silicon Valleyand sit across the street from one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, Google, barely any employees were really active on the community besides shopping at Amazon.

It took some work to find internal thought partners — employees who could coach me on selling ‘Community’ to management. Paul, who headed up the QuickBooks Online product and was probably one of the only other bloggers in the company besides me, provided the guidance I needed.  (There were a few other bloggers, but they were really hard to identify).

So, I started doing Google searches on ‘online communities’ and quickly realized most of the articles were written by researchers and analysts who never built online communities. And as they say ‘it is different when you actually do the work.’ I shouldn’t be so negative because there were some really strong existing communities, such as eBay’s, UrbanBaby, Edmunds, etc.  And we did learn a lot by participating in these communities. We learned. And we shared those learnings with others in the company.  One of the keys to selling to senior management is to make sure nobody at the (grown up) table is surprised by what you show them. In other words, the plan was to make sure that almost of Bennett’s direct reports knew what we were going to share with them before the big presentation.

Secondly, it was important to partner with key internal groups, such as legal, privacy, and finance. Leveraging my working relationship with Paul (he had helped with a number of projects before), we sat down with the General Council and presented our case for why developing an online community would be a game changer. Ironically, we already had an online community up and running, so we had first hand evidence that the company would not fall apart. I  recommend that you not start a community before receiving legal’s approval.

Since part of the plan was to encourage employees to participate in the community, legal was concerned about how we planned to monitor what was said online. That’s when we came up with the idea to provide opt-in training to employees in the company.   In forming my partnerships, I developed some key slogans to reinforce my commitment to get them involved. These included: – Legal is not evil (we even wanted to printed t-shirts with this motto)– Finance can be your friend – Privacy and Security are not trying to restrict you – Product and Customer Service can work together

It was important to get finance on board because it was clear that we would be an expense to the company and any cost savings would have to be identified and (financially) modeled over time. For example, we knew we would eventually try and demonstrate that our users would eventually start going to the community vs. picking up the phone and calling our 800 number. 

Finance also had to be involved because of potential revenue recognition issues. The definition of revenue recognition basically states that if a company discusses (and this includes using the word ‘expects’) a particular feature that is not already in the product, they will have to account for any potential revenue generated by sharing  information on a particular product/service during that period.  For more info on revenue recognition: http://www.sec.gov/interps/account/sab101.htm

Key Play Takeaway: Legal is not evil.