Marketing with Mike Volpe

We have an internal wiki that we use for almost all communication and collaboration at HubSpot.  I talked about it in my Atlassian Starter Day Presentation (we use their wiki product, called Confluence).  Recently, I got a question from someone who had seen my presentation that I thought was worth sharing here on the blog.

How did you get your sales team to use the wiki?

It wasn't easy, but here are some of the ways how we got our sales team to start using our internal wiki.

1. Get sales management buy-in - We were able to get the sales managers to agree that sales should be using the wiki, and that they would help get everyone in sales to use the wiki.
2. Put lots of valuable information on the wiki - We now have all of our sales scripts, sales tips, product info, competitive info, promotion info, marketing campaign info, and basically all the useful information a sales rep might need on the wiki.
3. Email sales links to wiki pages, instead of full emails - If you update information on a competitor, email the link tot he wiki page.  The wiki is richer since it has threaded discussion and links and videos and files, it is a better place to post and discuss information, but you can use email to drive people to the wiki content.
4. Use the wiki for projects involving sales - If you have a team of people doing a cross functional project (perhaps entering a new vertical), use the wiki to document and report on that project.  If the project involves sales, then you almost force them to start using the wiki and become familiar with it.
5. Talk about the wiki in every meeting - We mention that all the resources we are discussing in meetings are on the wiki, and tell people to go to the wiki after the meeting to get the meeting notes, slides, etc.
6. Use the wiki in new hire training - All new hires need to use the wiki to document what they learn each day in training, and also to follow along with all the training class presentations.  This helps make the wiki a part of the daily lives for the newest employees.

Today, our sales team uses our wiki for all sorts of things and are very actively engaged there, as much as other groups in the company.

Have you gotten your sales team to use internal collaboration tools in your company?  How?

I have a ton of respect for Seth Godin and I am a huge fan of his.  That's why when he launched the www.triiibes.com community as part of his latest book launch, I joined the community immediately.

But I realized today that I had not logged into the community for a long time.  I guess I just didn't get any value out of it - I am a lot more active in Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.  So I checked the stats for the Triibes website on Compete, and sure enough, it looks like after a peak around the launch, traffic has been declining.  As of writing this, traffic peaked in August 2008 at about 35,000 monthly visitors and has dropped to 10,000 monthly visitors in January 2009.

Now, knowing Seth a little bit, I think he might not be upset by this.  Small is the new big to him, and many times he is in favor of more active and tight knit smaller communities and says they are more powerful than larger less connected and active communities.  I wonder what the future holds for Triiibes?  I wonder if the 10,000 people now visiting the site are a lot more active than the 35,000 that were visiting a few months ago.  I wonder if a year from now Triiibes will be a success or not?

Do you know of any examples of niche business online communities?  What are they?  What made them successful?  What gave them long term staying power?