On October 20, 2010 worldatwork.org posted the following:
Information Overload Is Widespread, a Growing Problem Among Professionals
“[...] international survey of 1,700 white collar workers in five countries (the United States, China, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Australia) [...] Given the rising tide of information, it is not surprising that a majority of workers in every market (62%, on average) admit that the quality of their work suffers at times because they can’t sort through the information they need fast enough. [...] The avalanche of information also is taking a psychological toll on white-collar workers. About 1-in-2 (52%) of professionals surveyed reported feeling demoralized when they can’t manage all the information that comes their way at work.
White-collar workers reported spending as much time wading through information as they do using it in their jobs:
- In every market, a majority of workers say that the amount of information they have to manage at work has significantly increased since the economic downturn.
- China: 61%
- South Africa: 61%
- United States: 59%
- United Kingdom: 57%
- Australia: 56%
- On average, workers report spending slightly more than half (51%) of their work day receiving and managing information, rather than actually using information to do their jobs.
- According to the survey respondents, between one-third and one-half of all the information that professionals receive at work each day is not important to them getting their job done.
- About three-quarters of professionals in the United States, China and South Africa agree that search engines give them access to huge amounts of information, but don’t help them prioritize it for their professional needs.
[...] in the average workweek:
- 92% of U.S. professionals report needing to search for old e-mails or documents at least once a week, and that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time waster (90%).
- Workers in China are more likely than those in other countries to report needing to re-create documents because previous versions can’t be found (66%), missing deadlines because of trouble finding the necessary information (45%), and missing meetings or appointments because of scheduling miscommunications (50%) at least once a week.
- In South Africa, 57% of respondents reported delivering incomplete documents, e-mail or other communications because the necessary information or materials could not be found on time, while in Australia, 58% of respondents report disagreements among colleagues about the right way to organize information at least once in an average workweek.
While the majority of professionals in every market say their companies have taken at least some action in the past two years to help them manage information more efficiently, employees in China are most likely to say their employers have taken steps to address the problem compared to those in other countries. In terms of specific solutions, professionals reported that they would welcome up-to-date technology and customized tools designed with their profession in mind, as well as more training to help them successfully manage the deluge of information [...]“
Just a few days ago Joe Galvin from Sirius Decisions wrote about how important Social Media – as an approach for better internal collaboration – is as part of a Sales Enablement strategy. I think he is absolutely right. What used to be the informal coffee corner chat before nowadays is mimicked in Social Media platforms. Over time, people will learn that even within an enterprise the sharing of information is beneficial for everyone in the end. Yes, there may be a lot of sceptics around, especially in sales teams, but with the right programs and incentives offered, they will make the jump to the new social collaboration paradigm.
However, the flip side of extensive social collaboration might be the appearance of new information silos as well as growing information overload. Without the social collaboration being moderated to a certain extend, it might lose some of its potential impact on the overall performance of the sales teams. Aaron Roe Fulkerson discussed this in a recent blog post: “The importance of context: why Enterprise 2.0 still fails to deliver value”.
A company might use a lot of different types of social collaboration platforms – the challenges is: How can they be orchestrated in a way, that actual knowledge exchange is taking place across existing team and functional structures? And how can the content generated be aligned to some generally agreed upon enterprise structures? What companies, that are serious about implementing a Social Media strategy for sales, should think about, is to create and maintain an enterprise context. Then collaboration can take place within this context and will add greater value to a broader audience. Ideally, the enterprise context should constantly evolve based on feedback gathered during the ongoing social collaboration (for example as shown below).
Best regards,
Matthias Roebel
On March 23, 2010, the German speaking site http://carta.info published an interview with Prof. Peter Kruse about complexity and the net.
The following quote (my own translation) supports BizSphere’s knowledge management methods and user interface ideas, which aim to reduce the firehose of information (that marketing departments in B2B companies provide for sales people and channel partners plus what web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0 add) to what is relevant for a specific sales situation:
“…on the web, people use language way too undisciplined. Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant. What’s the tag ‘drama’ worth, when one person tags pages from divorce lawyers because he is currently experiencing drama in his marriage and another person tags certain theatre productions in his city?”
In the BizSphere Sales Enablement solution we do allow ‘free tagging’ but in addition we force content, contacts, comments, etc. to be tagged in a defined enterprise language – the context. For example, the intersection points of the following taxonomies – or tagging dimensions – create a clearly defined space for all relevant sales information to “live in”:
- products, services and solutions
- information types
- regions and countries
Thanks to the tagging dimensions being defined specifically for each enterprise, they can be used as a common enterprise language – even across different mother tongues. The benefits for the seller are simple yet effective: Searching for information supported by a commonly agreed semantic enterprise language delivers the results which are making sense in a certain sales context. This is something a classical search approach can’t deliver.
Best regards,
Paul Krajewski
‘IDC Forecasts Tech Sales & Marketing Expenses to Grow Faster Than Revenue in 2010′, press release from March 30, 2010:
“The International Data Corporation (IDC) Executive Advisory Group forecasts that global sales and marketing expenses will to grow at 4.7% and 3.5% respectively in 2010, outpacing the projected 3.2% growth in worldwide IT spending. These expense gains will lead tech executives to accelerate their initiatives to improve the productivity and cost efficiency of sales and marketing.
In addition, executives may continue to seek greater sales and marketing alignment through dramatic organization and reporting changes, as a way to solve the costly misalignments that have continually undermined sales and marketing integration and efficiency. [...]“
We have been addressing sales and marketing misalignments for large b2b enterprises since 2006 and it is great to see that IDC shares our point of view that sales enablement, content audits and improved campaigns are the way to go:
“Within the typical tech marketing organization, IDC sees that executives have numerous opportunities for savings and efficiency. “Sales enablement, content audits, and campaign vs. product go-to-market programs are all great ways to save money, and to make customers happier at the same time,” noted Rich Vancil, vice president of IDC’s Executive Advisory Group.”
For our approach to content audits please see our recent blog post on Content Intelligence. In one of our upcoming blog posts we will show you how easy it is to run campaigns with our Sales Enablement solution. Contact us anytime for a presentation that details how we have saved Fortune 500 companies money, they used to spend on content creation.
Just a few days ago, I had a very interesting conversation with the Sales Leader of a large IT distributor. In the past they’d naturally been focusing on optimizing their distribution processes from vendors to resellers. However, as IT products are more and more becoming a commodity and supply chains and ordering processes have become more and more streamlined over the years, there is pressure to think about some differentiation against their competitors.
One aspect brought up in the discussion by the Sales Leader is to start focusing on the actual knowledge delivered around the products, services and solutions distributed. Here we’re not just talking about speeds and feeds, but about how to effectively communicate which products, services and solutions are addressing which specific customer needs. Delivering such value to resellers means that they could better serve their customers, which eventually will make all parties involved happy. In a way, the Sales Leader said, it’s about to setting up a content logistics framework.
Yet, setting-up content logistics like this is more complicated than you might think, as knowledge can’t be forced into transaction-oriented systems and processes. The reason is, that content is something multi-dimensional – its meaning depends on the situational context it is applied in. Only if applied in the right way, content turns into knowledge and eventually into a successful conversation with the customer.
In order to successfully implement a content logistics framework a variety of ingredients are important. ‘Content needs’ have to be defined, content production responsibilities need to be assigned, ways of content delivery should be thought through end-to-end… just to mention a few things that need to be put in place. To make the whole model work in the long run – to match actual customer needs for the right information with the content delivered to them by the reseller’s sales teams – the content logistics framework should be based on a semantic knowledge management framework.
Well, you might think, this sounds complicated, like trying to boil the ocean. I can tell you, the opposite is the case once you’ve got your head around it – I’d be more than happy to discuss this in more detail with everyone interested.
In these tough economic times, some companies just cutting cost and try to survive: others capitalize on the economic downturn to realign, streamline and invest to come out these times stronger. Part of a successful transformation should be a winning sales enablement strategy. A strong Sales Enablement program will position sellers to take the lead and out-sell the competition.
SE is a strong combination of tools, processes, people and content that, when managed to serve content in context approach, it will deliver value added information when they need it.
Benefits to the organization include:
- Decreasing seller preparation time;
- Optimizing customer face time;
- Improving marketing and seller productivity;
- Leveraging knowledge experts and sales leaders to help all sellers become better informed;
- Reduce IT support cost by consolidating multiple Web-Portals;
- Obtain insight in content per offering, region, lifecycle, usage metric and state of the art: faceted browsing.
- Enabling sellers to articulate the brand value proposition at every stage of a customer interaction; and
- Providing Just-in-Time training, mentoring, coaching and contacts every step of the way.
How do you know if you need a Sales Enablement Strategy?
Take a quick test – On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the following statements about your organization? (10 being full compliance with the statement)
- My sales teams can articulate my company messages accurately to customers at all steps in the sales process;
- My sales teams can find value adding messages quickly;
- My sales teams are confident that the messages they find are accurate and current;
- A majority (greater than 80%) of the sales collateral created is actually used by sales.
If you answered anything below an eight, then your company could benefit from implementing a winning Sales Enablement strategy.
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In a Sales 2.0 world there is no doubt about the need for Sales Enablement applications to be social / web 2.0. As indicated in the graphic below, I would hope that even Customer Service taps into and participates in the harnessed collective intelligence of Sales and Marketing by using the Sales Enablement application.
Graphic from Dion Hinchcliffe http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe but altered with regards to ‘Sales Enablement Application’ instead of ‘online community’.
For such a Sales Enablement application to play together with the rest of the intranet / Enterprise 2.0 and the customer facing website, information architectures need to be aligned.
Information architecture?
Information architecture is the organization of sites, the content management system(s), metadata, ontologies, taxonomies, etc … This has actually been the biggest problem for users of intranets as the following data shows (not too fresh anymore but I think it holds true still):
Pain points of Intranets
- 42% Problems with the information architecture
- 38% Search functionality is missing or unsatisfying
- 28% Information is missing or outdated
- 19% Graphical User Interface (GUI) is cluttered/crowded
- 11% Performance problems
- 9% Too little relevance to day-to-day job
On May 15, 2009, @scottsantucci (Forrester Analyst covering Sales Enablement) noted:
“Had a briefing from @BizSphere. Very interesting thinking, particularly about the need for an information architecture.”
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