On June 30, 2011 focus.com published a report entitled “Defining Sales Enablement”. (You can download the PDF report for free once you provide some information on this link on focus.com) The experts included in the report are: Ardath Albee, Michael Fox, Robert Koehler, Christian Maurer, Russell Palmer, and myself (Paul Krajewski; part of the team at BizSphere AG).
One of my explanations of Sales Enablement was actually based on statements by Tamara Schenk (T-Systems International GmbH) as well as on Forrester’s definition of Sales Enablement. Here it is broken down:
“It’s a method of equipping sales channels with reusable tools that map to the buying process.
It is a strategic, ongoing process and it has very ambitious objectives:
To equip all people touching the accounts (more than just pre-sales and sales)
with the right information (sales playbooks, campaign information, ROI calculators and the like, documents/links, contact details of subject matter experts, etc.)
in a well-structured (What is applicable where? Who authored what? What can be used for how long?)
re-usable way (output in different formats or even auto-generation of tailored content)
across all silos in the enterprise and in the right language
at all stages of the customer’s problem-solving process/the customer’s buying cycle.
Having been on the enterprise side and having seen how many marketing dollars go into content production and toward polishing the look and feel, I want to highlight how important it is that the money is only spent on content that works (content planning, content intelligence like tracking usage and ratings/comments), and, if possible, can even be done in-house.”
Later in the report I am quoted with…
“A lot of people say ‘You are either in sales or you are in sales support!’ That basically shows that everyone should either contribute to sales enablement or benefit from it. Having so many stakeholders, sales enablement is owned by everyone and no one and suffers from that, unless an executive sponsor can be found who aligns people, processes, content, and technology.”
I just found a great comment on Focus.com that nicely sums up Sales Enablement Strategy:
By Tamara Schenk, Senior Program Manager Sales Enablement, T-Systems International GmbH:
“[...] Getting started with sales enablement from a strategic point of view means to look at the whole sales support supply chain end-to-end, not looking at functions only – working cross-functionally and to collaborate is key to success.
Identifying all redundancies along the whole sales support supply chain, will be an eye opener! For instance, different product portfolio views, often not consolidated, a variety of different sales portals, content often not structured and not defined from a customer’s point of view, a variety of groups that offer trainings – trainings on what to sell and on how to sell, etc.
Fixing these redundancies, means contributing immediately to the selling systems’ ROI!
Next, the different fields of action can be tackled from an operational point of view, as e.g. broadcast messaging, sales content (derived from strategy, role-based governance including content inventory, content categories, RACI, internationalization, etc.), knowledge management, skills and trainings and how to measure the success. Additional fields of action are sales and engagement models, the sales and the sales operations processes – they have always to be considered and integrated!
Executing all these activities successfully requires leadership, change, communication and sales adoption.”
Today, I had a look at the usage metrics and statistics report gathered at a large enterprise that recently launched our Sales Enablement application to replace more than 35 intranet portals. What I love about the report is that it not only tracks which content sales people view, download, rate (with up to 5 stars) or comment on (We actually also display all of the above in the frontend to show sales people where the good stuff is.), but it also tracks what they were not able to find. An anonymous list of all search queries that were punched in comes with the number of actual results that were displayed. That way the owners of the Sales Enablement application at our customers can take a look at all search queries that led to zero results and specifically address what must be a huge frustration for sales people who are trying to prepare a customer meeting.
Constant loop of quantitative and qualitative feedback lets you improve the experience
Knowing which way people search, what they are looking for, and to analyze whether the content does actually exist or still needs to be created is very insightful. Not only does it direct the content planning process (to invest marketing dollars only for content that will actually be used), but it also helps to focus on the important topics when optimizing your texts and their tags for the indexing by the search. What I mean by this is that a search term that led to zero results can be added – visible or invisible - to the content that would had been the perfect match. An example from one of our early customers – Nortel – would be frequent searches for “CS1k” with the expectation to find content for the product “CS1000″. It is just fair enough that people search the way they speak and analyzing the metrics and statistics helps you to improve their search experience.
Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration
Besides the quantitative things to look at, you also have the qualitative feedback in form of comments under each piece of content. When people start to…
- comment on a white paper why it did not resonate with customers in a specific industry vertical,
- add competitive insight from the field on an internal presentation,
- applaud or criticize the authors
- and help each other with lots of comments etc…
…then each piece of content has its own blog.
A word, that is not an official term but keeps on showing up in these comments or in the log files mentioned above, can be added as an alias of a product/service/solution, region/country or resource/document type.
The real Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration starts to happen when your Sales Enablement application allows your employees or even your channel partners to share their own documents or links which they found helpful. When everything can be accessed from one place and is marked as ‘peer contribution’ or as ‘content approved by marketing’, then there might be a chance to ensure that everyone is always using the latest version and does not waste time emailing people for it.
The report – this ‘one place’ should show in real-time – tells you who contributed the content that gets a lot of love and the collaboration around it might reveal insights of the kind only employees touching the customer accounts gather and the marketing department usually finds out about late.
