“…some key differences between Enterprise 2.0 users and the rest of the workforce:

• They’re your highest paid employees. Over half of this group earns more than $60k a year, compared to just 36% of non-users.
• They’re the most educated members of the workforce. Sixty-five percent of this group has completed at least a 4 year college degree compared to 55% of the rest of the workforce.
• They’re the leaders in your office. It’s not surprising to see 49% of this group are managers are executives given management’s enthusiasm about social technologies. Just 31% of non-users are in similar positions.

On August 17, 2011, BDSolutions tweeted that its VP of Sales Enablement, Bill Golder, said:

“Alignment of sales and marketing impacts revenue growth up to 3x.”

In a post by Amanda F. Batista from August 16, 2011, IDC is quoted with the statement that…

“B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company.”

“Wir freuen uns, dass wir den ehemaligen Mit-Initiator Jochen Moll als Fördermitglied gewinnen konnten. Mit seiner langjährigen Branchenerfahrung ist er eine Bereicherung für die Initiative”, so Lutz Steffen, geschäftsführender Gesellschafter Steffen GmbH und Sprecher des MUKIT. Neben dieser Fördermitgliedschaft positionierte sich BizSphere bereits auf der InnovationsArena der Messe “Wachsen!2011″ Anfang Juni zum Thema Innovation. Mit dem Beitritt im IT-Forum Mainz und dem IT-Buch Rhein-Main-Neckar baut BizSphere das regionale Netzwerk um die Niederlassung in Mainz weiter aus.

BizSphere AG

Die BizSphere AG ist ein Software- und Beratungsunternehmen und entwickelt Software- und Consulting-Lösungen im Bereich Wissens- und Kommunikationsmanagement. Mit der BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution hat BizSphere eine Software-Plattform und Beratungsmethode entwickelt, die Unternehmen eine effiziente und kundenspezifische Vertriebs- und Marketingkommunikation ermöglicht. Die Lösung vereint dabei Know-how aus den Bereichen soziales und semantisches Internet (Web 2.0/3.0) mit innovativem Benutzeroberflächen-Design.

Weitere Informationen:
BizSphere AG
Tamara Vierling
+49 172 3967686
E-Mail: tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com
http://www.bizsphere.com

Münchner UnternehmerKreis IT
Lutz Steffen
E-Mail: steffen@muk-it.com
+49 89 4536 1124
http://www.muk-it.com

The following blog post is in German. Now, BizSphere AG has a German speaking profile on the IT industry directory for the Rhein-Main-Neckar region in Germany at it-buch-rhein-main-neckar.de:

Die BizSphere AG ist nun mit dem folgenden Profil im IT-Buch Rhein-Main-Neckar vertreten it-buch-rhein-main-neckar.de:

Kernaussage: BizSphere ermöglicht, vorhandene Informationen unternehmensweit über einen Zugang zu nutzen und schnellen, sicheren Zugriff auf relevante Daten, Kontakte und visualisiert Cross-/Up-Selling-Potenziale.

• Im BizSphere Wissensmanagement-Scan Basic analysieren wir via Interviews die Kommunikations- und Informationsprozesse im Vertrieb Ihres Unternehmens.
• Der BizSphere Scan-Report bietet Ihnen die Möglichkeit, gezielt in die Verbesserung der vertriebsunterstützenden Kommunikation zu investieren.
• Im BizSphere Wissensmanagement-Scan Extended nehmen wir zusätzlich eine detaillierte Analyse Ihres Portfolios vor.
• Das Ergebnis zeigen wir in einer interaktiven Anwendung, die darstellt, wie sie weitere Informationen in verkaufsförderndes Wissen umsetzen können.
• Die BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution vernüpft Ihre Informationen mit Mehrwert und erhöht die Effizienz Ihres Vertriebs.

BizSphere entwickelt Software- und Consulting-Lösungen im Bereich Wissens- und Kommunikationsmanagement, die auf semantischem Informationsmanagement basieren. Mit der BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution hat BizSphere eine innovative Software-Plattform und Beratungsmethode entwickelt, die Unternehmen eine effiziente und kundenspezifische Vertriebs- und Marketingkommunikation ermöglicht. Ziel ist eine Kostenreduzierung sowie eine qualitative Optimierung relevanter Informationen. Die Software-Applikation unterstützt Unternehmen darin, die bereits bestehende Informationsvielfalt inhaltlich zu strukturieren und sinnvoll zu verwalten. Dem Vertrieb stehen Informationen flexibel und an den Bedarf der jeweiligen Vertriebssituation angepasst zur Verfügung.
Bestehende Customer Relationship Management-, Unified Communications- oder Enterprise Content Management-Lösungen können dabei integriert werden. Die Lösung vereint Know-how aus den Bereichen soziales und semantisches Internet (Web 2.0/3.0) mit innovativem Benutzeroberflächen-Design und ist für mittelständische Unternehmen ebenso geeignet wie für Großunternehmen.

In unserem Team haben wir über 30.000 Tage Expertise und Erfahrung versammelt aus den Bereichen Knowledge Management, Sales Enablement sowie Software-Entwicklung und -Implementierung. Zu unseren Kunden zählen internationale Unternehmen aus den Bereichen IT, Telekommunikation und Medien.

Suchbegriffe: Software, Beratung, Wissensmanagement, Informationsmanagement Kommunikationsmanagement, Intranet, Knowledge Management, Enterprise 2.0, Wissen, Informationen, IT

IT-Bereiche:

• Internet & Mobile Solutions
• IT-Consulting
• Learning & Knowledge Solutions

Gründungsjahr: 2007
Mitarbeiter: 25
Hauptbranche: ITK-Branche

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.”

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.”

“This is something I have been harping on about for years, and I am delighted to see that some sales enablement vendors are adopting this reality:

Without good sales enablement content, it does not matter what bells and whistles your sales enablement solution might offer, it is of no value. [...]

Sales enablement systems have become very sophisticated in terms of how they deliver content that will help boost sales performance. But the quality and nature of the content that those system deliver is a critical component of the system’s deployment success. [...]

BizSphere CEO Jochen Moll not only understands the value of great content; he also understands that a sales enablement solution is just one component of an overall sales enablement strategy. BizSphere advocates for the development of a company-wide sales enablement plan to ensure that everyone in an organization can influence, directly or indirectly, the success of the sales team. Great direction, Jochen! You guys are leading the way. [...]“

IBM fördert das Software und Beratungsunternehmen als weiteres Unternehmen im Rahmen des Smarter Planet Konzeptes

Stuttgart, 2. Mai 2011 – Das Software- und Beratungsunternehmen BizSphere ist als weiteres Unternehmen in Deutschland Mitglied der Initiative IBM Global Entrepreneur.

Mit diesem Programm fördert IBM softwarebasierte Innovationen junger Unternehmen. Die weltweite Initiative startete in den USA und ist Anfang 2011 auch in Deutschland angelaufen. Als Mitglied von IBM Global Entrepreneur ist BizSphere in die IBM Smarter Planet Agenda eingebunden. Diese hat das Ziel, Konzepte und Lösungen für einen intelligenten und umweltfreundlichen Planeten zu entwickeln. IBM unterstützt BizSphere als Mitglied der Initiative hinsichtlich Software, Know-how und Netzwerkkontakten zu Entscheidern aus Industrie, Regierung und Forschungseinrichtungen.

„Mit ihrem innovativen Ansatz im Bereich Wissensmanagement zur Vertriebsoptimierung passt die BizSphere Softwarelösung sehr gut in die Zielsetzung unserer Initiative: Lösungskonzepte im Sinne der IBM Smarten Planet Vision zu erarbeiten“, so Wieland Köbler, Leiter von IBM Global Entrepreneur Deutschland und Direktor ISV Sales and Development „Wir sind sehr stolz, dass wir mit unserem Konzept, das Unternehmensdaten inhaltlich intelligent strukturiert und verwaltet und so Informationen mit Mehrwert verknüpft, als Mitglied von IBM Global Entrepreneur aufgenommen wurden“, so Jochen Moll, Vorstandsvorsitzender von BizSphere. „Als BizSphere Sales Enablement wird die Plattform in erster Linie zur Vertriebsoptimierung eingesetzt, bestehende Web-Portale, Fileserver, CM-, CRM- und DM-Systeme werden integriert und Inhalte in der BizSphere Lösung zusammengeführt.“

Seit dem deutschen Start der Initiative IBM Global Entrepreneur auf der CeBIT 2011 in Hannover wurden insgesamt fünf Unternehmen aus den Bereichen E-Commerce, Event- und Fundraising, Prozessmanagement sowie Marketing und Communication Asset- sowie Wissensmanagement ausgewählt. Zu den Launch-Partnern gehören unter anderen die Münchner Venture-Capital-Unternehmen Wellington Partners und Earlybird.

BizSphere AG

Die BizSphere AG ist ein Software- und Beratungsunternehmen mit Sitz in Stuttgart. Mit der BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution hat BizSphere eine innovative Software-Plattform und Beratungsmethode entwickelt, die Unternehmen eine effiziente und kundenspezifische Vertriebs- und Marketingkommunikation ermöglicht. Die Software-Applikation BizSphere Sales Enablement unterstützt Unternehmen darin, die bereits bestehende Informationsvielfalt inhaltlich zu strukturieren und sinnvoll zu verwalten. Dem Vertrieb stehen Informationen flexibel und nach Bedarf abrufbar zur Verfügung. Dadurch sind Unternehmen trotz kontinuierlicher Veränderungsprozesse in der Lage, auf die Bedürfnisse ihrer Kunden schnell und gezielt einzugehen. Die Lösung vereint dabei Know-how aus den Bereichen soziales und semantisches Internet (Web 2.0/3.0) mit innovativem Benutzeroberflächen-Design.

Weitere Informationen:

www.ibm.com/isv/startup
www.bizsphere.com

BizSphere AG
Tamara Vierling
+491723967686
+4961314970618
tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

Christine Paulus
External Relations
+498945041396
+4915114270446
christine.paulus@de.ibm.com

In line with the Smarter Planet concept IBM supports the software and consulting company

Stuttgart, 2011 May, 2 – The software and consulting company BizSphere became the latest member of the IBM Global Entrepreneur initiative. With this program IBM and partners help the ‘next generation of entrepreneurs‘, who develop software based innovations to capture emerging business opportunities. As part of the IBM Smarter Planet program the global campaign started last year in the United States and 2011 in Germany. The IBM Smarter Planet agenda develops intelligent and environment-friendly solutions. IBM Global Entrepreneur members receive no-charge access to IBM’s software portfolio and support from IBM experts. Selected companies also have the opportunity to benefit from the IBM network of decision makers in industry, government, research and development.

“With its innovative knowledge management solution for sales optimization BizSphere is an excellent candidate for our initiative which aims to identify and integrate solutions that help solving today`s challenges in the context of IBM’s vision of a Smarter Planet”, said Wieland Köbler, Leader Global Entrepreneur Deutschland and Director ISV Sales and Development at IBM. „We are very proud that we have been selected to the IBM Global Entrepreneur initiative. Our solution structures and manages information in an ‘intelligent way‘, and adds additional value to the data by placing content in the right context”, states Jochen Moll, CEO at BizSphere. „The BizSphere Sales Enablement platform is used for sales optimization. Existing web portals, fileserver, CM, CRM and DM systems can be integrated and consolidated within the BizSphere Solution.”

In Germany the initiative was kicked-off at CeBIT 2011 in Hannover. Up to now, five companies, specialized in e-Commerce, event and fundraising, process management, marketing and communication asset management as well as knowledge management have been selected. Launch partners in Germany are, for example, the Venture Capital companies Wellington Partners and Earlybird.

BizSphere AG
BizSphere AG is a software and consulting company with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2006 “BizSphere” was established as a business unit within SVA GmbH, one of the leading system integrators in Germany. In 2007 this business unit became an independent legal entity as SVA-BizSphere AG, which is doing business under the name of BizSphere AG since October 2010. The company is located in Germany with offices in Mainz and Stuttgart and operates with an international network of staff and consultants.

BizSphere has developed a software platform and consulting framework supporting companies in solving their Sales Enablement challenges. BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution optimizes costs and the quality of existing information by effective structured content. With this solution, sales representatives are able to use the information they need according to their requirements and companies will be able to serve and fulfill constantly changing customer needs within reduced response time. The platform combines know-how in the areas of semantic and social web (Web 2.0/3.0), as well as innovative user interface design.

Further information:

www.ibm.com/isv/startup
www.bizsphere.com

BizSphere AG
Tamara Vierling
+491723967686
+4961314970618
tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

Christine Paulus
IBM External Relations
+498945041396
+4915114270446
christine.paulus@de.ibm.com

Stuttgart, February 09, 2011 – The innovative software and consulting company BizSphere appoints Stephan Timme as new Head of Sales Central Region, effective February 14, 2011. In this position the former IBM manager will be responsible for the BizSphere sales organization in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Europe. Stephan Timme works with BizSphere to leverage the distribution channel and the customer portfolio.

“We want to accelerate our growth in Europe – especially Germany, Austria and Switzerland – and enhance our solution and consulting portfolio”, commented Jochen Moll, BizSphere Chief Executive Officer. “Having Stephan Timme on board will strengthen our sales team and with his expertise and experience he will help us to drive our business forward”.

Stephan Timme comes to BizSphere with more than seven years of experience in different, leading sales positions at IBM. Before he joined BizSphere, he served as Sales Manager, Information Management Software, Public and Distribution for IBM Software Group. Prior to this position he was responsible for selling the total IBM portfolio into all lines of business in the Industrial Sector.

BizSphere AG

BizSphere AG is a software and consulting company with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2006 “BizSphere” was established as a business unit within SVA GmbH, one of the leading system integrators in Germany. In 2007 this business unit became an independent legal entity as SVA-BizSphere AG, which is doing business under the name of BizSphere AG since October 2010. The company has a global presence with staff operating out of Germany (Stuttgart, Mainz, Hamburg, Munich) as well as Shanghai (China) and Toronto (Canada).

BizSphere has developed a software platform and consulting framework supporting companies in solving their Sales Enablement challenges. BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution optimizes costs and the quality of existing information by effective structured content. With this solution, sales representatives are able to use the information they need according to their requirements and companies will be able to serve and fulfill constantly changing customer needs within reduced response time. The platform combines know-how in the areas of semantic and social web (Web 2.0/3.0), as well as innovative user interface design.

Further Information:

http://bizsphere.com
http://twitter.com/bizsphere
http://slideshare.net/bizsphere
http://youtube.com/bizsphere
http://facebook.com/bizsphere

Press & Media Contact:

BizSphere AG
Marketing & Communications Manager
Tamara Vierling
Holzhofstr. 3, 55116 Mainz, Germany
Mobile: +49 (0) 172 39 67686
Phone: +49 (0) 6131 49706 18
Fax: +49 (0) 6131 49706 66
Email: tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

“Sales Enablement: People, Processes and/or Technology?

How do you view sales enablement? How is it weighted across the traditional “people, processes and technology” model?”

One of the responses was:

“There are numerous sales enablement “solutions” available, each of which claims to offer some unique value. Ultimately, what I find repeatedly, is that the content for any of these solutions is an afterthought. Buying decisions for sales enablement systems are based on the capabilities the system will deliver, primarily using existing content. But the source and format of that content will continue to require improvements if the full benefit of a sales enablement program is going to be realized.

Ultimately, sales enablement systems are a version of knowledge management tools. The remaining challenge is in how to motivate target users of that knowledge to find it and use it effectively.”

Here is my answer to both the initial question and the response above:

Jeanne Hellman, who wrote a comprehensive case study on implementing a Sales Enablement system and who I worked with on this very task at Nortel Networks, always adds “Content” to “People, Processes and Technology” and then calls it “The Four-Legged Chair Analogy”.

However, the observations above are correct with regards to how Sales Enablement solutions are being sold/bought. What I can say to this is that a good Sales Enablement system will give feedback in real-time regarding which type of content works and which doesn’t (based on many metrics like views, downloads, star ratings, comments, sharing, etc…). In addition, it will also have a dashboard/report for the owner of the Sales Enablement solution to show the gaps / what is missing:

E.g. the…

• offering in the product portfolio,
• sales region / country,
• industry vertical,
• customer pain point,
• sales/buying cycle step,
• content type/format,
• etc…

…that does not have customized or fresh content.

All the quantitative feedback mentioned above together with the qualitative feedback from the social / 2.0 features will tell you where to spend your marketing dollars for content creation and where you can stop producing content, nobody uses.

Yes, we are talking about Knowledge Management tools. Yes, the biggest challenge is to motivate users to use them (instead of emailing each other) and to contribute their own knowledge back into the system (tribal knowledge). However, there are features like customized dashboards, daily newsletters or RSS feeds that show each person based on their interest or assigned lead in the CRM system what might interest them. Yes, you will have to start with existing content. However, making “Content, People, Processes, and Technology” your mantra, will make sure no area is left out and get you closer to realizing the full benefit of a Sales Enablement program.

Best regards,
Paul Krajewski
–
The blog post above is a personal statement from Paul Krajewski and does not necessarily represent the point of view of BizSphere AG.

“Imagine a large company that can sell different combinations of products and services, and organize things in a variety of different hierarchies,” he says. “If we were calling on a c-level person about [her/his] particular business problem, it could span across multiple product lines. If you talk to a manager-level person, you may only talk about one particular product. How do we build a taxonomy that allows us to cascade and work within that complex an infrastructure? That’s what BizSphere does. [...]”

One of my contributions has been chosen for inclusion in the 6 Best Practices in Sales Enablement: Strategies briefing. (You can download the PDF document for free.)

The other contributors who are cited in the Focus.com briefing document are: Bob Apollo, Dave Brock, Candyce Edelen, Michael Fox, Robert Koehler, Christian Maurer, Sharon Drew Morgen, Russell Palmer, Tamara Schenk and Tony Zambito.

BizSphere is a software and consulting company with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. It has developed a software platform and consulting framework supporting companies in solving their Sales Enablement challenges. BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution optimizes costs and the quality of existing information by effective structured content. With this solution, sales representatives are able to use the information they need according to their requirements and companies will be able to serve and fulfill constantly changing customer needs within reduced response time. The platform combines know-how in the areas of semantic and social web (Web 2.0/3.0), as well as innovative user interface design.

KP TECH
KP TECH is an independent corporate finance and M&A adviser. The clients include both international and medium-sized companies from the technology sector among information technology, cleantech, biotechnology and measurement technology. KP TECH accompanied product and services companies in this sectors and acts as expert partner in questions relating to mergers & acquisitions, company valuation, business due diligence and venture capital.
www.tech-corporatefinance.com

Further Information:
http://www.bizsphere.com
http://www.bizsphere.com/blog
http://twitter.com/bizsphere
http://slideshare.net/bizsphere
http://www.youtube.com/bizsphere
http://facebook.com/bizsphere

Contact:
BizSphere AG
Marketing & Communications Manager
Tamara Vierling
Holzhofstr. 3
55116 Mainz, Germany
Mobile: +491723967686
Phone: +4961314970618
Fax: +4961314970666
Email: tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

1. Align the way you name and structure your portfolio of products, services and solutions across all your regions/countries as well as audiences. This doesn’t sound sexy but it is crucial. The bigger your enterprise is and the more mergers & acquisitions it has been involved in, the more likely you have confusion amongst your different audiences: Regional teams who translate materials into their respective language, partners/channels who you might have a somewhat disconnected portal for, new hires vs. experienced staff in your sales force, the rest of your workforce or the workforce of companies you merged with, and the public/customers/media/analysts. All these different audiences might use different (old) names to refer to the same product, service or solution, they might not be up to date on portfolio/company restructuring, they might try to sell or buy things you have discontinued etc… You might never get to a point where you present the same single one taxonomy to all audiences but at least align and update! Doing that allows for a mapping from customer needs / buyer pain points to your products/services/solutions.

2. Make sure all your sales people and partners/channels have visibility to all cross-selling, up-selling, and other relationships between products, services and solutions in order to make sure no opportunity to sell more is overlooked. Most enterprises fail at providing this kind of data in a complete way because they try to do it in (multiple) Excel files which just aren’t multidimensional and only show a (rarely updated) small part of the highly matrixed organization based on which line of business authored it.

3. Make sure that no piece of collateral and no product/service/solution ever exists without a clear way to contact different experts (product marketing, CI/MI, pricing expert, training expert, etc.) in each region/language. Are you sure everyone in your organization would know who to call for expertise of the kind A for product B, sold in industry vertical C, in language D, in country E, to global account F… Most corporate phone directories and intranets cannot be drilled down into like this. Can yours? When subject matter experts of different types are always shown with their contact details in the context of every piece of collateral and each product/service/solution then people can interact with them to ask questions, leave comments / blog posts… Basically all that knowledge is being created in context and nobody ever feels left alone without experts at their finger tips. Welcome to the Enterprise 2.0.

“Sales Enablement – It’s not all the same. What does it mean to you?”
What do we mean by the term “sales enablement?” I was at an executive level meeting on Wednesday in the Silicon Valley area, where a comment was made by a senior VP of worldwide sales, that the term would need to be defined for the sales force, because it meant different things to different people. What does it mean to you?

Here is my answer:

Every analyst firm and every business has their own definition. On focus.com and LinkedIn.com you can find many of them. Some use a very broad and all encompassing definition, some a very narrow, and some do not use the term Sales Enablement at all. I like the saying “You are either in sales or you are in sales support!” Basically everyone in a business should make sure that those who directly touch accounts have more valuable conversations with them and have everything they need to close.

You can have philosophical discussions whether the “support”/”enablement” should be spearheaded by the sales leader or the marketing leader, you can talk about “sales and marketing alignment” or you can get to work and put people, content, processes and technology in place that make sure that everyone (no matter whether they report to global, a regional team, a product line or a business function) can contribute the following:

- Contact details of subject matter experts per specific intersection in the matrixed organization,
- Knowledge about up-selling&cross-selling opportunities,
- Knowledge about customer pain points in specific industry verticals,
- Tools (like ROI calculators),
- Insights from the field (like customized presentations that resonated well and why),
- Collateral / marketing assets (branding approved vs. generated in the trenches) in different languages
- Comments / blog posts / questions
- Leads
- Pricing information for specific scenarios
- News etc…

When everyone globally can access, contribute, rate, and comment in an “Enterprise 2.0″ fashion then all that searching and re-creating/re-formatting that costs your sales people so much time can be cut down and through the wisdom of the crowd they will be better prepared to face the buyer who thanks to “Web 2.0″ is also better informed than ever. Now that terms like “Buyer Enablement” start to emerge, the buyer who is in the driver’s seat will not put up with the generic pitch and only listen to sales people after a lot of research which means the questions asked will be so specific to the buyer’s pain point that only the sales person who can tap into the wisdom of his/her entire organization can answer them.

Important is that all this knowledge is not tagged/labeled/structured in random ways and not all thrown in the same pot. Only if you provide people a context and semantic structures to contribute into and search in, you will allow for the knowledge to be accessible and to become wisdom. Without a semantic (web 3.0) approach where the systems knows what kind of information it is storing you would not be able to do things like presenting a sales person with all collateral that make sense in the sales step he/she is currently in. If you left this up to free tagging/naming by the hundreds or thousands of people who contribute, you would never get consistency and always miss some collateral e.g. per sales step.

One of the three Key Technology Marketing Trends for 2011 according to IDC is Investing more in Sales Enablement. It “is critical as buyers indicate that internal decision making is becoming more complex, while at the same time, sales professionals are not adding the needed information and value needed to overcome the growing buying cycle complexity. As a result, sales is being invited later into the decision making process, sales cycles are extending and deals are stalling.”

“[...] Is this digital spending allocation aligning with buyer needs? When asking over 200 IT buyers what they felt was most important part of the overall purchase process, over 1/3rd of the buyers indicated Vendor Content as key to the purchase decision. Content may indeed be king.

IDC survey results indicate that buyers rely on Vendor Content greatly, exceeding the value of direct vendor engagements with technical teams, sales representatives and executives in making key purchase decisions. With a wealth of information available at the click of a mouse, buyers are doing more of their own research and evaluations on-line relying less and less on vendor interaction to progress through the decision making cycle. We call this the “Internet fueled buying cycle.”

Content marketing, and developing content in particular to attract today’s economic focused buyer, is more important than ever to help connect and engage with buyers, and help customer stakeholders make better and faster IT purchase decisions. From these survey results, increased spending on content marketing for corporate web sites and social media would seem to help drive more / faster buying decisions. To help cut through the constant information overload, and help guide decisions more effectively, the most valuable content is that which is tuned to be relevant and engaging to the buyer – one-to-one personalized for example by industry, location, size, stage in buying cycle, role, pain points and opportunities.

The End of Sales as we Know It?
The importance of content marketing, from these survey results, help guide marketers that they should indeed be investing more in developing and delivering the right personalized and engaging content to help buyers drive decisions.

However, the importance of content and lack of priority towards direct engagements points to a troubling trend in that today’s Internet fueled, buyer controlled purchase process is disintermediating sales from the purchase process. Buyers are doing more and more of their own research in the early and middle phases of the sales process, and involving sales reps later and later in the sales cycle, often after key purchase decisions have already been made. Can sales be made relevant and valuable again in these key stages of the buying cycle?

The key to shaping the trends back in the vendors favor certainly requires an investment in content marketing, but also may mean investing more wisely in Sales Enablement to be sure sales is armed with the content they need to effectively engage buyers earlier, and with more value in the process.

Sales Enablement or Perish
Sales Enablement is defined by IDC as: “The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place … to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” [...]“

Sales enablement platforms – seven key requirements

“The Sales Enablement Platform, sometimes called the sales knowledge management system, is taking its place alongside the Customer Relationship Management system as one of the must-have platforms of an advanced sales organization. Any company planning to implement a Sales Enablement Platform will have a long list of requirements, but the true significance of some factors is not always clear ahead of implementation. This article draws on experience of implementing and using Sales Enablement Platforms to highlight seven key requirements and explain their significance. It focuses on the needs of larger, more complex companies – the ones that have most to gain from a Sales Enablement Platform. [...]“

Read it here. At this link you can also download a nicer looking PDF version of the article.

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 [...]“

“SVA-BizSphere AG” becomes “BizSphere AG” and relocates from Wiesbaden to Mainz

Stuttgart, October 27, 2010 — The international start-up company SVA-BizSphere AG which specializes on software and services solutions for enterprise sales and marketing organizations, changed the company name into BizSphere AG as of October 21st and relocates the management office from Wiesbaden to Mainz with the beginning of November. The company originally started 2007 as a spin-off of SVA GmbH. With the relocation and the new company name, BizSphere gives a clear signal for increasing its presence in the market. The previous change in the management board and its commitment to innovation and marketing weeks ago were the first steps of the company’s re-positioning efforts.

The new location in Mainz will be the biggest BizSphere location in Germany and will also serve as the executive management office. The headquarters’ location will remain in Stuttgart. “With this step we’ve made another important statement to firmly establish our market position”, says Jochen Moll, CEO of BizSphere AG. “The Rhein-Main area is a very innovative economic region and the new office location in Mainz helps us to take advantage of an excellent business infrastructure”, Moll emphasizes. “The new company name and the relocation to Mainz are milestones for the growth and development of BizSphere”, Sven Eichelbaum adds, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BizSphere AG and Member of the Board of SVA GmbH.

BizSphere AG
BizSphere AG is a software and consulting company with its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2006 “BizSphere” was established as a business unit within SVA GmbH, one of the leading system integrators in Germany. In 2007 this business unit became an independent legal entity as SVA-BizSphere AG, which is doing business under the name of BizSphere AG since October 2010. The company has a global presence with staff operating out of Germany (Stuttgart, Mainz, Hamburg, Munich) as well as Shanghai (China) and Toronto (Canada).
BizSphere AG has developed a software platform and consulting framework supporting companies in solving their Sales Enablement challenges. BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution Suite optimizes costs and the quality of existing information by effective structured content. With this solution, sales representatives are able to use the information they need according to their requirements and companies will be able to serve and fulfill constantly changing customer needs within reduced response time. The platform combines know-how in the areas of semantic and social web (Web 2.0/3.0) as well as innovative user interface design.

Further information:
http://bizsphere.com
http://bizsphere.com/blog
http://twitter.com/bizsphere
http://slideshare.net/bizsphere
http://youtube.com/bizsphere
http://facebook.com/bizsphere

Contact:
BizSphere AG
Marketing & Communications Manager
Tamara Vierling
Holzhofstr. 3
55116 Mainz
Germany
Mobile: +49(0) 172 39 67686
Phone: +49(0) 711 490 39 744
Fax: +49(0) 6131 49706 66
Email: tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

Is sales training a component of sales enablement?
Are sales enablement or sales training two different groups are they part of the same?

Here is my answer:

Sales training is without a doubt a very important component of sales enablement. In most enterprises there is no shortage of sales training. However, in order to really enable sales people and to protect them from information overload a proper sales enablement approach would align people, processes, content, and technology to answer…

…which sales training is best (maybe based on ratings)?
…what is the most current and what needs to be updated?
…which formats are available?
…in which languages is it available?
…for which customer needs, industry verticals or countries / sales regions is customized training available?
…what are the cross-selling, up-selling, etc. opportunities that need to be kept in mind?
…who are the specific subject matter experts and how can they be contacted?

If you present your sales training in these different dimensions and make it easy to find for each product, service or solution, your sales force will start to save time, have better informed meetings, win more often and increase the average deal size.

By mapping your sales training as described above and tracking ratings, downloads and search queries you will be able to identify gaps and see which of them are the most important to focus on. By allowing comments and user generated content, you will crowdsource a lot of valuable insights from the field.

Best,
Paul

I would like to thank Brian, for bringing up the “change” subject. From my experience, being able to manage and moderate change is crucial for the success of any sales enablement initiative.

Let me give you one example from my time at Nortel. Back in 2006, the company had decided to become a services and solutions company – like many other tech firms before. Now, on the one hand we were facing the challenge of defining a solutions portfolio connected to the already existing products, on the other hand thousands of box selling sales people needed to educated to become solution sellers.

One thing that helped us a lot was that we visualized the change for sellers. Executives often wonder, why people are not instantly getting how new structures are supposed to be working – what they forget is how long it actually took to agree on these new structures in the first place. So naturally, adapting to change needs time, but this can be supported, if the change of structures is not only communicated to but visualized for people leveraging inutive graphical navigation elements in the sales portal for example. During the Services and Solutions transformation this approach did help Nortel a great deal.

So, a bucket you might want to add to the change discussion is the bucket of visualization of change. Making changing structures, changing selling context tangible makes change efforts like new solutions launches more likekly to be successful.

Another interesting bucket might be the rapidly changing web and the impact on sellers and buyers – so called Sales 2.0. Only a few years back no seller would have thought that monitoring prospects on LinkedIn and Twitter for example will become key to sales success. Therefore, launching effective Social CRM tools for sellers aligned with the existing sales process will become an important change initiative for sales organizations.

“Sales Enablement: Where does it live?
Several clients have asked us for best practices in sales enablement – specifically who owns it?

I’d support our marketing colleagues who are trying to align selling messages with product positioning and messaging documents. Others on the training side would say that their training materials are the baseline for sales enablement. Finally, the “sales enablement automation” crowd would claim ownership of the process and fulfillment of sales enablement materials on their web-based or internally-hosted portals.

So I ask YOU – learned Sales Enablement Content Group members: Where does Sales Enablement live?”

Coming from the point of view of someone providing web-based or internally-hosted portals for Sales Enablement, I would not claim ownership. All stakeholders like product marketing, training, CI/MI, the teams for pricing and ROI / business case calculations, the customer reference database, corporate branding, MarComs, etc… should be invited… invited to house their content and – just as important – their contact details in that one joint portal.

A portal… not for the sake of the technology or to have yet another portal… but… a portal to let all these stakeholders see which of their content works and which doesn’t (also which content is missing and which gets insightful comments as a feedback loop from the field or the channel back to corporate).

When there is this one interface that cuts across all team sites and the silos the many regional or functional groups might have built with SharePoint or LiveLink or any of these solutions, your sales people and channel partners can – for the first time – see what is available for the given sales situation they are in. None of the stakeholders “owns” this more than the others and the portal just helps to filter by sales step, region, industry vertical, content type, etc… to make visible whether the sale is being enabled or specific content and contacts are missing.

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

The Sales Enablement market exists and is growing

More and more decision makers in companies realize that ‘information overload’ – especially in times of the social web – means that many (Sales and Marketing) employees can not be as effective any more. There are no intelligent tools to manage this amount of information and at the same time ensure quality, relevance and up-to-dateness. The classical approaches of information management can not provide crucial information in the right format, at the right time and in the right place for all undertakings. The BizSphere Sales Enablement solution and our expertise is exactly the right approach for this problem!

Our innovative strength is outstanding and our focus on the ‘user experience’ is recognized in the industry

I’m very impressed by the innovative force that I feel at BizSphere. Our applications and the consistent logic behind them are compelling and brilliant! In very short iteration loops, we come up with new ideas and approaches to enhance our application suite and expand its areas of use – especially our focus on the ‘user experience’ analysts see as a strength. More than ever, will the ease-of-use of an application decide its success or cause a lack of adoption.

This ability is a very important asset, which we as a company have as an advantage.

I’m looking forward to meeting more of our customers and stakeholders in the sales enablement space.

Best regards,

Jochen Moll
CEO
SVA-BizSphere AG

SVA-BizSphere setzt jetzt auf Innovation und erweitert Marketingbereich

August 9, 2010 - Stuttgart (ots): SVA-BizSphere, internationales Startup-Unternehmen, das auf innovative Software-Lösungen für den Vertrieb spezialisiert ist, verstärkt seinen Fokus auf Innovation. Matthias Roebel übernimmt als “Chief Innovation Officer” neben seiner Verantwortung für Produktmanagement und -strategie zusätzliche Aufgaben im Bereich Business Development bei SVA-BizSphere. Das Startup möchte so noch gezielter auf die immer schneller wechselnden Anforderungen des Marktes eingehen und seine Rolle als Innovationsführer für Sales Enablement-Lösungen weiter ausbauen. Gleichzeitig stellt sich das Unternehmen im Bereich Marketing neu auf. Zum 1. August verstärkt Tamara Vierling als Marketing & Communications Managerin das Team. Die 35-jährige verantwortet die externe und interne Kommunikation bei SVA-Bizsphere.

Matthias Roebel hat die Produktentwicklung bei SVA-BizSphere in den vergangenen Jahren stark geprägt. Davor war der 33-jährige in internationalen Positionen im Bereich Marketing und Business Development bei Nortel und IBM beschäftigt. Tamara Vierling verfügt über langjährige Erfahrung im Bereich Kommunikation in internationalen Unternehmen und Agenturen. Die studierte Germanistin war unter anderem für EMC, IBM und Kia Motors tätig.

“Mit der Neuausrichtung im Marketing und dem Fokus auf Innovation möchten wir mittelfristig unsere Präsenz auf dem Markt verstärken”, sagt Jochen Moll, Vorsitzender des Vorstands von SVA-Bizsphere. “Wir bieten unseren Kunden nicht nur eine Informationsmanagement-Software an, sondern innovative Lösungen für ihre Herausforderungen. Das können wir nur, wenn wir uns auch selbst von Innovation leiten lassen”, so Moll.

SVA-BizSphere AG

Die SVA-BizSphere AG wurde bis zur Gründung als Geschäftsbereich “BizSphere” innerhalb der SVA GmbH, einer der größten Systemintegratoren in Deutschland, geführt. In 2007 wurde dieser Bereich zu einer eigenständigen Rechtsform, der SVA-BizSphere AG. Das Unternehmen ist in Stuttgart ansässig und weltweit mit Mitarbeitern in Wiesbaden, Hamburg, München, Shanghai, Chicago und Toronto vertreten.

Mit BizSphere Sales Enablement hat SVA-BizSphere eine innovative Software-Lösung und Beratungsmethode entwickelt, die Unternehmen eine effiziente und kundenspezifische Vertriebs- und Marketingkommunikation ermöglicht. BizSphere Sales Enablement unterstützt Unternehmen darin, die bereits bestehende Informationsvielfalt inhaltlich zu strukturieren und sinnvoll zu verwalten. Dem Vertrieb stehen Informationen so flexibel und nach Bedarf abrufbar zur Verfügung. Dadurch sind Unternehmen trotz kontinuierlicher Veränderungsprozesse in der Lage, auf die Bedürfnisse ihrer Kunden schnell und gezielt einzugehen. Die Lösung vereint dabei Know-how aus den Bereichen soziales und semantisches Internet (Web 2.0/3.0) mit innovativem Benutzeroberflächen-Design.

Weitere Informationen:
www.BizSphere.com
http://twitter.com/BizSphere
http://slideshare.net/BizSphere
http://YouTube.com/BizSphere

Pressekontakt:

SVA-BizSphere AG
Marketing & Communications Manager
Tamara Vierling
Borsigstr. 14
65202 Wiesbaden
Mobil: +49(0)172-3967686
Festnetz: +49(0)711-49039-744
Fax: +49(0)6122-536319
E-Mail: tamara.vierling@bizsphere.com

Jochen Moll appointed as CEO of SVA-BizSphere AG

Former IBM and EMC Corporation Executive will drive the company’s growth strategy

Stuttgart, Jul 19, 2010: SVA-BizSphere AG, one of Germany’s most innovative business software start-ups, is pleased to announce Jochen Moll as their new CEO, effective July 1st 2010. Jochen has more than 20 years of experience in the IT Industry, serving in many different management and executive positions at companies including IBM and EMC. At IBM, Jochen was Vice President (VP) Business Partner Organization Central Region as well as VP of IBM’s software business in the Central Region in Europe (Germany, Austria Switzerland). At EMC Corporation he served as the Managing Director for Germany and until recently helped to jump-start the business as VP of Strategic Alliances for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Jochen’s appointment is a significant milestone for the company’s business and growth strategy. His experience in the software business as well as proven skills to build a powerful partner network, will help the company to drive continuous growth. “The Sales Enablement market is currently growing quickly. We offer a highly innovative Sales Enablement solution,” says Jochen Moll. “We plan to build on that momentum and will continue to expand into international markets.”

Ralph-Peter Quetz, who previously was CEO, will serve BizSphere as COO, effective July 1st. He has successfully set up the company’s strong organizational and financial basis and will ensure day-to-day operations in those areas.

About Sales Enablement

IT Analysts at Forrester Research define Sales Enablement as a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to have a valuable conversation with the right set of clients. According to IDC, more than a third of possible client deals lost could have been won, if the seller had been better informed and had acted more client-oriented – this happens despite the fact that companies, according to Forrester Research, already invest on average US $135,000 in sales support per seller per year. Sales Enablement solutions aim to leverage these investments better or reduce them whilst increasing client satisfaction, sales success rates and the effectiveness of sales people.

About SVA-BizSphere AG

SVA-BizSphere AG has developed a software platform and consulting framework supporting companies in solving their Sales Enablement challenges. The company combines fundamental research in the areas of semantic & social web as well as user interface design with in-depth experience from Sales Enablement projects in large global enterprises and SMBs. This results in ongoing, customer needs oriented innovation, which new and existing clients benefit from. The BizSphere Sales Enablement solution is based on an open IT architecture for Knowledge Management, leverages Enterprise 2.0 technologies and integrates with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems as well as Unified Communications (UC) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. SVA-BizSphere AG was founded in 2007. The company is globally present with staff in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, Hamburg, Shanghai, Chicago and Toronto.

Links

www.bizsphere.com
www.enableyoursales.com/blog
http://twitter.com/bizsphere
http://youtube.com/bizsphere
http://slideshare.net/bizsphere
Facebook BizSphere

We are all still shocked about the tragic news we received Monday morning. Nicholas Kruse, long friend and co-founder of BizSphere died on Saturday, 3rd of July, 2010 during the “Gobi March 2010″ in Northwest China. He was only 31 years old.

Nick was with us since the early beginning. Some of us knew him years before and developed a deep friendship with him. As the creative director, he played a crucial part in the development of our company’s vision along with the concepts behind the user interface of BizSphere applications. He was a key contributor to the solution breakthrough in our first customer projects. With his company ReignDesign in Shanghai, he also brought in the first front end development team for our company that has remained a close development partner to this day.

In his work we valued his artistic talent, his sharp mind and also out-of-the-box ways. As a friend, we benefited from his insights, his ears to us, his care, his hospitality, his ability to party, his loyalty and his smile. We also all looked up to him for his incredible knowledge about China. He spoke Chinese fluently and had a deep understanding of Chinese history and culture. That made him one of our key anchors of our presence in the People’s Republic.

His spirit was always free, not bound to conventions, preconceived ideas or norms. Until his last moments, Nick was a free man.

The entire team is feeling terribly saddened about the unbelievable loss of our great friend and colleague. We will miss him as we go forward and it will not be the same without him. His spirit, his vision and his ideas will live on in us.

Our hearts and prayers go out to his family, his girlfriend and friends. We cannot even fathom the pain and frustration they have to go through. We would like to thank Andrew Kruse (his brother) and Fei Lin (his girlfriend) who were in Urumqi right after Nick was brought to the hospital and stayed with him the entire three days until he passed away. Thank you Andrew and Fei!

We will keep Nick in our minds forever.

Nick, may you rest in peace our friend!

The entire BizSphere team

PS: Please see below a couple of further links

• In memories to Nicholas Kruse, the folks of ReignDesign have put together this site.
• Please also see his memorial page on facebook especially the description of his last days.

Responsibilities:

• Define user model and user interfaces for new and existing products and features.
• Develop high level and/ or detailed storyboards, mockups, prototypes, wireframes, and product specifications to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas.
• Gauge the usability of new and existing products, and make constructive suggestions for change.
• Assist the agile development process by providing timely, meaningful feedback during all phases of the development cycle.
• Connect with the user interface development community to track latest trends and emerging technologies.
• Champion user needs and continually strive to improve the usability of our products while understanding business and technical constraints. Understand the balance of user experience, business case, and time-to-release in order to make appropriate strategic decisions.
• You will work collaboratively with fellow members of the User Experience team to conceptualize, design and mock-up ideas; then inspire members of Product Management, Engineering and Quality Engineering to develop great products.
• Represent the “User Experience”, translate customer requirements into defined specifications and inspire the Engineering team to develop the right product.
• Usability testing and QA

Required competencies:

• We’re looking for candidates which are close to their bachelor with 3+ years hands-on experience in interface design
• Strong understanding of UI/ UX principles and best practices
• Uncanny drive to design the best user experience.
• Proven track record and a passion for designing compelling, great user interfaces.
• Experience working with various departments within a product team

Desired Skills:

• Fluent in English
• Strong Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks skills
• Adobe Flash skills (Action Script 3)
• HTML skills
• Familiarity with Adobe Flex
• Familiarity with other programming languages and advanced programming concepts
• Familiarity with Agile Software development method

Location:

• Shanghai, China

Time:

• 6 months
• Beginning September 2010

Salary:

• 1000 USD/ month

About us:

Over the last years, SVA-BizSphere Entwicklungs- und Vertriebs-AG has developed consulting methods and web-based software components to leverage sustainable knowledge and communication management. Both software and consulting are based on three core competencies: sustainable knowledge management, functional and intuitive user interfaces and the integration of communication and information management.

Besides several customized Rich Internet Applications (RIA), the company has created the BizSphere Sales Enablement Solution Suite, addressing the constantly growing problem of information overload specifically in the area of sales and marketing. The solution significantly enhances the information quality and relevance by optimizing content creation as well as search patterns.

SVA-BizSphere AG is a spin-off of SVA GmbH based in Wiesbaden, Germany. SVA GmbH is one of Germany’s leading system integrators in the field of datacenter infrastructure with an annual revenue of 120 million Euros with its more than 120 employees.

SVA-BizSphere AG is a team of more than 30 highly qualified and internationally experienced consultants, IT architects, developers and web designers. At several offices in Germany and Shanghai the team concentrates on the agile and client-oriented execution of software development and implementation

Please submit your application including resume to: kaye.huang@bizsphere.com.

For more information about us visit: www.bizsphere.com

Candidates only! It is NOT OK for recruiters or others to solicit SVA-BizSphere AG.

In the February 2010 issue of CRM magazine Christopher Musico looked at ‘Sales Enablement Tools’. The article is great to begin the Sales Enablement conversation:

“Sales Enablement Tools – Make the Selling Simpler: Organizations want sales reps to have access to the right information at the most critical moments

Sales professionals should have the world at their fingertips, thanks to netbooks, laptops, smartphones, and the ubiquity of cloud-based data. And yet pundits and executives alike say the same basic challenge endures: the lack of personalized, targeted information.

[...] Michael Gerard, vice president of the sales advisory practice at IDC. “It’s the most basic things. Reps are having a difficult time having a fluent conversation with the customer, and that gets into knowing who [she] is, about [her] company, what products [her] company may or may not have already purchased.”

This is the sweet spot for sales enablement—defined by IDC as “the delivery of the right information in the right format to the right person at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”

Whilst we couldn’t agree more with this definition of Sales Enablement we like to see “…in the right format…” added into that definition above. One of our YouTube videos explains what we mean by that.

“Scott Santucci, senior analyst at Forrester Research, says he’s seen an explosion of interest in this area over the past year. As with any technology, however, those rushing to buy the hot newness without first establishing a clear strategy are doomed to fail. It’s not that there’s a lack of information—far from it. Instead, it’s hard to wade through the sheer tonnage of information and determine what’s up-to-date, relevant, and in a form amenable to the particular sales conversation. “It’s a very simple, yet really complicated problem,” Santucci says.

IDC’s Gerard says the first step is to figure out who owns sales enablement in your organization. While the prevailing view has the niche bridging both sales and marketing, no one seems able to agree on exactly who owns which pieces of the pie. [...]”

These are nuanced problems, and Santucci says each of the relevant vendors—including BizSphere, iCentera, Kadient, and Savo Group—cater to slightly different problems. [...]

Santucci says that BizSphere is a relative newcomer to this space, but tackles a more-ambitious problem. “Imagine a large company that can sell different combinations of products and services, and organize things in a variety of different hierarchies,” he says. “If we were calling on a c-level person about [her] particular business problem, it could span across multiple product lines. If you talk to a manager-level person, you may only talk about one particular product. How do we build a taxonomy that allows us to cascade and work within that complex an infrastructure? That’s what BizSphere does. [...]”

BizSphere AG agrees with Scott Santucci that different companies need different Sales Enablement solutions and we like to think of ourselves as the Sales Enablement solution for the large global B2B enterprise with our experience at Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Nortel, since the year 2006.

“These vendors offer on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models—and CSO Insights Managing Principal Jim Dickie says the SaaS option is growing in popularity, in part because those prices range between $40 and $100 per sales professional per month. That model, he adds, is an easy way for sales executives to test if sales enablement can fix a particular problem. If it does, expect sales folks to take more ownership—literally. “You’ll see people start off with SaaS, but if they decide to use it long-term, they’ll convert over to perpetual license,” Dickie says. [...]

BizSphere AG’s Sales Enablement solution is available as on-premises or SaaS.

BY THE NUMBERS

• $135,262 is spent, on average, in support costs per year for each salesperson.
• 7 hours per week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls.
• 50 percent of the information is pushed through email.
• 10 percent is “made available in a useful format.”

Source: Forrester Research & IDC Sales Advisory Service
[...]“

On 2/4/2010, Tamara Schenk @tamaraschenk (T-Systems International GmbH, Portfolio & Offering Management, Head of Special ICT Innovation Projects) posted a great comment on the article mentioned above:

Christopher, thanks for this great summary – spot on!

The discussion on “who owns sales enablement” is really interesting – from my point of view this question brings as back to the “functional silos”. Didn’t we want to overcome the functional silos by implementing sales enablement? We had a similar discussion when we started our sales enablement project. Now we have a cross-functional team which is lead by portfolio & offering management, in our approach the “backbone” of sales enablement.

You hit the nail on the head with your characteristics of the here listed vendors (there are a few more with interesting, solutions for special needs…). If an organization has a complex offering portfolio with different kinds of relationships within the portfolio you will need a lot of taxonomy features – but make sure that your first step is the consolidation of your portfolio and the second step is implementing sales enablement, including working on content quality, governance, processes, change management etc. The better you design the portfolio structure the easier you can analyze the content quality later on. From our experience that’s one of the critical success factors – and the other one is change management – how do I motivate sales reps to use the sales enablement platform and to use the collaboration features? Communicate, communicate, communicate… and you could give the sales user groups the responsibility for a successful change!

The objectives of sales enablement initiative could be different, e.g. one collaboration platform instead of ten different portals, get consistent messages, optimize go-to-market, deliver right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place, break functional silos, reduce applications, reduce ramp-up time for new hires, improve sales efficiency etc. All objectives should be aligned to one common understanding: “Sales is the customer”!

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.

Thanks to Solution for Sales for allowing us to re-post their article on our blog. It describes the sales enablement theme from a business perspective and greatly compliments the articles on our page:

“Salespeople volunteer for a tough job. The complexity of what they sell and the sophistication of the people they sell to increase year by year. In this environment every sales interaction and conversation is important, which is why the best salespeople spend so much time preparing for their conversations with customers and creating the materials they will use.

But salespeople are often not well served by the resources they are given to prepare for these conversations. The problem resides at two levels: the quality of sales materials is often poor and it is hard to find the right resources, even if they do exist. The concept of the sales enablement platform – a knowledge management tool for sales – has arisen as a solution to the second of these problems. This article outlines the requirements for an effective sales enablement platform and analyses the benefits.

What customers want

Customers have grown out of having products sold to them; they have even tired of solutions selling. Now they want to buy on the basis of business outcomes. The communications company doesn’t want an improved customer loyalty system; it wants customers that stay longer and spend more. The manufacturer no longer wants an improved supply chain solution; it wants lower supply costs and on time delivery. And they want to look at all the options for achieving their desired outcome.

One consequence is that customers expect salespeople to explain how they can deliver outcomes. They are looking for salespeople to share a point of view, not just ask questions.

Customers want to work with salespeople who bring business knowledge from a wide range of different situations; salespeople who can contribute new business ideas.

What salespeople need

The sales cycle can be viewed as a series of interactions or conversations with the customer. Each sales interaction has a specific set of objectives: it must change a viewpoint, unearth information, resolve a concern, solve a problem or provide needed information. Knowing this, and understanding the customer’s expectations, it is apparent that the salesperson, when preparing for a sales conversation, needs to be able to marshal a wide range of information and structure it according to the context and objectives of each different situation. Salespeople need better information systems to help them do this, and the sales enablement platform has evolved to address this need.

What’s the problem?

Typically, current tools do not meet the information needs of salespeople – see below “What salespeople say they need”. These shortfalls are damaging because salespeople rely on sales resources to fuel the engine of sales conversations – no fuel, no progress.

What salespeople say they need

• One source – I don’t want to have to search through multiple, unconnected information silos, arranged arbitrarily e.g. according to product set, department, country
• The big picture – I need the high level view so I can spot related offerings and cross and up sell opportunities
• Concise and complete – I want just the resources that are relevant now, not loads of extraneous stuff. But it must be all the resources, from all departments
• Arranged for me – I don’t want to have to be an expert on the portfolio to get to the resources I need
• In my language – it must respond to the words I use
• Responding to the sales context – e.g. the stage of sale, technical vs business
• Linking me to people who can help – I want to connect to salespeople who have been here before me, and to the expert behind the resource
• Listening to me – I’d like the opportunity to comment and share information. I’d like to be updated on topics that I choose

The impact – sales efficiency

Much has been written about the impact of these problems on salesforce productivity. For example, IDC research says that on average each week a salesperson spends:

• 6.4 hours creating presentations
• 5.8 hours searching for client-related information
• 2.3 hours searching for marketing collateral

Clearly, if these processes could be speeded up sales would be more efficient. For example, for a salesforce of 500, saving one hour each week is worth over €500k each year in simple efficiency savings. That means getting more sales out of the same size salesforce or accommodating salesperson wastage without loss of sales.

Significant as this is, Solutions for Sales believes that it is the potential improvement in sales effectiveness delivered by the sales enablement platform that offers the most significant gains.

The impact – sales effectiveness

We have argued that customers expect a higher quality of interaction with their sales contacts. They want business advice; they want a balanced view; they want to focus on their desired business outcome not the salesperson’s desired sales outcome. To meet these customer expectations salespeople need to tap into a wide range of resources and quickly find all that is available to make the next sales interaction successful.

This is something salespeople are not doing well according to statistics from IDC, which show that:

• 33% of all unsuccessful deals could have been won if the seller had been better informed and had acted more client-oriented
• 57% of customers feel that salespeople are poorly prepared or not prepared at all at initial meetings
• More than 50% of customers expect salespeople to be better informed about client-specific requirements and goals

If accessing sales resources is difficult or laborious, it is our experience that the salesperson’s patience runs out long before all relevant resources have been discovered. The result is sales meetings that fall into the 57% that customers judge to be poorly prepared and sales opportunities that end up in the 33% that would have been won if the salesperson had been better informed.

The most significant benefit of a good sales enablement platform is that it improves the quality of the sales conversation, which results in more wins. When it comes to quantifying this benefit there are so many other factors at play that it is hard to provide objective figures. Readers must judge for themselves, but if it is accepted that salespeople who are better prepared for sales meetings can achieve a 1% higher win rate, then for a company with sales of €250 million the result would be an extra €1.5 – €2.5 million of sales each year. And there’s another important benefit: the salesperson that demonstrates the ability to talk outcomes with their customer gains visibility of more sales opportunities.

Marketing has needs too

Sales enablement platforms are not just for sales. Marketing has a whole range of requirements in this area. See below:

What CMOs say they need

• Drive Sales – I need to have better ways of steering Sales in the direction the company wants to go
• Satisfy Sales – I want to provide the sales resources that salespeople need. I am sick of hearing them say that Marketing is no help
• Economise on Marketing resource – I would like to know which resources are valued by sales so I can save money by stopping doing what’s not wanted
• Improve visibility – I want to see who’s using what, which resources are getting old, and what the coverage is of sales resources across the portfolio
• Develop a broader view – I’d like people to have a better understanding of the breadth of our capability and the positive synergies across our portfolio
• Exploit all our resources – I want everyone to be able to contribute to selling, including organisations like professional services and delivery
• Encourage interaction – I need to get salespeople sharing their experience and marketing people contributing their knowledge directly to sales
• Structured, uniform and global – I’m worried that the ad-hoc social networking and web tools that are springing up will just create confusion. Worse, if they aren’t maintained they will mislead

Producing the best sales resources

People all round the company have information that can help sales. Of course the main producers are Products, Marketing and Sales themselves, but there are others. In some companies Professional Services and Consulting divisions have information on the services they offer, their expertise and their processes, methods and tools. They may produce opinion pieces and white papers. This is valuable material in a complex sales process. Delivery and Operations can provide performance statistics and quality measures that are useful sales ammunition, and customers want to know about the design, implementation and support services available to them.

Products, Marketing, Sales, Professional Services, Consulting, Delivery and Operations will all have their own ways of producing and storing information – this is what created the silos in the first place. The good news is that these don’t have to change. The sales enablement platform spans all these sources, presenting sales materials from all departments as an integrated whole. As well as giving 360° visibility, the sales enablement platform helps producers by providing:

• Structure: defining the types of resource salespeople need; formats; desired content
• User feedback: comments from salespeople on how resources can be improved and what new resources are needed
• User rating: rating and usage statistics allow producers to judge how well they are doing and allow managers to identify the best producers and the most popular types of resource
• Inventory control: to highlight when resources need updating or are approaching end-of-life, and show where more resources are needed

The result is a continuous improvement cycle that leads towards better quality sales resources which are more useful to salespeople.

Sales enablement in context

The selling process can be viewed as a series of conversations between salesperson and customer, so the job of sales enablement is to make those conversations more interesting and ultimately more rewarding for both parties.

When preparing for a sales call, the salesperson needs sales resources that are appropriate to the specific conversation being planned. Successful companies make sure that high quality sales resources exist, and they make it easy for salespeople to find the right resources for the job at hand. The sales enablement platform solves the second of these problems. It gives sellers access to the right sales resources and information – the fuel that powers the engine of sales. Moreover, it helps improve the quality of sales resources by creating channels for feedback and engagement so that content producers get a better understanding of what’s needed.

Conclusions

The sales enablement platform is a strategic tool that CMOs can use to define the portfolio structure, drive sales behaviour and optimise product marketing resource. It cuts through organisational silos and allows every department to play its part in supporting sales. It fosters business networking amongst salespeople and with other departments that have a major impact on sales, such as Marketing, Operations and Professional Services. It improves the quality of sales resources by facilitating feedback and engagement between users and producers. For all these activities it provides a structure that is uniform, maintainable and scalable.

For the Sales VP, the sales enablement platform facilitates better execution in the everyday work of the salesforce, leading to lower sales costs and a higher win rate. The result is a solid business case for investment, which explains why the sales enablement platform is taking its place alongside CRM and marketing automation as a must-have business tool.

This article was written by Alan Willis of Solutions for Sales. For more information email or call +44 (0)1702 586742.”

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

“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.

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.

Friday, March 26, 2010 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM CET
Freitag 26.03.2010 um 15 Uhr – Dauer: ca. 45 min

Sales Enablement: Der Schlüssel zu mehr Vertriebseffizienz

Sie wollen, dass Ihr Vertrieb die Vorbereitungszeit für Kundentermine minimieren kann? Außerdem sollen die Vertriebsmitarbeiter optimal informiert auftreten? Dann verbessern Sie Ihre vertriebsspezifische Wissensbasis mittels effektiver, zielorientierter Inhaltsplanung auf Marketingseite sowie einfachen Möglichkeiten zum Wissensaustausch zwischen den einzelnen Vertriebsmitarbeitern.

Agenda

* 10 min Die Probleme und Kosten des “Information Overload” für Vertrieb und Marketing
* 25 min Sales Enablement: Mit nachhaltigem Wissensmanagement zu mehr Effizienz
* 10 min Fragen und Antworten

Redner: Christoph Goertz, Leiter Marktentwicklung, SVA-BizSphere AG

Wir laden Sie herzlichst zu diesem Sales Enablement Webinar ein und freuen uns darauf, mit Ihnen über Ihre Erfahrungen oder Anregungen zu diskutieren.

Kostenlose Anmeldung: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/592898210

Gerhard Geschwandtner put it well in his opening remarks: The Internet is changing the world. It has already changed end customers’ purchasing behaviors significantly, but changes in the B2B world are and will be equally dramatic.

Also, the changes span the entire range from Lead Generation, where social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook are playing bigger roles from day to day, to Sales Enablement, where sellers need to be enabled to have better informed and more relevant conversations with their clients despite the challenges of information overload. However, there’s more: Think about how Sales Compensation or Pipeline Management need to change in a more dynamic, flatter world. Or how (social) Marketing Automation methods could improve Lead Nurturing…

As exciting as all of these things are, as overwhelming they may appear to customers in the first place. However, waiting and observing is not an option. Companies have started to try out and adopt one or the other Sales 2.0 technology/methodology and they are seeing the benefits – as we could hear in the various panel discussions during the conference. Yes, the holistic picture of how the different pieces of the Sales 2.0 ecosystem are playing together still needs to be drawn – but you’ve got to start somewhere, if you don’t want to be left behind.

The next challenge, to quote Gerhard again, is moving from reactive to proactive in using the tools.

On March 7, 2010 Peter O’Neill from Forrester Research, Inc. wrote about us in his blog post ‘Spotted – 2 interesting European marketing automation vendors’, calling us one of the European companies with some very innovative ideas:

“[...] BizSphere positions itself as providing sales enablement solutions (my colleague Scott Santucci also knows them well) but they are actually filling a gap between a marketing asset management system and satisfying the needs of both sales people and field marketers. While central marketing people need an asset management system to maintain content integrity and oversight; their colleagues in the field also need a tool to help them collate the right collateral package matching every potential sales situation, most relevant to that target customer and status in the sales cycle. [...]“

For a quick view of our approach to Sales Enablement have a look at our presentation on slideshare.net or check out our YouTube videos.

Fortune 500 companies invest millions of dollars every year to produce up-to-date material for marketing, sales and employee training. Shockingly, less than half of the produced material is used at all:

“[...] IDC research has found that over 40% of all marketing assets are not in use today, with some sales organizations reporting that as much as 90% of the assets created by their marketing peers are never used by sales teams. This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects, and current customers. [...]” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

IDC’s numbers show how big the need for Content Intelligence really is. In the coming weeks, we’ll have a series of posts on this topic to further elaborate on the pain points as well as possible solutions for enterprises. To kick things off, I’ll describe three reasons why Enterprises need Content Intelligence.

1) Excel-based inventory management is error-prone, cumbersome and expensive

The image below (1) shows two real-life examples we found at Fortune 500 clients. Content managers kept enormous Excel spreadsheets in order to monitor the inventory of marketing assets. You can imagine the time they had to spend spend updating these sheets, the likelihood of human error, and the resulting frustration. Excel is without a doubt a very powerful tool, but it was not designed for this task and hence does a very poor job of it. It quickly becomes painfully difficult to maintain these big sets of multi-faceted data (especially for non-experts) or even simply to access it – try to quickly get a certain piece of information out of the spreadsheet below!

(1) Inventory monitoring efforts

The visualization (2) gives an indication of how complex the world of a content professional (Content Manager, Marketing, etc.) in today’s business world is. All the labels on this chart represents nodes and leafs of an average B2B company portfolio (>500 nodes). There are numerous documents and other digital assets for all the single leafs and nodes on this chart. However, the portfolio is only one dimension – we have to consider at least two more dimensions:

• the geography (Regions, Sub-Regions and Countries) and

• the Resource type dimension (there can be hundreds of different types of resources in one company: e.g. Case Study, Success Story, Sales Presentation, Brochure, FAQ,…)

If you visualize these three basic dimensions as a 3-dimensional information space, you get much closer to the reality of B2B content management. In fact, enterprise companies often have many more dimensions (Sales Cycle Steps, Verticals/Industries, etc.). The Excel nightmare in figure (1) is the result of an inevitable reality: more dimensions –> more complex information space –> bigger spreadsheets!

(2) Visualization of a standard B2B Portfolio

The challenge we address, then, is to provide content professionals with the overview and transparency they need to keep the companies knowledge inventory optimal, in terms of both quantity and quality. If you try to achieve this goal by using spreadsheets you will end with monster-files as shown above (1). Our solution is called Content Landscape. Content Landscape is a feature rich yet easy-to-use Content Intelligence application which allows for searching and browsing of your inventory in one interactive view. Based on a faceted browsing approach you can drill down from tens of thousands of documents to your one relevant document with two or three mouse clicks. Moreover, the content dashboard and dynamic tables provide content professionals with all necessary information to make the right decisions.

(3) Screenshot Content Landscape

2) Quantity & Gaps – Enterprises need to understand what´s there and what´s missing

Here are some examples of common questions content professionals (Marketing) need answers for:

1. Do we have Case Studies for all our offerings? Where do we have gaps?
2. Do we have enough regional specific content? Which region has the most Success Stories? Where do we have to produce additional Success Stories?
3. How much country specific resources do we have for EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa)?
4. Which resources type is the one with the lowest availability? etc. etc.

“The top reason that assets are not used or that they are under-used, is that end-users are unable to access or locate these assets. Based upon anecdotal feedback from recent survey participants, the key root causes include: “too much material,” old content and assets, and poor processes and technologies.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

Content Landscape lets you break down your inventory by age and by step in its lifecycle (e.g. lifecycle step ‘end of life’ means content is hidden for sales users until it has been updated by marketing).

By classifying a company’s content according to its portfolio of products, services, and solutions, cross-mapped to geographic/language regions, Content Landscape offers a simple and clear visual overview of where the gaps with no available content are – as opposed to the inscrutable endless rows of an Excel spreadsheet.

3) Quality and activity – Enterprises need to understand the quality of their knowledge inventory and how it´s being used

“The lack of relevance of content and assets is also cited as a reason for lack of asset utilization.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

The described life cycle for content makes sure that no outdated content is accessible. The real innovation is tying content to use, just like Ken Knickerbocker from CRMparadigmshift.com/blog/ demands in his post ‘Can sales give as good as it gets?’:

“Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward.”

The usage behavior of the crowd (views/downloads) and social features like rating and commenting clearly indicate which types of content work and which don´t. Since they’re visible to everyone, these indicators enable a culture of creating content that drives business results (as opposed to the up to 90% of marketing content that ends up not being used) and could be taken into account for…

“…reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute” as suggested in ‘Top Intranets Embrace Mobile Accessibility and Social Networking’.

By allowing ratings and comments on each asset, marketing and communications teams are also getting instant feedback from the field. Insights a marketing department would never receive using the traditional uni-directional communication flow from marketing down to sales can now be gathered [see (4)]. For example, colleagues in sales can leave comments to indicate which asset worked for them related to a certain customer need or industry.

(4) Analysis Framework

Conclusion
The sheer quantity of content generated and maintained by a modern Fortune 500 company renders 20th-century solutions and approaches grossly inadequate. Whether it’s massive spreadsheets or a multitude of data silos, an enterprise’s content is hard to even find, let alone assess or maintain. And yet marketing is pushed more than ever before to get more bang for the buck, despite having little or no feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

To put it simply, content management is no longer enough; it must be complemented by content intelligence. To work effectively, content professionals desperately need smarter tools to find, track, visualize, and assess content, such as Content Landscape. What content do we have? What’s being used, and what’s not? Where do we have gaps? How old is this content? Who is responsible for it? A company that can answer these questions will see its content intelligence investment repaid many times over, both in the efficiency of its marketing dollars and the effectiveness of its sales force. It´s time to get serious about Content Intelligence.

We will post more about this topic in the next weeks. What are your thoughts?

He had me. A bit. “What stuff?”, I asked. He responded that most of all the immediate value used to justify the purchase would be in increased sales through the combining of customers and products (more opportunities to sell more). As we talked further he summed up the pitfalls as:

• Sellers will instantly have 40%-60% more new products and solutions to sell (that they know little about): Where will sellers get the necessary knowledge or find an expert just-in-time?
• Customers with trusting relationships will want “what does this mean to us” meetings: Has marketing (or management) given sellers the up to date details?
• The combined companies will begin a process of choosing what stays, what goes – a complete restructuring of offering portfolio will have to happen: How will you get your sellers on the same page and focused on selling?

We spoke about how these challenges could manifest and about the best ways to address them. Basically, he emphasized that C-level executives recognize that critical nature of communication and collaboration of the selling community (sales reps, expert or support roles, and marketing) to maintain focus on the essential goal of selling. His point was simple: You got to keep selling.

Reflecting on the call, I realized that innovative technology and consulting methods, specifically Sales Enablement solutions, can go a long way to address these needs. I made the following list to send to this executive:

• Given the rapid nature of combining the teams, being able to provide access to all relevant content (regardless of where it is stored) explaining the new offering portfolio – but within the context of the customer conversations – is the key.
• Within this newly established enterprise context web 2.0 collaboration methods become very powerful. Sharing content instantly leveraging blog and twitter like functionality across sales teams can boost the effectiveness of communication to the customers.
• With the virtual doubling of the team’s size, even the guy with the deepest networks will be severely impacted – often sellers need the expert not just the white paper or slide and integrating to unified communications (VoIP / chat / presence information / etc.) would be hugely powerful.

Additionally, I found an article at Forbes.com that was written by McKinsey & Company titled ‘Master sales force integration in a merger’, that explores this topic beyond the technology aspect I cover.

Please share your experiences and comments if your company is embarking on this strategy. I would be very happy to have further discussions with you on this subject.

For sales enablement systems, it is of particular importance that the customer view is considered when structuring this information space. As I explained in my last post on this blog (The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in) one of the key customer views to be included is the customer’s buying process.

This recommendation is based on the recognition that Buyer/Seller relationships are changing. By staying with the sales process as the structuring element, these important changes might be missed or discovered too late.

Scott Santucci from Forester research in a recent post confirmed this fact of changing relationships. He writes:

“Buyer/Seller relationships are stratifying right before our eyes into a new caste system of strategic, value-added vendors on the one end and undifferentiated, commodity-type suppliers on the other.”

He suggests a

“…new selling model of actually co-creating value with customers and focusing on helping those customers drive business outcome”.

is needed.

In this post, I want to discuss how using steps in the customer’s buying process as one dimension to structure and access content is key to this new selling model.

What are the major steps in a customer’s buying process?

Activities to be carried out by the customers in the buying process might vary according to the size and type of organization. However the fundamental decisions to be made for advancing in the buying process remain the same. Structuring content according to what decision it actually supports, seems therefore a more robust concept. On a high level, there are 3 fundamental decision points:

The buyer:

1. has to come to the insight that a status quo is no longer tolerable if the business should prosper and a more detailed investigation is needed.
2. concludes that the ‘cost of the problem’ outweighs the ‘cost of solutions’ than can be bought
3. decides to buy from the seller offering the best ‘perceived future in use value’ compared to the to be paid ‘cash value’

There are usually minor decision points in between these major milestones. But for the illustration of how to structure content along the customer’s buying process, the granularity of the 3 major milestones appears to be sufficient.

What contents will help the buyer to reach a decision?

Some people might see a deontological problem by the seller “pushing” the buyer over the first decision point. It is however legitimate for the seller to help the buyer already to come to the conclusion that the frustration with the status quo is no longer tolerable; provided it is done with the right mindset: Helping customers to get better outcomes for their business. What kind of content is then needed to help the customer in a non manipulative way to come to this conclusion?

Geoffrey James’ blog post “Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job” provides some guidance. In there, he cites Neil Rackham’s second rule for sales research being:

“Prospective customers do not value information about products; instead they value information about the industry and the customer’s competition, providing it is current and up-to-date”.

Standard “Corporate Literature” produced by the seller’s organization will thus hardly be what is needed to reach the first milestone in the customer’s buying process. Imagine yourself in the situation trying to assess the importance of a problem and you do not yet know whether you need a solution and if so, whether it could be bought somewhere. Now ask yourself how you would react to a salesperson rattling down a laundry list of features and if you are lucky maybe even a few benefits You would consider the seller’s pitch as being annoying because it is totally irrelevant to the decision you need to make.

Industry or analyst reports creating awareness about the problem the seller can address are a better suiting tactic. This also means that not all contents in Sales Enablement systems are produced by the seller’s organization. Making such reports available in a Sales Enablement system, linked to this early phase of the buying process, reduces the time sales people spend to research for such content and insures that the best suited content for that phase is used.

After reaching the first milestone, the co-creation of value between seller and buyer takes place. In this phase “educational” content, helping the customer to define the specific cost of the pain (e.g. if I do nothing, my sales continue to lag behind those of my strongest competitor by 1M$ per month) and showing how the seller’s solution can address the problem is to be provided (e.g. canned webinars, white papers etc.) The aim of this content is to help the customer to evaluate whether the cost of the pain outweighs the typical investment in a solution to solve the problem.

Considering this milestone is very relevant. Research shows that 20% of forecasted deals end up with ‘no decision’ (i.e. nothing at all is bought). I consider ignoring this second milestone as a root cause for this phenomenon.

This second milestone also allows for the distinction between value-added vendors and commodity type suppliers. The latter typically start their selling process only when the customer has reached the conclusion that solutions providing a positive return compared to the cost of the problem can be bought on the market.

To help the customer with the final selection of the seller with the highest impact on a business outcome, product literature sometimes helps, success stories and ROI calculations are other content to be used.

Conclusion

Using the customer’s buying process as an additional mean to structure the content to be provided within a Sales Enablement systems can be looked at as one of the “manageable projects” Scott Santucci suggests to address the strategic challenges of being successful in the “new caste system”.

References:

It is time to think about creating an enterprise context (Matthias Roebel)

The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in (Christian Maurer)

Its been a while why and what’s going on with sales enablement these days (Scott Santucci)

Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job (Geoffrey James)

No question, it is extremely important for every company to leverage the social networking and interaction technologies available today. They actually might encourage employees to share knowledge and to connect with each other more easily. However, if a social networking strategy is implemented without addressing some fundamental content management and communications problems within the enterprise, it won’t be successful in the long run.

“Facebook doesn’t have your friends. It has facts about your friends. Google is at its best when it gives you links to links, not the information itself,” says Seth Godin in his recent blog post “Getting Meta“. Technology can just be an enabler, not the solution to existing fundamental problems – social software makes no exception here.

Why is that? Just imagine an international school, where students from all over the world are gathering. All of them are speaking different mother tongues – a lingua franca like English is missing however. Now offer to this crowd of students the possibility to network. What you’ll see happening is them networking within their language silos. Just like on Facebook or LinkedIn: Nobody is having friends he can’t communicate with – like in the real world.

Finding a common language

So, in order to make collaboration and knowledge exchange strategies sustainable and successful a common language within the enterprise needs to be established – a lingua franca, an enterprise context. If this is not happening, Sales and Marketing, Communications and Delivery will keep on misunderstanding each other causing a lot of inefficiencies for the company. And they will keep on producing more and more information without actually creating a knowledge base for the company – the social content additionally created by the masses, even would come on top of this information pile.

You may think: This sounds pretty philosophical and far from reality? Let me proof to you the opposite with two examples. The first example is related to the incredible number of different namings for the same type of document. Take a brochure: It may be called brochure or flyer or customer deliverable or, or, or… I’ve seen companies with 500+ different labels for in fact just over 70 types for content items.

The second example is related to the offerings of a company. Times are changing quickly and so are the names of products and solutions. It’s quite normal in an enterprise, that some people are still speaking about a product using its older name while others are using the new name or an abbreviation – such differences are another source for misunderstandings.

“Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity,” Seth Godin also states in “Getting Meta”. And exactly this opportunity enterprises need to explore, if they really want to become serious about a sustainable knowledge strategy for their Sales and Delivery, their Marketing and Communications departments. To overcome their existing challenges in the area of Sales Enablement they need to start creating information about information, in other words: meta data. Organizing this meta data in a controlled framework means setting up a commonly agreed on enterprise context, which describes the macro and the micro structures of the companies in a simple, but effective manner.

Once set up, the company’s knowledge base can grow steadily and even socially without causing additional information overload. Marketing can produce content right on target, and Sales reliably receives the information they need to lead valuable conversations with their customers.

- You know that doing these improvements will help your sales force, since it is ultimately up to your sales force to find relevant content, digest it, interpret it, fill in any missing gaps, and then adapt it to match customer needs.

- You know that doing these activities successfully will add more value and quality to customer interactions though better communication, sales collaboration, and access to relevant messaging

To act on their list, companies usually create multiple strategies using different teams that try the same tactics that other teams have tried in the past, but with a different spin.

- You also know that you are continually redoing your strategies year after year because they never quit seem to get you the results you wanted.

You try changing teams, changing leadership, or changing your methods, but you still don’t seem to gain any ground. In some cases, your initiatives seem to cause more problems than they fix.

- What don’t know is that one Sales Enablement strategy can address multiple items on the list and deliver results in a more cohesive way.

By approaching your wish list with a Sales Enablement initiative, your efforts will result in higher close rates, reduced operational costs, and increased revenue more efficiently and effectively.

Article: http://bit.ly/3qldZK

When companies look to measure the ROI of initiatives, they tend to focus on the obvious usual suspects. But if the definition of what McKinsey is measuring across all US workers here was, “all those employees who contribute and create information, provide knowledge or expertise, and tailor or deliver this knowledge/information to gain clients, win profitable deals, and retain customers“, then in many organizations, the percentage of people who are paid up to 75% premium might as well be double the 47% McKinsey has. You have to consider all the supporting roles found within large enterprises.

However more to the point, any challenge so broadly affecting the company and potentially so tied to the top and bottom line has to be seen as strategic, especially in particular, at the large, global Enterprise. Why? The inherent challenges of a complex global organization [heavily matrixed, many regions, multiple product groups, etc. = many silos] – they sell complex solutions in a complex selling environment with complex processes in multiple markets with a complex set of competitors. (Get it? Its complex!)

For the majority of these companies their comparative advantage is how well they can leverage their expertise:

• Expertise in the client’s situation/context;
• Expertise in any aspect of the available solutions;
• Expertise in the market and competitors.

With the increased speed of all markets today, changes in the competitive landscape and unforeseen macro-events, technical disruptions and innovations can impact entire industries and regions. How quickly your organization can respond, shift and adapt will determine if you lead/win or follow/lose.

Manage the complexity of your environment (lots of data sources and business processes): When we define the term Sales Enablement portal as “the place on your intranet where employees contribute and create information, provide knowledge or expertise, and tailor or deliver this knowledge/information to gain clients, win profitable deals, and retain customers” then my advice is to make sure the technical aspects of your Sales Enablement portal fits into your landscape and you do not create some over-simplified new one (e.g. yet one more place to put and get information for each business unit or country).

Do not see the statement “We are in the information age” as just something regarding the broader world we live in, but make it an important part of your corporate culture: The lesson of web 2.0 for companies is that people=expertise. There are a lot of innovations that can streamline people’s collaboration and leverage their expertise (social networks, wikis, SharePoint like platforms, micro-blogging, instant messaging, Voice over IP, etc.). But they all are not right for every company, and you can spend more time trying to manage all of the technologies than getting any value from them. Just because they all exist doesn’t mean you have to use them.

Some tips for selecting a new collaboration technology for your large, global enterprise to help get you on your way are:

• Find the right few technologies to support your culture of collaborating. (No culture of collaborating? You better get one – fast)
• Manage your technologies: don’t let them dictate your strategies
• Focus the development and deployment of technologies to specific groups and goals
• Be iterative in the process to use success to build momentum – leverage quick wins
• Develop and understand the personas of your sellers or other end users: define their needs and any benefits gained – what’s in it for them?
• Create a Sales Enablement road map that includes all four legs of Sales Enablement (People, Technology, Processes and Content)

Best of luck circumnavigating this brave, new (collaborative and technically advanced) world.

If reductions in expenses or headcount, mergers/acquisitions, or a company restructuring are driving your company’s agenda in 2010, then how you prepare your sales force to deal with your return to growth strategy matters … it matters a great deal!

As the Sales Enablement space matures, in particular within the economic context of the last 18 months, Sales and Marketing leaders are beginning to understand Sales Enablement in the larger strategic context. Its initial “motherhood and apple pie” appeal is undeniable, but as more companies implement and measure the impact, executives can see just how many ways it improves their bottom line.  Whatever your return to growth strategy is for 2010 (reductions in expenses or headcount, mergers/acquisitions, or a company restructuring) how you prepare your sales force matters, as it will impact the speed of your economic recovery. It matters a great deal!

As Sales Enablement has evolved into its own discipline, it has moved beyond the basic goal of improving sales process efficiency and into a part of the corporate strategic priority. CSO Insights recently reported in their 2008 survey of sales leaders that, within their top key initiatives, at least six were elements that could be delivered with a Sales Enablement strategy, including: #2: Improving rep access to knowledge to sell effectively; #3: More closely aligning sales and Marketing;  and #5: Enhancing sales team communications. This means real dollars and real efforts!

Download the full Case Study (PDF): http://tiny.cc/DauaR

The selling world in the web 2.0 era
Depending on the studies you consult, you will find that around 70 to 90 % of purchases today start with an internet search. Search engine optimized (SEO) websites and well written blogs are the primary tools to generate anonymous attraction from these searches.

Addressed attraction can be generated with lead generation systems usually including functions such as lead scoring and lead nurturing. Social media are another category of systems for addressed attraction generation.

All these systems are usually owned by marketing. As a consequence salespeople become involved later in the customers buying process. Their ability to guide prospective customers through the early stages in the buying process is thus drastically diminished.

In consequence, Sales Enablement systems will have to hold primarily content helping salespeople with the later stages of the process. Given the increased knowledge of the prospective customer, this content must be very sophisticated and detailed in order to enable salespeople to provide value to the customer interaction at this late stage in the process.

Do all prospective customers buy in this way?
While the negotiation power has undeniably shifted toward the customer through the fact how companies are using the web, we would be ill advised to assume, that the above scenario is the universal one how customers buy today. In their Sales Performance Optimization – 2009 Survey and Analysis, CSO Insights reports that about 52% of the leads salespeople are working on, are self generated by the salespeople. This figure actually has risen over recent years. In 2006 only 40% of the leads were self generated. This is surprising considering the trend described above.

One possible explanation for this discrepancy could be that a shift has already occurred how field sales forces are used. They might increasingly be used only for offerings where the customer needs help early on to understand that there is a problem and how it could be solved. It seems plausible that for this scenario generating leads directly by the sales force might be more effective. The majority of respondents to the CSO Insights study operate in B2B selling environments, whereas it is not so clear whether the studies claiming the percentage of buying cycles started with an internet search are making this distinction between B2C and B2B selling. This could be another reason for the discrepancy of the two trends.

Irrespective of what causes the discrepancy, for the functionality of Sales Enablement systems, this means that providing effective support for the early stages in the buying process might actually have a greater impact on the productivity of the salespeople than focusing on the late stages.

What happened to the sales processes?
Classical sales cycles are designed from an inside out perspective. They describe the steps a salesperson ought to take to bring a lead to a closed deal. Sales stages carry therefore labels like Qualification, First Meeting, Presentation, Negotiation and Close.

Experts are telling us, that sales stages today must be coupled with the way customers want to buy. From the discussion above, it is probably prudent to assume, that in one organization several buying cycles can coexist. For offerings where customers need help in understanding how they will solve problems (often also referred to as “Complex Sales”) we will therefore have a different sales process than for offerings having little educational need from the customer perspective.

Organizing information along one sales process might thus not be very effective for many organizations. The actions of the salesperson will much more be guided by the various ways how customers want to buy, rather than how they used to sell.

Conclusion
The environment salespeople have to operate in has become more complex. For Sales Enablement systems, this means that structuring knowledge in the various ways customers want to buy are needed to really sustainably increase the effectiveness and thus the productivity of salespeople.

Further Information
Visit Christian Maurer’s Webinar: Why Do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets?
Bizsphere has the pleasure to offer to the readers of this blog a free participation to the next Masterclass given by the author of this post.

The Masterclass will take place on:
Thursday, August 20, 2009
11:00 am – 11:45 am EDT (17:00 CET)

To register for free, please follow this link:
Masterclass Webinar

About the Author:
Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/

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)

1. My sales teams can articulate my company messages accurately to customers at all steps in the sales process;
2. My sales teams can find value adding messages quickly;
3. My sales teams are confident that the messages they find are accurate and current;
4. 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.

What is a winning Sales Enablement strategy?

Sales Enablement comprises a set of cross-functional activities specifically targeted at preparing members of a sales team for a successful customer engagement.  It establishes the tools and formal processes needed to increase sales team performance and aligns the people and content to ensure the right messages are being delivered at the right time. Think of this as the same concept as “Just-in-Time” delivery, but instead of delivering goods, it delivers the right message into the hands of sales at the right time ─ what they need, when they need it.

But it’s not easy. It requires change from multiple facets within an organization. It requires agreement to align the tools, messages, processes, and methodologies across product, marketing, sales engineers, and sales business groups. It takes a whole new thought process and commitment to move the organization from document management to content management. And it takes the desire to have everyone within the organization help sales make a sale.

The four Pillars of Sales Enablement

All four pillars need to be present to carry an organization to the next level successfully.

People:

Both marketing content contributors and sellers will need to change the way they think about content and the way it’s delivered. Marketing teams need to understand sales strategies that will drive revenue; identify the critical buying conversations; connect the insights and expertise of knowledge experts to sales reps; and deliver it when and where sellers need it.  Sellers need to break their preferred habits. When the content is there when they need it and where they expect it, they have to actually go and get it, as opposed to emailing or calling someone else for it.

Technology:

Most companies have separate content portals for sellers, sales engineers, and partners. A single, agile Web2.0 application can serve all internal audiences seamlessly and reduce the number of steps sellers need to take to access content.  A good agile Web2.0 application, like BizSphere can “slice and dice” content so that is it presented to users when and how they are using it— by the steps of the sales cycle and in context to region and offering taxonomy.

With a Web 2.0 application the integration of different communication vehicles in this single experience, includes a social networking (or social media) piece to allow sellers to talk to sellers.  This is more important now than every before, especially as content contributors and knowledge experts are downsizing with companies.  By instilling blogs/wikis, presence awareness and VoIP clients within the application, sellers can be one click away from accessing the knowledge experts within an organization.

Processes:

Most companies that have multiple portals don’t have a unified submission process for posting content.  This means duplicate files, redundant roles, and multiple processes. By reducing the number of portals or implementing a single submission form, contributors can focus on the experience as opposed to managing documents.  In addition, this provides the framework for establishing a unified workflow and governance model to streamline processes and enable a common content lifecycle strategy.

Publishing content is a great example to demonstrate gained efficiencies: With a traditional web publishing model many people own documents, who send to gatekeepers of the content, who forward to gatekeepers of the portals, who then cut and past into various forms for publication. Compare this to a non-traditional publishing model where each content owner has the ability to publish directly to the Web 2.0 Application. Fewer hands touch the content, which frees up resources and accelerates the time to publish.

Content:

Many companies do a good job creating content, but is it the right content?  And, is there a lifecycle and management model in place? There is so much content being produced now that many companies don’t even bother to try and expire or update it.  With the reduction in staff, it’s easier and cheaper just to keep creating new stuff without taking ownership and accountability of the old stuff. It is quoted by IDC that as much of 60% of sales facing content is never used.  This is caused by distrust and is compounded by the fact that there is so much clutter sales can’t find anything useful. Companies can use technology to instill life cycle management into their existing document repositories. These systems make it more acceptable for the owners since they can proactively manage their content via email and get notified when it is about to expire.

The future of knowledge and content management is to single source it, and better yet, let the technology deliver the information in whatever format the end user needs it.

For example, let’s use a value proposition.  This value proposition may appear in many places: a brief, a customer presentation, an internal presentation, a sales playbook, and on various web portals. Each document or platform is usually owned by different people, and as such; usually have multiple people recreating this one value proposition. Not only does this mean having to keep up with multiple variations, but also sellers don’t know if they have the most recent version. Single sourcing data can address this by allowing the person that owns this responsibility control what content is being disseminated by posting it as a “nugget of data” into a centralized repository.  When someone needs it, they know where to go to grab the most updated version. And if you have auto generation (like in BizSphere leading edge development), the technology will place this nugget into which ever document template the seller requests.  A seller can tell the system what collateral they need (internal, external), in what context (region, product, industry) and for what purpose (new customer, second visit, closing a deal).  The tool will go and grab the appropriate content elements, build the documents, and then email them to the seller.

BizSphere Document Generation allows the auto-generation of content into multiple output formats such as MS Office PowerPoint presentations or Adobe PDF files. Moreover and according, for instance, to a specific sales situation or audience, you can generate documents in the correct and appropriate corporate template: assuring CI consistency while leveraging design customization.

The difference made

Every piece of content marketing creates or facilitates should enable a sale: if that doesn’t happen, sales doesn’t have the information they need to make a sale and then nobody gets a paycheck… it can’t be expressed any simpler than that. This “sales centric” approach will help marketing refocus their efforts and actually contribute to closing a deal.

The end result is the ability to connect the dots between marketing and sales, thus enabling a company to work smarter, reduce the risk of misinformation, and achieve a sales knowledge advantage by adding more value and quality to customer interactions.

Next time on this blog I present a case study.

About the Author:

Rob Goring, Senior IT manager. Held various IT positions in large a Communications Enterprise and was responsible for many innovative new product and process implementations including SE and BizSphere world-wide. Has become a true evangelist on the efficiency and cost reductions gains by SE and the BizShere in particular. Currently performing Programm and Product management.
http://twitter.com/gori01

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

Source: Translated from STIMMT Intranet Report 2003 http://topics.stimmt.ch/intranet/

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.”

The need for an information architecture that cross-references content based on taxonomies to establish context for sales people becomes clear when looking at old-fashioned sales portals like the ones many businesses expect their sales people to navigate still:

Offering Taxonomy

In case you are in Marketing/Sales Enablement at a business that sells to businesses all over the world, would it look anywhere close to the image above when all products and services, that your company needs to enable sales people and channel partners for, were shown in a taxonomy/hierarchy?

Do you have traditional intranet pages for each country or sales region that you have sales people or channel partners in?

If so, then you have thousands of silos to maintain and your users have hundreds of mouse clicks stealing their time! (Also see “Important characteristics of how typical sales reps at large organizations roll”.)

Or with the words of Bruce A. Brien from his blog post ‘Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement’ from July 16, 2009:

“It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed. That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked. If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need. Marketing is not supporting them. Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.”

Displaying your content and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…

1. a context (an information architecture)
2. in Rich Internet Applications using web 2.0 technologies

… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past. These web 1.0 sales portals have to become tools that help sales people excel at selling. From my point of view they need to offer a highly customized experience for each user based on…

• what we know about their job,
• what we know about their language and location,
• what we know about their last visits to the tool,
• what they want and don’t want to see (they might have taken the time to adjust some settings),
• what marketing or corporate want them to see (news alert/announcement, promotion/campaign, etc…)
• what their peers have rated, tagged, contributed…
• and what they are allowed to see (channel partners aren’t allowed to see everything etc…).

BizSphere Sales Web is one Sales Enablement application that…

1. starts with establishing a context as mentioned above
2. and then encourages to break up all content into small nuggets,
3. which get tagged according to the parts of the context they are applicable to.
4. Finally, for sales people this allows to simply auto-generate a polished client-facing presentation or document that includes all the right nuggets (e.g. customer references from the right country and industry vertical etc…).

Check out www.enableyoursales.com/en/solution/documentgeneration/ and request a demo.

About the Author:
Paul Krajewski, Media guy turned tech marketer as traditional media dies. B2B marketing for the future of communications, 4G, Unified Communications (UC), Virtual Worlds with 3D spatial audio, …
Currently looking after a BizSphere Sales Enablement implementation for our almost 4,000 sales people world-wide.
http://salesenablement.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/pkralle

Why is Knowledge Management important in Selling?
There are many formulas telling what is needed for having success in sales. While these formulas vary slightly, knowledge seems to be an essential component in all of them.  So it seems useful to look into the question how well CRM systems support salespeople in holding the needed knowledge readily available. To answer this question, we need to look at different aspects of knowledge

The 3 C’s of Knowledge
For a successful sales campaign, adequate knowledge is needed about:
1.    The customer’s/prospect’s situation
2.    The competitive landscape
3.    The supplier’s capabilities

How do CRM Systems Support These Domains?
Using the above framework, we can make the following observations.

1. Customer Knowledge
One of the primary purposes of CRM systems is to provide data structures allowing tracking every relevant interaction between the companies customer facing people with the customers/prospects, they look after. Thus a body of situational knowledge is created. Consultation of this knowledge is then particularly valuable in the maintenance of a customer relationship.

This body of knowledge is however not sufficient when building or expanding a customer relationship. In this case, the following additional elements are needed:
•    Background information about the prospect
•    The current situation the prospect  is in
•    Trigger events causing sales people to want to build the relationship to eventually close a deal.

While CRM systems might provide a structure to capture this information for ready reference, the original source is outside of such systems. What is captured is the knowledge salespeople have gained through research activities such as: General searches on the internet, reading general printed press or specific trade journals and increasingly through the use of specialized systems made available in a Sales 2.0 context.  CRM systems support the research activity through specialized systems by providing embedded links to such system. The research can be conducted without leaving the CRM systems context. Some of those specialized systems can also automatically push information into CRM data structures.

2. Competitive Knowledge
For building and consultation of competitive knowledge, CRM systems are used pretty similar to what is described above for customer knowledge. In large companies, there might though also be dedicated people researching the competitive landscape and making it available for ready reference in CRM systems, together with the knowledge built up by sales people themselves from information learned through customer interactions.

3. Capabilities Knowledge
Was one to ask salespeople where they get the information about their companies and product and services capabilities so they know what to say in a particular sales situation, they hardly would answer, that the CRM system is the primary source. Most CRM systems do though hold some capabilities knowledge usually referred to as company literature. The original design idea for this was to enable sales people to easily and efficiently answer fulfill information requests from their customers. There are though two factors that limit the usefulness of such company literature repositories. First, the internet has caused the number of such direct information requests from customers to drop drastically. Second, it is a well known fact that salespeople consider such literature not to be of much use in their campaigns anyway and make thus little to no use of it.

Capabilities knowledge is probably mostly stored in Sales Portals. These portals are often built from a product marketing perspective.  Salespeople are thus left on their own to match the complexity of the customer requirements and the complexity of their companies capabilities to propose a valuable solution to the customer. Furthermore, customers today do not tolerate salespeople being simple conveyers of canned marketing prepared standard value propositions anymore. Salespeople are expected to be able to add value to the interaction. The messaging has to be adapted to the individual customer and to the current context of a sales campaign.

Conclusion
While CRM systems are configured to guide salespeople in what needs to be done in a sales campaign through the implementation of sales processes, they provide no support for the sales people of what is best said to the customer in a particular phase of the process. Sales portals are also no help for this as capabilities knowledge is stored under a different view point there. It becomes thus pretty obvious that sales enablement systems guiding salespeople in what needs to be said in a particular phase of the sales process and allowing furthermore the tailoring of the messaging to the specific customer context can significantly improve the productivity of salespeople, while maintaining image integrity required from a marketing perspective.

About the Author:
Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/

So, something is wrong in the world of selling. Sellers seem to be overwhelmed by the huge amounts of information that are available to them while the right and useful information does not reach the buyers on the clients’ end. While companies have focused on optimizing the transactional sales process over the last years using CRM technologies and methods, the informational angle of selling has not really been in focus.

It is just consequent that major analyst firms like IDC, Forrester or Gartner have recently been starting to address this obvious problem in their research. Under the label of ‘Sales Enablement’, they are proposing that information relevant for sellers should be integrated alongside the sales process of a company. Such integration could guarantee that sales people always have the right information at their fingertips in any sales situation – to enable them to have a valuable conversation with their clients.

While this theoretically makes a lot of sense, reality in enterprises looks pretty complex. Here are a few reasons why:

• Relevant content is usually distributed across numerous intranet sites, databases or other repositories – just think about a seller, who has to access the customer reference database, the competitive intelligence site as well as the product information teamroom to gather everything he needs to prepare a client presentation.

• Content is created in author-centric patterns that make it difficult to effectively browse – this means that a marketing person, who creates a positioning paper, does not necessarily categorize and save it in a way a seller can intuitively find it.

• There’s no feedback loop between sales and marketing to comment or rate content.

• Beyond content integration and CRM alignment, there’s a variety of other marketing and sales processes that should become integrated more tightly – proposal generation, for example, can be optimized in most companies.

Nevertheless, companies should start focusing on Sales Enablement now – before the problems related to it get worse. I hope, this blog will become a platform for a lively and engaging exchange of ideas, thoughts and concepts around Sales Enablement. In the end, companies’ sales and marketing teams need to become more effective in all their efforts to provide better tailored solutions to and to have more quality discussions with their clients.

We have invited a lot of guest bloggers from universities, analyst firms as well as enterprises to share their views on Sales Enablement. Amongst others, the following questions will be discussed:

• How to effectively and sustainably integrate intranet-based content and communication silos?
• Once achieved, what additional content silos and sources could be integrated and which sales and marketing processes could be aligned?
• How can sellers retrieve content more intuitively and efficiently?
• Can intuitive user interfaces help sellers to better handle the growing complexity of enterprise portfolios and client needs to effectively facilitate successful client conversations?
• How can communication happening between knowledge experts across the company be turned into reusable and generally available information?

I am looking forward to exciting discussions over the next weeks and months!