In these tough economic times, some companies just cutting cost and try to survive: others capitalize on the economic downturn to realign, streamline and invest to come out these times stronger. Part of a successful transformation should be a winning sales enablement strategy. A strong Sales Enablement program will position sellers to take the lead and out-sell the competition.

SE is a strong combination of tools, processes, people and content that, when managed to serve content in context approach, it will deliver value added information when they need it.
Benefits to the organization include:

• Decreasing seller preparation time;
• Optimizing customer face time;
• Improving marketing and seller productivity;
• Leveraging knowledge experts and sales leaders to help all sellers become better informed;
• Reduce IT support cost by consolidating multiple Web-Portals;
• Obtain insight in content per offering, region, lifecycle, usage metric and state of the art: faceted browsing.
• Enabling sellers to articulate the brand value proposition at every stage of a customer interaction; and
• Providing Just-in-Time training, mentoring, coaching and contacts every step of the way.

How do you know if you need a Sales Enablement Strategy?

Take a quick test – On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the following statements about your organization? (10 being full compliance with the statement)

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.

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

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