According to IDC, 57% of all clients feel sales people presenting to them for the first time are not very well prepared. At the same time, sellers spend more than a third of their working time searching for information and creating presentations to prepare for client meetings. And in addition to that, according to Forrester analysts, companies are spending around 135.000$US per year on sales support activities like sales collateral production, training or workshops.

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!

Forrester, Gartner, idc

See also:General