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Enable Your Sales Blog

News, discussions and Opinions about Sales Enablement and Sales 2.0 as well as all updates on our Sales Enablement Solution Suite


Posts Tagged ‘content logistics’

Posted by Paul Krajewski on June 2nd, 2011 - No Comments

When a Sales Enablement Strategy fixes redundancies it immediately contributes to the ROI in sales


I just found a great comment on Focus.com that nicely sums up Sales Enablement Strategy:

By Tamara Schenk, Senior Program Manager Sales Enablement, T-Systems International GmbH:

“[...] Getting started with sales enablement from a strategic point of view means to look at the whole sales support supply chain end-to-end, not looking at functions only – working cross-functionally and to collaborate is key to success.

Identifying all redundancies along the whole sales support supply chain, will be an eye opener! For instance, different product portfolio views, often not consolidated, a variety of different sales portals, content often not structured and not defined from a customer’s point of view, a variety of groups that offer trainings – trainings on what to sell and on how to sell, etc.

Fixing these redundancies, means contributing immediately to the selling systems’ ROI!

Next, the different fields of action can be tackled from an operational point of view, as e.g. broadcast messaging, sales content (derived from strategy, role-based governance including content inventory, content categories, RACI, internationalization, etc.), knowledge management, skills and trainings and how to measure the success. Additional fields of action are sales and engagement models, the sales and the sales operations processes – they have always to be considered and integrated!

Executing all these activities successfully requires leadership, change, communication and sales adoption.”

Posted by Paul Krajewski on February 3rd, 2011 - No Comments

Content, People, Processes, and Technology make the Four-Legged Sales Enablement Chair


A few days ago, I noticed the following discussion in the LinkedIn.com group “Sales Enablement Content“:

“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.
matrixed organizations
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.

Posted by Paul Krajewski on October 22nd, 2010 - 2 Comments

Is sales training a component of sales enablement?


I’m honoured that focus.com has asked me to be one of their experts. Today, I answered the following question on focus.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

Posted by Paul Krajewski on September 8th, 2010 - 5 Comments

Where does Sales Enablement live?


On September 7, 2010, Eric Nitschke (Launch International) asked the following questions on the LinkedIn Group Sales Enablement Content. Please see my response below.

“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.

matrixed organizations
The single biggest complaint about Sales Enablement, I hear from sales people is missing content… content that is more specific than the generic pitch. A portal, that comes along with all stakeholders agreeing on content governance, a life-cycle duration for the content and responsibilities to respond to feedback & requests, will first of all make these gaps painfully visible and then guide the content planning to invest marketing’s dollars as effective as possible.
To come back to your question, in some organizations it might be the CMO and in others the sales leader or portfolio manager – who is the executive sponsor, who aligns all the stakeholders to feed the new portal and shut down the old ones.
Posted by Matthias Roebel on September 7th, 2010 - No Comments

The Importance of Context for the Enterprise 2.0


Just a few days ago Joe Galvin from Sirius Decisions wrote about how important Social Media – as an approach for better internal collaboration – is as part of a Sales Enablement strategy. I think he is absolutely right. What used to be the informal coffee corner chat before nowadays is mimicked in Social Media platforms. Over time, people will learn that even within an enterprise the sharing of information is beneficial for everyone in the end. Yes, there may be a lot of sceptics around, especially in sales teams, but with the right programs and incentives offered, they will make the jump to the new social collaboration paradigm.

However, the flip side of extensive social collaboration might be the appearance of new information silos as well as growing information overload. Without the social collaboration being moderated to a certain extend, it might lose some of its potential impact on the overall performance of the sales teams. Aaron Roe Fulkerson discussed this in a recent blog post: “The importance of context: why Enterprise 2.0 still fails to deliver value”.

semantic web 3.0 BizSphere Knowledge Management methods

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).

Enterprise 2.0 with BizSphere

Best regards,
Matthias Roebel

Posted by Matthias Roebel on March 29th, 2010 - No Comments

Enabling your sales channels with content for each situational context


Just a few days ago, I had a very interesting conversation with the Sales Leader of a large IT distributor. In the past they’d naturally been focusing on optimizing their distribution processes from vendors to resellers. However, as IT products are more and more becoming a commodity and supply chains and ordering processes have become more and more streamlined over the years, there is pressure to think about some differentiation against their competitors.

One aspect brought up in the discussion by the Sales Leader is to start focusing on the actual knowledge delivered around the products, services and solutions distributed. Here we’re not just talking about speeds and feeds, but about how to effectively communicate which products, services and solutions are addressing which specific customer needs. Delivering such value to resellers means that they could better serve their customers, which eventually will make all parties involved happy. In a way, the Sales Leader said, it’s about to setting up a content logistics framework.

Yet, setting-up content logistics like this is more complicated than you might think, as knowledge can’t be forced into transaction-oriented systems and processes. The reason is, that content is something multi-dimensional – its meaning depends on the situational context it is applied in. Only if applied in the right way, content turns into knowledge and eventually into a successful conversation with the customer.

In order to successfully implement a content logistics framework a variety of ingredients are important. ‘Content needs’ have to be defined, content production responsibilities need to be assigned, ways of content delivery should be thought through end-to-end… just to mention a few things that need to be put in place. To make the whole model work in the long run – to match actual customer needs for the right information with the content delivered to them by the reseller’s sales teams – the content logistics framework should be based on a semantic knowledge management framework.

Well, you might think, this sounds complicated, like trying to boil the ocean. I can tell you, the opposite is the case once you’ve got your head around it – I’d be more than happy to discuss this in more detail with everyone interested.


 

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BizSphere: Bizsphere AG heute in Köln auf der cologne IT summit_ http://t.co/EDfepARu 2011-11-14T10:42:19+00:00


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