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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 ‘information overload’

Posted by Paul Krajewski on November 8th, 2010 - No Comments

Defining Sales Enablement for your b2b sales force


On focus.com, LinkedIn.com and other places discussions about the definition of the term Sales Enablement keep on popping up. This question is from November 5, 2010:

“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.

matrixed organizations

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.

Posted by Paul Krajewski on November 1st, 2010 - No Comments

new data on information overload


On October 20, 2010 worldatwork.org posted the following:

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 [...]“

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 Paul Krajewski on April 5th, 2010 - 7 Comments

Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant


semantic web 3.0 BizSphere Knowledge Management methods
On March 23, 2010, the German speaking site http://carta.info published an interview with Prof. Peter Kruse about complexity and the net.

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.

Enterprise 2.0 with BizSphere

Best regards,
Paul Krajewski


 

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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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