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.
My last post on the question where Sales Enablement lives got a comment requesting further clarification of the following graphic:
The comment was asking where to find sales people in the graphic and what the role of Sales Playbooks is. I have to admit that it is difficult to read, but the sales people are actually represented within the green area as indicated by the words Sales Force. (This is not a reference to salesforceDOTcom.)
This speaks to the point that sales people and the legacy sales portals, that are supposed to enable them, sit in between a highly matrixed organization on the one side and just as complex an organization on the client’s side. These legacy sales portals are one-dimensional (they fail to show content & contacts in the context of the highly matrixed organization and in context to what pain point on the client side is addressed) and there are often several portals as there are so many silos of information.
Each Sales Playbook is a great tool for a small subset of the sales force (as shown in the graphic), but comes out of one of the silos, fed by only some of the Product/Portfolio Marketing teams or one regional team. When all content (e.g. customer references from different regions or specific value propositions per industry vertical…) lives in a multi-dimensional business context like it is made possible in BizSphere (which was designed to cut across all silos), a completely customized Sales Playbook for any given sales situation can be auto-generated.
In contrast to legacy sales portals, BizSphere takes at least three dimensions into account. These could be:
Where is the seller going to a meeting? (Sales regions, countries…)
What does the seller want to sell (Portfolio of products, services and solutions.)
What does the seller need in order to be successful in the meeting? (Content types like white paper, case study, ROI-Calculator, contact details of a subject matter expert, etc…)
You might also want to define a taxonomy of customer pain points and map your products against those or add other dimensions that your company thinks in. BizSphere then lets you filter down by media type, language of the content, and/or the sales step you are in with the opportunity you are working.
Imagine the 1st orange arrow in the graphic above to be a customer reference from a Canadian client for a specific security solution.
Imagine the 2nd orange arrow to be the contact details of the sales engineer in South Africa who is the expert for a given service.
The 3rd orange arrow could be an ROI-calculator for the same service but it is really specific to the mining industry and therefore relevant in Western Australia.
Can you already see how here the regional teams can have as much of say in which content is relevant for specific sales situations as the product marketing team?
Can you get lost in BizSphere? No way, because nothing is easier than answering: What do I want to sell, where do I want to sell it and what would help me to close the deal? Once you set your context in these three dimensions you will have filtered down from thousands of marketing assets / pieces of collateral to only the relevant ones.
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.
