My university studies focused strongly on Business Intelligence. After graduating, I worked at several Fortune 500 companies in the area of content management. I could never understand why these huge companies spend so much money on Business Intelligence (think of the Data Warehouses, OLAP tools and executive dashboards etc.), but don´t spend a dime on gaining intelligence on one of the biggest assets in the company – their knowledge inventory.
Fortune 500 companies invest millions of dollars every year to produce up-to-date material for marketing, sales and employee training. Shockingly, less than half of the produced material is used at all:
“[...] IDC research has found that over 40% of all marketing assets are not in use today, with some sales organizations reporting that as much as 90% of the assets created by their marketing peers are never used by sales teams. This includes assets that have been developed for sales, channels, prospects, and current customers. [...]” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)
IDC’s numbers show how big the need for Content Intelligence really is. In the coming weeks, we’ll have a series of posts on this topic to further elaborate on the pain points as well as possible solutions for enterprises. To kick things off, I’ll describe three reasons why Enterprises need Content Intelligence.
1) Excel-based inventory management is error-prone, cumbersome and expensive
The image below (1) shows two real-life examples we found at Fortune 500 clients. Content managers kept enormous Excel spreadsheets in order to monitor the inventory of marketing assets. You can imagine the time they had to spend spend updating these sheets, the likelihood of human error, and the resulting frustration. Excel is without a doubt a very powerful tool, but it was not designed for this task and hence does a very poor job of it. It quickly becomes painfully difficult to maintain these big sets of multi-faceted data (especially for non-experts) or even simply to access it – try to quickly get a certain piece of information out of the spreadsheet below!
(1) Inventory monitoring efforts
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I recently had a call with an executive centered around his company’s growth through a M&A strategy. His observation was that with financing for these deals returning and the number of under-valued assets (companies) left in the wake of the recession’s creative destruction, this was for many companies a chance of lifetime. But he qualified this comment with a warning: as long as you know how to do this stuff.
He had me. A bit. “What stuff?”, I asked. He responded that most of all the immediate value used to justify the purchase would be in increased sales through the combining of customers and products (more opportunities to sell more). As we talked further he summed up the pitfalls as:
- Sellers will instantly have 40%-60% more new products and solutions to sell (that they know little about): Where will sellers get the necessary knowledge or find an expert just-in-time?
- Customers with trusting relationships will want “what does this mean to us” meetings: Has marketing (or management) given sellers the up to date details?
- The combined companies will begin a process of choosing what stays, what goes – a complete restructuring of offering portfolio will have to happen: How will you get your sellers on the same page and focused on selling?
We spoke about how these challenges could manifest and about the best ways to address them. Basically, he emphasized that C-level executives recognize that critical nature of communication and collaboration of the selling community (sales reps, expert or support roles, and marketing) to maintain focus on the essential goal of selling. His point was simple: You got to keep selling.
Reflecting on the call, I realized that innovative technology and consulting methods, specifically Sales Enablement solutions, can go a long way to address these needs. I made the following list to send to this executive:
- Given the rapid nature of combining the teams, being able to provide access to all relevant content (regardless of where it is stored) explaining the new offering portfolio – but within the context of the customer conversations – is the key.
- Within this newly established enterprise context web 2.0 collaboration methods become very powerful. Sharing content instantly leveraging blog and twitter like functionality across sales teams can boost the effectiveness of communication to the customers.
- With the virtual doubling of the team’s size, even the guy with the deepest networks will be severely impacted – often sellers need the expert not just the white paper or slide and integrating to unified communications (VoIP / chat / presence information / etc.) would be hugely powerful.
Additionally, I found an article at Forbes.com that was written by McKinsey & Company titled ‘Master sales force integration in a merger’, that explores this topic beyond the technology aspect I cover.
Please share your experiences and comments if your company is embarking on this strategy. I would be very happy to have further discussions with you on this subject.
One of the key factors for Sales Enablement systems to be of value to salespeople is to provide them with knowledge structured in the context of how a B2B salesperson works. How can this context be characterized? Is it the sales process? To what extend does the customer buying process have to be taken into consideration? How does the customers’ use of the internet influence the selling world? Let us work backwards through these questions to find the answer to the question: What context is to be considered to structure knowledge so it is of most help to salespeople?
The selling world in the web 2.0 era
Depending on the studies you consult, you will find that around 70 to 90 % of purchases today start with an internet search. Search engine optimized (SEO) websites and well written blogs are the primary tools to generate anonymous attraction from these searches.
Addressed attraction can be generated with lead generation systems usually including functions such as lead scoring and lead nurturing. Social media are another category of systems for addressed attraction generation.
All these systems are usually owned by marketing. As a consequence salespeople become involved later in the customers buying process. Their ability to guide prospective customers through the early stages in the buying process is thus drastically diminished.
In consequence, Sales Enablement systems will have to hold primarily content helping salespeople with the later stages of the process. Given the increased knowledge of the prospective customer, this content must be very sophisticated and detailed in order to enable salespeople to provide value to the customer interaction at this late stage in the process.
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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)
- My sales teams can articulate my company messages accurately to customers at all steps in the sales process;
- My sales teams can find value adding messages quickly;
- My sales teams are confident that the messages they find are accurate and current;
- 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.
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In a Sales 2.0 world there is no doubt about the need for Sales Enablement applications to be social / web 2.0. As indicated in the graphic below, I would hope that even Customer Service taps into and participates in the harnessed collective intelligence of Sales and Marketing by using the Sales Enablement application.
Graphic from Dion Hinchcliffe http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe but altered with regards to ‘Sales Enablement Application’ instead of ‘online community’.
For such a Sales Enablement application to play together with the rest of the intranet / Enterprise 2.0 and the customer facing website, information architectures need to be aligned.
Information architecture?
Information architecture is the organization of sites, the content management system(s), metadata, ontologies, taxonomies, etc … This has actually been the biggest problem for users of intranets as the following data shows (not too fresh anymore but I think it holds true still):
Pain points of Intranets
- 42% Problems with the information architecture
- 38% Search functionality is missing or unsatisfying
- 28% Information is missing or outdated
- 19% Graphical User Interface (GUI) is cluttered/crowded
- 11% Performance problems
- 9% Too little relevance to day-to-day job
On May 15, 2009, @scottsantucci (Forrester Analyst covering Sales Enablement) noted:
“Had a briefing from @BizSphere. Very interesting thinking, particularly about the need for an information architecture.”
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To understand whether the answer to this question is of relevance when looking for ways how to improve productivity of a sales force, let us ask
Why is Knowledge Management important in Selling?
There are many formulas telling what is needed for having success in sales. While these formulas vary slightly, knowledge seems to be an essential component in all of them. So it seems useful to look into the question how well CRM systems support salespeople in holding the needed knowledge readily available. To answer this question, we need to look at different aspects of knowledge
The 3 C’s of Knowledge
For a successful sales campaign, adequate knowledge is needed about:
1. The customer’s/prospect’s situation
2. The competitive landscape
3. The supplier’s capabilities
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