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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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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