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- 28% Information is missing or outdated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

Source: Translated from STIMMT Intranet Report 2003 http://topics.stimmt.ch/intranet/

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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