On March 7, 2010 Peter O’Neill from Forrester Research, Inc. wrote about us in his blog post ‘Spotted – 2 interesting European marketing automation vendors’, calling us one of the European companies with some very innovative ideas:

“[...] BizSphere positions itself as providing sales enablement solutions (my colleague Scott Santucci also knows them well) but they are actually filling a gap between a marketing asset management system and satisfying the needs of both sales people and field marketers. While central marketing people need an asset management system to maintain content integrity and oversight; their colleagues in the field also need a tool to help them collate the right collateral package matching every potential sales situation, most relevant to that target customer and status in the sales cycle. [...]“

For a quick view of our approach to Sales Enablement have a look at our presentation on slideshare.net or check out our YouTube videos.

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

The visualization (2) gives an indication of how complex the world of a content professional (Content Manager, Marketing, etc.) in today’s business world is. All the labels on this chart represents nodes and leafs of an average B2B company portfolio (>500 nodes). There are numerous documents and other digital assets for all the single leafs and nodes on this chart. However, the portfolio is only one dimension – we have to consider at least two more dimensions:

• the geography (Regions, Sub-Regions and Countries) and

• the Resource type dimension (there can be hundreds of different types of resources in one company: e.g. Case Study, Success Story, Sales Presentation, Brochure, FAQ,…)

If you visualize these three basic dimensions as a 3-dimensional information space, you get much closer to the reality of B2B content management. In fact, enterprise companies often have many more dimensions (Sales Cycle Steps, Verticals/Industries, etc.). The Excel nightmare in figure (1) is the result of an inevitable reality: more dimensions –> more complex information space –> bigger spreadsheets!

(2) Visualization of a standard B2B Portfolio

The challenge we address, then, is to provide content professionals with the overview and transparency they need to keep the companies knowledge inventory optimal, in terms of both quantity and quality. If you try to achieve this goal by using spreadsheets you will end with monster-files as shown above (1). Our solution is called Content Landscape. Content Landscape is a feature rich yet easy-to-use Content Intelligence application which allows for searching and browsing of your inventory in one interactive view. Based on a faceted browsing approach you can drill down from tens of thousands of documents to your one relevant document with two or three mouse clicks. Moreover, the content dashboard and dynamic tables provide content professionals with all necessary information to make the right decisions.

(3) Screenshot Content Landscape

2) Quantity & Gaps – Enterprises need to understand what´s there and what´s missing

Here are some examples of common questions content professionals (Marketing) need answers for:

1. Do we have Case Studies for all our offerings? Where do we have gaps?
2. Do we have enough regional specific content? Which region has the most Success Stories? Where do we have to produce additional Success Stories?
3. How much country specific resources do we have for EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa)?
4. Which resources type is the one with the lowest availability? etc. etc.

“The top reason that assets are not used or that they are under-used, is that end-users are unable to access or locate these assets. Based upon anecdotal feedback from recent survey participants, the key root causes include: “too much material,” old content and assets, and poor processes and technologies.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

Content Landscape lets you break down your inventory by age and by step in its lifecycle (e.g. lifecycle step ‘end of life’ means content is hidden for sales users until it has been updated by marketing).

By classifying a company’s content according to its portfolio of products, services, and solutions, cross-mapped to geographic/language regions, Content Landscape offers a simple and clear visual overview of where the gaps with no available content are – as opposed to the inscrutable endless rows of an Excel spreadsheet.

3) Quality and activity – Enterprises need to understand the quality of their knowledge inventory and how it´s being used

“The lack of relevance of content and assets is also cited as a reason for lack of asset utilization.” (IDCs sales enablement framework, 2009)

The described life cycle for content makes sure that no outdated content is accessible. The real innovation is tying content to use, just like Ken Knickerbocker from CRMparadigmshift.com/blog/ demands in his post ‘Can sales give as good as it gets?’:

“Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward.”

The usage behavior of the crowd (views/downloads) and social features like rating and commenting clearly indicate which types of content work and which don´t. Since they’re visible to everyone, these indicators enable a culture of creating content that drives business results (as opposed to the up to 90% of marketing content that ends up not being used) and could be taken into account for…

“…reward points that accrue to employees when they contribute” as suggested in ‘Top Intranets Embrace Mobile Accessibility and Social Networking’.

By allowing ratings and comments on each asset, marketing and communications teams are also getting instant feedback from the field. Insights a marketing department would never receive using the traditional uni-directional communication flow from marketing down to sales can now be gathered [see (4)]. For example, colleagues in sales can leave comments to indicate which asset worked for them related to a certain customer need or industry.

(4) Analysis Framework

Conclusion
The sheer quantity of content generated and maintained by a modern Fortune 500 company renders 20th-century solutions and approaches grossly inadequate. Whether it’s massive spreadsheets or a multitude of data silos, an enterprise’s content is hard to even find, let alone assess or maintain. And yet marketing is pushed more than ever before to get more bang for the buck, despite having little or no feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

To put it simply, content management is no longer enough; it must be complemented by content intelligence. To work effectively, content professionals desperately need smarter tools to find, track, visualize, and assess content, such as Content Landscape. What content do we have? What’s being used, and what’s not? Where do we have gaps? How old is this content? Who is responsible for it? A company that can answer these questions will see its content intelligence investment repaid many times over, both in the efficiency of its marketing dollars and the effectiveness of its sales force. It´s time to get serious about Content Intelligence.

We will post more about this topic in the next weeks. What are your thoughts?

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.

For sales enablement systems, it is of particular importance that the customer view is considered when structuring this information space. As I explained in my last post on this blog (The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in) one of the key customer views to be included is the customer’s buying process.

This recommendation is based on the recognition that Buyer/Seller relationships are changing. By staying with the sales process as the structuring element, these important changes might be missed or discovered too late.

Scott Santucci from Forester research in a recent post confirmed this fact of changing relationships. He writes:

“Buyer/Seller relationships are stratifying right before our eyes into a new caste system of strategic, value-added vendors on the one end and undifferentiated, commodity-type suppliers on the other.”

He suggests a

“…new selling model of actually co-creating value with customers and focusing on helping those customers drive business outcome”.

is needed.

In this post, I want to discuss how using steps in the customer’s buying process as one dimension to structure and access content is key to this new selling model.

What are the major steps in a customer’s buying process?

Activities to be carried out by the customers in the buying process might vary according to the size and type of organization. However the fundamental decisions to be made for advancing in the buying process remain the same. Structuring content according to what decision it actually supports, seems therefore a more robust concept. On a high level, there are 3 fundamental decision points:

The buyer:

1. has to come to the insight that a status quo is no longer tolerable if the business should prosper and a more detailed investigation is needed.
2. concludes that the ‘cost of the problem’ outweighs the ‘cost of solutions’ than can be bought
3. decides to buy from the seller offering the best ‘perceived future in use value’ compared to the to be paid ‘cash value’

There are usually minor decision points in between these major milestones. But for the illustration of how to structure content along the customer’s buying process, the granularity of the 3 major milestones appears to be sufficient.

What contents will help the buyer to reach a decision?

Some people might see a deontological problem by the seller “pushing” the buyer over the first decision point. It is however legitimate for the seller to help the buyer already to come to the conclusion that the frustration with the status quo is no longer tolerable; provided it is done with the right mindset: Helping customers to get better outcomes for their business. What kind of content is then needed to help the customer in a non manipulative way to come to this conclusion?

Geoffrey James’ blog post “Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job” provides some guidance. In there, he cites Neil Rackham’s second rule for sales research being:

“Prospective customers do not value information about products; instead they value information about the industry and the customer’s competition, providing it is current and up-to-date”.

Standard “Corporate Literature” produced by the seller’s organization will thus hardly be what is needed to reach the first milestone in the customer’s buying process. Imagine yourself in the situation trying to assess the importance of a problem and you do not yet know whether you need a solution and if so, whether it could be bought somewhere. Now ask yourself how you would react to a salesperson rattling down a laundry list of features and if you are lucky maybe even a few benefits You would consider the seller’s pitch as being annoying because it is totally irrelevant to the decision you need to make.

Industry or analyst reports creating awareness about the problem the seller can address are a better suiting tactic. This also means that not all contents in Sales Enablement systems are produced by the seller’s organization. Making such reports available in a Sales Enablement system, linked to this early phase of the buying process, reduces the time sales people spend to research for such content and insures that the best suited content for that phase is used.

After reaching the first milestone, the co-creation of value between seller and buyer takes place. In this phase “educational” content, helping the customer to define the specific cost of the pain (e.g. if I do nothing, my sales continue to lag behind those of my strongest competitor by 1M$ per month) and showing how the seller’s solution can address the problem is to be provided (e.g. canned webinars, white papers etc.) The aim of this content is to help the customer to evaluate whether the cost of the pain outweighs the typical investment in a solution to solve the problem.

Considering this milestone is very relevant. Research shows that 20% of forecasted deals end up with ‘no decision’ (i.e. nothing at all is bought). I consider ignoring this second milestone as a root cause for this phenomenon.

This second milestone also allows for the distinction between value-added vendors and commodity type suppliers. The latter typically start their selling process only when the customer has reached the conclusion that solutions providing a positive return compared to the cost of the problem can be bought on the market.

To help the customer with the final selection of the seller with the highest impact on a business outcome, product literature sometimes helps, success stories and ROI calculations are other content to be used.

Conclusion

Using the customer’s buying process as an additional mean to structure the content to be provided within a Sales Enablement systems can be looked at as one of the “manageable projects” Scott Santucci suggests to address the strategic challenges of being successful in the “new caste system”.

References:

It is time to think about creating an enterprise context (Matthias Roebel)

The Need to Understand the Context, B2B Sales People are Operating in (Christian Maurer)

Its been a while why and what’s going on with sales enablement these days (Scott Santucci)

Neil Rackham: Sales is a Research Job (Geoffrey James)

No question, it is extremely important for every company to leverage the social networking and interaction technologies available today. They actually might encourage employees to share knowledge and to connect with each other more easily. However, if a social networking strategy is implemented without addressing some fundamental content management and communications problems within the enterprise, it won’t be successful in the long run.

“Facebook doesn’t have your friends. It has facts about your friends. Google is at its best when it gives you links to links, not the information itself,” says Seth Godin in his recent blog post “Getting Meta“. Technology can just be an enabler, not the solution to existing fundamental problems – social software makes no exception here.

Why is that? Just imagine an international school, where students from all over the world are gathering. All of them are speaking different mother tongues – a lingua franca like English is missing however. Now offer to this crowd of students the possibility to network. What you’ll see happening is them networking within their language silos. Just like on Facebook or LinkedIn: Nobody is having friends he can’t communicate with – like in the real world.

Finding a common language

So, in order to make collaboration and knowledge exchange strategies sustainable and successful a common language within the enterprise needs to be established – a lingua franca, an enterprise context. If this is not happening, Sales and Marketing, Communications and Delivery will keep on misunderstanding each other causing a lot of inefficiencies for the company. And they will keep on producing more and more information without actually creating a knowledge base for the company – the social content additionally created by the masses, even would come on top of this information pile.

You may think: This sounds pretty philosophical and far from reality? Let me proof to you the opposite with two examples. The first example is related to the incredible number of different namings for the same type of document. Take a brochure: It may be called brochure or flyer or customer deliverable or, or, or… I’ve seen companies with 500+ different labels for in fact just over 70 types for content items.

The second example is related to the offerings of a company. Times are changing quickly and so are the names of products and solutions. It’s quite normal in an enterprise, that some people are still speaking about a product using its older name while others are using the new name or an abbreviation – such differences are another source for misunderstandings.

“Right now, there’s way too much stuff and far too little information about that stuff. Sounds like an opportunity,” Seth Godin also states in “Getting Meta”. And exactly this opportunity enterprises need to explore, if they really want to become serious about a sustainable knowledge strategy for their Sales and Delivery, their Marketing and Communications departments. To overcome their existing challenges in the area of Sales Enablement they need to start creating information about information, in other words: meta data. Organizing this meta data in a controlled framework means setting up a commonly agreed on enterprise context, which describes the macro and the micro structures of the companies in a simple, but effective manner.

Once set up, the company’s knowledge base can grow steadily and even socially without causing additional information overload. Marketing can produce content right on target, and Sales reliably receives the information they need to lead valuable conversations with their customers.

- You know that doing these improvements will help your sales force, since it is ultimately up to your sales force to find relevant content, digest it, interpret it, fill in any missing gaps, and then adapt it to match customer needs.

- You know that doing these activities successfully will add more value and quality to customer interactions though better communication, sales collaboration, and access to relevant messaging

To act on their list, companies usually create multiple strategies using different teams that try the same tactics that other teams have tried in the past, but with a different spin.

- You also know that you are continually redoing your strategies year after year because they never quit seem to get you the results you wanted.

You try changing teams, changing leadership, or changing your methods, but you still don’t seem to gain any ground. In some cases, your initiatives seem to cause more problems than they fix.

- What don’t know is that one Sales Enablement strategy can address multiple items on the list and deliver results in a more cohesive way.

By approaching your wish list with a Sales Enablement initiative, your efforts will result in higher close rates, reduced operational costs, and increased revenue more efficiently and effectively.

Article: http://bit.ly/3qldZK

When companies look to measure the ROI of initiatives, they tend to focus on the obvious usual suspects. But if the definition of what McKinsey is measuring across all US workers here was, “all those employees who contribute and create information, provide knowledge or expertise, and tailor or deliver this knowledge/information to gain clients, win profitable deals, and retain customers“, then in many organizations, the percentage of people who are paid up to 75% premium might as well be double the 47% McKinsey has. You have to consider all the supporting roles found within large enterprises.

However more to the point, any challenge so broadly affecting the company and potentially so tied to the top and bottom line has to be seen as strategic, especially in particular, at the large, global Enterprise. Why? The inherent challenges of a complex global organization [heavily matrixed, many regions, multiple product groups, etc. = many silos] – they sell complex solutions in a complex selling environment with complex processes in multiple markets with a complex set of competitors. (Get it? Its complex!)

For the majority of these companies their comparative advantage is how well they can leverage their expertise:

• Expertise in the client’s situation/context;
• Expertise in any aspect of the available solutions;
• Expertise in the market and competitors.

With the increased speed of all markets today, changes in the competitive landscape and unforeseen macro-events, technical disruptions and innovations can impact entire industries and regions. How quickly your organization can respond, shift and adapt will determine if you lead/win or follow/lose.

Manage the complexity of your environment (lots of data sources and business processes): When we define the term Sales Enablement portal as “the place on your intranet where employees contribute and create information, provide knowledge or expertise, and tailor or deliver this knowledge/information to gain clients, win profitable deals, and retain customers” then my advice is to make sure the technical aspects of your Sales Enablement portal fits into your landscape and you do not create some over-simplified new one (e.g. yet one more place to put and get information for each business unit or country).

Do not see the statement “We are in the information age” as just something regarding the broader world we live in, but make it an important part of your corporate culture: The lesson of web 2.0 for companies is that people=expertise. There are a lot of innovations that can streamline people’s collaboration and leverage their expertise (social networks, wikis, SharePoint like platforms, micro-blogging, instant messaging, Voice over IP, etc.). But they all are not right for every company, and you can spend more time trying to manage all of the technologies than getting any value from them. Just because they all exist doesn’t mean you have to use them.

Some tips for selecting a new collaboration technology for your large, global enterprise to help get you on your way are:

• Find the right few technologies to support your culture of collaborating. (No culture of collaborating? You better get one – fast)
• Manage your technologies: don’t let them dictate your strategies
• Focus the development and deployment of technologies to specific groups and goals
• Be iterative in the process to use success to build momentum – leverage quick wins
• Develop and understand the personas of your sellers or other end users: define their needs and any benefits gained – what’s in it for them?
• Create a Sales Enablement road map that includes all four legs of Sales Enablement (People, Technology, Processes and Content)

Best of luck circumnavigating this brave, new (collaborative and technically advanced) world.

If reductions in expenses or headcount, mergers/acquisitions, or a company restructuring are driving your company’s agenda in 2010, then how you prepare your sales force to deal with your return to growth strategy matters … it matters a great deal!

As the Sales Enablement space matures, in particular within the economic context of the last 18 months, Sales and Marketing leaders are beginning to understand Sales Enablement in the larger strategic context. Its initial “motherhood and apple pie” appeal is undeniable, but as more companies implement and measure the impact, executives can see just how many ways it improves their bottom line.  Whatever your return to growth strategy is for 2010 (reductions in expenses or headcount, mergers/acquisitions, or a company restructuring) how you prepare your sales force matters, as it will impact the speed of your economic recovery. It matters a great deal!

As Sales Enablement has evolved into its own discipline, it has moved beyond the basic goal of improving sales process efficiency and into a part of the corporate strategic priority. CSO Insights recently reported in their 2008 survey of sales leaders that, within their top key initiatives, at least six were elements that could be delivered with a Sales Enablement strategy, including: #2: Improving rep access to knowledge to sell effectively; #3: More closely aligning sales and Marketing;  and #5: Enhancing sales team communications. This means real dollars and real efforts!

Download the full Case Study (PDF): http://tiny.cc/DauaR

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.

Do all prospective customers buy in this way?
While the negotiation power has undeniably shifted toward the customer through the fact how companies are using the web, we would be ill advised to assume, that the above scenario is the universal one how customers buy today. In their Sales Performance Optimization – 2009 Survey and Analysis, CSO Insights reports that about 52% of the leads salespeople are working on, are self generated by the salespeople. This figure actually has risen over recent years. In 2006 only 40% of the leads were self generated. This is surprising considering the trend described above.

One possible explanation for this discrepancy could be that a shift has already occurred how field sales forces are used. They might increasingly be used only for offerings where the customer needs help early on to understand that there is a problem and how it could be solved. It seems plausible that for this scenario generating leads directly by the sales force might be more effective. The majority of respondents to the CSO Insights study operate in B2B selling environments, whereas it is not so clear whether the studies claiming the percentage of buying cycles started with an internet search are making this distinction between B2C and B2B selling. This could be another reason for the discrepancy of the two trends.

Irrespective of what causes the discrepancy, for the functionality of Sales Enablement systems, this means that providing effective support for the early stages in the buying process might actually have a greater impact on the productivity of the salespeople than focusing on the late stages.

What happened to the sales processes?
Classical sales cycles are designed from an inside out perspective. They describe the steps a salesperson ought to take to bring a lead to a closed deal. Sales stages carry therefore labels like Qualification, First Meeting, Presentation, Negotiation and Close.

Experts are telling us, that sales stages today must be coupled with the way customers want to buy. From the discussion above, it is probably prudent to assume, that in one organization several buying cycles can coexist. For offerings where customers need help in understanding how they will solve problems (often also referred to as “Complex Sales”) we will therefore have a different sales process than for offerings having little educational need from the customer perspective.

Organizing information along one sales process might thus not be very effective for many organizations. The actions of the salesperson will much more be guided by the various ways how customers want to buy, rather than how they used to sell.

Conclusion
The environment salespeople have to operate in has become more complex. For Sales Enablement systems, this means that structuring knowledge in the various ways customers want to buy are needed to really sustainably increase the effectiveness and thus the productivity of salespeople.

Further Information
Visit Christian Maurer’s Webinar: Why Do Salespeople Make Little Use of Marketing Assets?
Bizsphere has the pleasure to offer to the readers of this blog a free participation to the next Masterclass given by the author of this post.

The Masterclass will take place on:
Thursday, August 20, 2009
11:00 am – 11:45 am EDT (17:00 CET)

To register for free, please follow this link:
Masterclass Webinar

About the Author:
Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/

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)

1. My sales teams can articulate my company messages accurately to customers at all steps in the sales process;
2. My sales teams can find value adding messages quickly;
3. My sales teams are confident that the messages they find are accurate and current;
4. 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.

What is a winning Sales Enablement strategy?

Sales Enablement comprises a set of cross-functional activities specifically targeted at preparing members of a sales team for a successful customer engagement.  It establishes the tools and formal processes needed to increase sales team performance and aligns the people and content to ensure the right messages are being delivered at the right time. Think of this as the same concept as “Just-in-Time” delivery, but instead of delivering goods, it delivers the right message into the hands of sales at the right time ─ what they need, when they need it.

But it’s not easy. It requires change from multiple facets within an organization. It requires agreement to align the tools, messages, processes, and methodologies across product, marketing, sales engineers, and sales business groups. It takes a whole new thought process and commitment to move the organization from document management to content management. And it takes the desire to have everyone within the organization help sales make a sale.

The four Pillars of Sales Enablement

All four pillars need to be present to carry an organization to the next level successfully.

People:

Both marketing content contributors and sellers will need to change the way they think about content and the way it’s delivered. Marketing teams need to understand sales strategies that will drive revenue; identify the critical buying conversations; connect the insights and expertise of knowledge experts to sales reps; and deliver it when and where sellers need it.  Sellers need to break their preferred habits. When the content is there when they need it and where they expect it, they have to actually go and get it, as opposed to emailing or calling someone else for it.

Technology:

Most companies have separate content portals for sellers, sales engineers, and partners. A single, agile Web2.0 application can serve all internal audiences seamlessly and reduce the number of steps sellers need to take to access content.  A good agile Web2.0 application, like BizSphere can “slice and dice” content so that is it presented to users when and how they are using it— by the steps of the sales cycle and in context to region and offering taxonomy.

With a Web 2.0 application the integration of different communication vehicles in this single experience, includes a social networking (or social media) piece to allow sellers to talk to sellers.  This is more important now than every before, especially as content contributors and knowledge experts are downsizing with companies.  By instilling blogs/wikis, presence awareness and VoIP clients within the application, sellers can be one click away from accessing the knowledge experts within an organization.

Processes:

Most companies that have multiple portals don’t have a unified submission process for posting content.  This means duplicate files, redundant roles, and multiple processes. By reducing the number of portals or implementing a single submission form, contributors can focus on the experience as opposed to managing documents.  In addition, this provides the framework for establishing a unified workflow and governance model to streamline processes and enable a common content lifecycle strategy.

Publishing content is a great example to demonstrate gained efficiencies: With a traditional web publishing model many people own documents, who send to gatekeepers of the content, who forward to gatekeepers of the portals, who then cut and past into various forms for publication. Compare this to a non-traditional publishing model where each content owner has the ability to publish directly to the Web 2.0 Application. Fewer hands touch the content, which frees up resources and accelerates the time to publish.

Content:

Many companies do a good job creating content, but is it the right content?  And, is there a lifecycle and management model in place? There is so much content being produced now that many companies don’t even bother to try and expire or update it.  With the reduction in staff, it’s easier and cheaper just to keep creating new stuff without taking ownership and accountability of the old stuff. It is quoted by IDC that as much of 60% of sales facing content is never used.  This is caused by distrust and is compounded by the fact that there is so much clutter sales can’t find anything useful. Companies can use technology to instill life cycle management into their existing document repositories. These systems make it more acceptable for the owners since they can proactively manage their content via email and get notified when it is about to expire.

The future of knowledge and content management is to single source it, and better yet, let the technology deliver the information in whatever format the end user needs it.

For example, let’s use a value proposition.  This value proposition may appear in many places: a brief, a customer presentation, an internal presentation, a sales playbook, and on various web portals. Each document or platform is usually owned by different people, and as such; usually have multiple people recreating this one value proposition. Not only does this mean having to keep up with multiple variations, but also sellers don’t know if they have the most recent version. Single sourcing data can address this by allowing the person that owns this responsibility control what content is being disseminated by posting it as a “nugget of data” into a centralized repository.  When someone needs it, they know where to go to grab the most updated version. And if you have auto generation (like in BizSphere leading edge development), the technology will place this nugget into which ever document template the seller requests.  A seller can tell the system what collateral they need (internal, external), in what context (region, product, industry) and for what purpose (new customer, second visit, closing a deal).  The tool will go and grab the appropriate content elements, build the documents, and then email them to the seller.

BizSphere Document Generation allows the auto-generation of content into multiple output formats such as MS Office PowerPoint presentations or Adobe PDF files. Moreover and according, for instance, to a specific sales situation or audience, you can generate documents in the correct and appropriate corporate template: assuring CI consistency while leveraging design customization.

The difference made

Every piece of content marketing creates or facilitates should enable a sale: if that doesn’t happen, sales doesn’t have the information they need to make a sale and then nobody gets a paycheck… it can’t be expressed any simpler than that. This “sales centric” approach will help marketing refocus their efforts and actually contribute to closing a deal.

The end result is the ability to connect the dots between marketing and sales, thus enabling a company to work smarter, reduce the risk of misinformation, and achieve a sales knowledge advantage by adding more value and quality to customer interactions.

Next time on this blog I present a case study.

About the Author:

Rob Goring, Senior IT manager. Held various IT positions in large a Communications Enterprise and was responsible for many innovative new product and process implementations including SE and BizSphere world-wide. Has become a true evangelist on the efficiency and cost reductions gains by SE and the BizShere in particular. Currently performing Programm and Product management.
http://twitter.com/gori01

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.”

The need for an information architecture that cross-references content based on taxonomies to establish context for sales people becomes clear when looking at old-fashioned sales portals like the ones many businesses expect their sales people to navigate still:

Offering Taxonomy

In case you are in Marketing/Sales Enablement at a business that sells to businesses all over the world, would it look anywhere close to the image above when all products and services, that your company needs to enable sales people and channel partners for, were shown in a taxonomy/hierarchy?

Do you have traditional intranet pages for each country or sales region that you have sales people or channel partners in?

If so, then you have thousands of silos to maintain and your users have hundreds of mouse clicks stealing their time! (Also see “Important characteristics of how typical sales reps at large organizations roll”.)

Or with the words of Bruce A. Brien from his blog post ‘Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement’ from July 16, 2009:

“It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed. That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked. If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need. Marketing is not supporting them. Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.”

Displaying your content and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…

1. a context (an information architecture)
2. in Rich Internet Applications using web 2.0 technologies

… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past. These web 1.0 sales portals have to become tools that help sales people excel at selling. From my point of view they need to offer a highly customized experience for each user based on…

• what we know about their job,
• what we know about their language and location,
• what we know about their last visits to the tool,
• what they want and don’t want to see (they might have taken the time to adjust some settings),
• what marketing or corporate want them to see (news alert/announcement, promotion/campaign, etc…)
• what their peers have rated, tagged, contributed…
• and what they are allowed to see (channel partners aren’t allowed to see everything etc…).

BizSphere Sales Web is one Sales Enablement application that…

1. starts with establishing a context as mentioned above
2. and then encourages to break up all content into small nuggets,
3. which get tagged according to the parts of the context they are applicable to.
4. Finally, for sales people this allows to simply auto-generate a polished client-facing presentation or document that includes all the right nuggets (e.g. customer references from the right country and industry vertical etc…).

Check out www.enableyoursales.com/en/solution/documentgeneration/ and request a demo.

About the Author:
Paul Krajewski, Media guy turned tech marketer as traditional media dies. B2B marketing for the future of communications, 4G, Unified Communications (UC), Virtual Worlds with 3D spatial audio, …
Currently looking after a BizSphere Sales Enablement implementation for our almost 4,000 sales people world-wide.
http://salesenablement.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/pkralle

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

How do CRM Systems Support These Domains?
Using the above framework, we can make the following observations.

1. Customer Knowledge
One of the primary purposes of CRM systems is to provide data structures allowing tracking every relevant interaction between the companies customer facing people with the customers/prospects, they look after. Thus a body of situational knowledge is created. Consultation of this knowledge is then particularly valuable in the maintenance of a customer relationship.

This body of knowledge is however not sufficient when building or expanding a customer relationship. In this case, the following additional elements are needed:
•    Background information about the prospect
•    The current situation the prospect  is in
•    Trigger events causing sales people to want to build the relationship to eventually close a deal.

While CRM systems might provide a structure to capture this information for ready reference, the original source is outside of such systems. What is captured is the knowledge salespeople have gained through research activities such as: General searches on the internet, reading general printed press or specific trade journals and increasingly through the use of specialized systems made available in a Sales 2.0 context.  CRM systems support the research activity through specialized systems by providing embedded links to such system. The research can be conducted without leaving the CRM systems context. Some of those specialized systems can also automatically push information into CRM data structures.

2. Competitive Knowledge
For building and consultation of competitive knowledge, CRM systems are used pretty similar to what is described above for customer knowledge. In large companies, there might though also be dedicated people researching the competitive landscape and making it available for ready reference in CRM systems, together with the knowledge built up by sales people themselves from information learned through customer interactions.

3. Capabilities Knowledge
Was one to ask salespeople where they get the information about their companies and product and services capabilities so they know what to say in a particular sales situation, they hardly would answer, that the CRM system is the primary source. Most CRM systems do though hold some capabilities knowledge usually referred to as company literature. The original design idea for this was to enable sales people to easily and efficiently answer fulfill information requests from their customers. There are though two factors that limit the usefulness of such company literature repositories. First, the internet has caused the number of such direct information requests from customers to drop drastically. Second, it is a well known fact that salespeople consider such literature not to be of much use in their campaigns anyway and make thus little to no use of it.

Capabilities knowledge is probably mostly stored in Sales Portals. These portals are often built from a product marketing perspective.  Salespeople are thus left on their own to match the complexity of the customer requirements and the complexity of their companies capabilities to propose a valuable solution to the customer. Furthermore, customers today do not tolerate salespeople being simple conveyers of canned marketing prepared standard value propositions anymore. Salespeople are expected to be able to add value to the interaction. The messaging has to be adapted to the individual customer and to the current context of a sales campaign.

Conclusion
While CRM systems are configured to guide salespeople in what needs to be done in a sales campaign through the implementation of sales processes, they provide no support for the sales people of what is best said to the customer in a particular phase of the process. Sales portals are also no help for this as capabilities knowledge is stored under a different view point there. It becomes thus pretty obvious that sales enablement systems guiding salespeople in what needs to be said in a particular phase of the sales process and allowing furthermore the tailoring of the messaging to the specific customer context can significantly improve the productivity of salespeople, while maintaining image integrity required from a marketing perspective.

About the Author:
Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping leaders of large, global B2B sales organizations to increase their productivity.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/camaurerconsulting
http://ultimatesalesexecresource.blogspot.com/

So, something is wrong in the world of selling. Sellers seem to be overwhelmed by the huge amounts of information that are available to them while the right and useful information does not reach the buyers on the clients’ end. While companies have focused on optimizing the transactional sales process over the last years using CRM technologies and methods, the informational angle of selling has not really been in focus.

It is just consequent that major analyst firms like IDC, Forrester or Gartner have recently been starting to address this obvious problem in their research. Under the label of ‘Sales Enablement’, they are proposing that information relevant for sellers should be integrated alongside the sales process of a company. Such integration could guarantee that sales people always have the right information at their fingertips in any sales situation – to enable them to have a valuable conversation with their clients.

While this theoretically makes a lot of sense, reality in enterprises looks pretty complex. Here are a few reasons why:

• Relevant content is usually distributed across numerous intranet sites, databases or other repositories – just think about a seller, who has to access the customer reference database, the competitive intelligence site as well as the product information teamroom to gather everything he needs to prepare a client presentation.

• Content is created in author-centric patterns that make it difficult to effectively browse – this means that a marketing person, who creates a positioning paper, does not necessarily categorize and save it in a way a seller can intuitively find it.

• There’s no feedback loop between sales and marketing to comment or rate content.

• Beyond content integration and CRM alignment, there’s a variety of other marketing and sales processes that should become integrated more tightly – proposal generation, for example, can be optimized in most companies.

Nevertheless, companies should start focusing on Sales Enablement now – before the problems related to it get worse. I hope, this blog will become a platform for a lively and engaging exchange of ideas, thoughts and concepts around Sales Enablement. In the end, companies’ sales and marketing teams need to become more effective in all their efforts to provide better tailored solutions to and to have more quality discussions with their clients.

We have invited a lot of guest bloggers from universities, analyst firms as well as enterprises to share their views on Sales Enablement. Amongst others, the following questions will be discussed:

• How to effectively and sustainably integrate intranet-based content and communication silos?
• Once achieved, what additional content silos and sources could be integrated and which sales and marketing processes could be aligned?
• How can sellers retrieve content more intuitively and efficiently?
• Can intuitive user interfaces help sellers to better handle the growing complexity of enterprise portfolios and client needs to effectively facilitate successful client conversations?
• How can communication happening between knowledge experts across the company be turned into reusable and generally available information?

I am looking forward to exciting discussions over the next weeks and months!