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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According to IDC, 57% of all clients feel sales people presenting to them for the first time are not very well prepared. At the same time, sellers spend more than a third of their working time searching for information and creating presentations to prepare for client meetings. And in addition to that, according to Forrester analysts, companies are spending around 135.000$US per year on sales support activities like sales collateral production, training or workshops.
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.
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