The cost of running a sales enablement solution: Is there a need for editorial staff to help create and edit content?
In ‘Is Sales Enablement just Lipstick on a Knowledge Management Pig?’ Gerhard Gschwandtner (@gerhard20) asked:
“What’s the real cost of running a Sales Enablement solution? Is there a need for editorial staff to help create and edit content, to set up template standards and apply them?”
The following job posting gives a bit of a hint what kind of tasks around a Sales Enablement Web Portal need to be performed manually:
Job Title: Sales Enablement Intern
Job Date: 2009-09-24Company: Initiate Systems
Job Location(s): Chicago, IL, US
Description:
Sales Enablement: Sales Enablement Web Portal– Maintain the sales portal by:
o Naming, dating, tagging and approving submitted assets on a daily basis
o Building or creating custom pages when needed
o Special projectsSales Enablement: Sales Methodology (RADAR) Opportunity Sessions
o Scheduling monthly RADAR sessions for AEs
o Researching submitted RADAR opportunities to find additional materials
- Hoovers
- Spoke
Sales Enablement: Weekly Reports
o Sales Portal weekly reports
o RADAR monthly reportsAs time permits:
Lead Generation: Lead Processing
o Research incoming leads verify in Salesforce.com and add if necessaryLead Generation: Telesales Tagging
o Add campaigns in Salesforce.com
o Add tasks for AEs in Healthcare and EnterpriseLead Generation: Assist with Tradeshows
o Assemble collateralLead Generation: Mailings
o Tag campaigns
o Mail merge letters
Having been working with the cutting edge Sales Enablement solution BizSphere at a large b2b company since 2007, I can comment on the extend to which the tasks above can be automated:
o The submission process (for assets or pieces of information like contact details) can be shortened.
- Empower both – providers of official content (Product Marketing, MarComm, CI/MI, Training Department, Event Planning Team, etc.) and users who want to contribute (Sales, Customer Service, rest of work force, Channel Partners, etc.) – with an easy way to submit from within the context of the specific combination of geography, product/service/solution and type of information they are looking at. That takes care of the tagging. If they want to tag things further they should be allowed to.
- Implement a Content Governance model that automates notifications regarding content that needs to be approved, that reached the end of its Life Cycle, or that is meant for a limited audience only.
- For most companies cutting down the number of ways to submit content and even unifying the process so that one form allows to upload a single instance (Single Sourcing) and to publish it to multiple locations (facing the public, channel partners or only sales people) would be the wildest dream.
BizSphere goes further than Single Sourcing of assets. It does Single Sourcing for the fragments (nuggets) your assets consist of. When you only have one instance of a photo, a logo, the number of employees you have or lets say a value proposition, then it will be updated in all your assets the moment you update this instance. Your assets are being auto-generated! The moment you click the ‘Generate’ button, hundreds of nuggets come together to form an asset that is customized for the context you chose. You want to pitch an offering to a customer in Spain? Then the auto-generation means that only the customer references from Spain are being pulled and put together in a polished way according to the chosen template. (See Do we really want people who earn $150 an hour creating PowerPoint presentations from scratch? and Do you want your sales people to spend their time customizing slide decks?)
o The task of building pages can be reduced to typing the name of a new offering (product/service/solution) and clicking ‘Publish’.
- When you have established a context, your assets or their nuggets live in, then your sales portal’s pages can be dynamic and just list everything that is applicable for the given combination of geography, offering and type of information. A manually built page would be a silo that would be pretty much outdated the moment the intern from the job posting above has finished it. In BizSphere adding the name of a new offering automatically extends the number of possible combinations of geography, offering and type of information. For each of these combinations BizSphere lists what has a good standing with regards to its life cycle, therefore everything you see is fresh.
o Reports should be in real-time and not weekly.
- Having a dash board overview of both your inventory of assets and their usage lets you track whether a certain region or offering has no assets available or whether they are not being looked at. You will see which type of assets your sales people love (Ratings might not tell you a lot but usage data will). This ability is crucial in becoming better and better in focusing your marketing efforts on what will actually help sales to close deals. “IDC research shows that over 40% of all marketing assets handed over to sales are not in use today.” (IDC’s Best Practices in Sales Enablement – Content and Marketing, July 2009) Why pay someone to create reports every week when you and everybody else, who is interested, could have the kind of dash board BizSphere calls ‘Content Landscape’ as well as even more detailed usage metrics of the Sales Enablement solution; all of it in real-time and sliced and diced as you wish. For presentations to executives just create a deep link to how you sliced and diced the data and they will get to see the current – as opposed to last week’s – data.
BizSphere is the Sales Enablement solution Jeanne Hellman looks at in her case study of “implementing Sales Enablement in a complex, global company”. The link lets you download the full case study for free.
How do your sales people and channel partners navigate your product and services information?
- Are you 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”.)
On May 15, 2009, @scottsantucci (Forrester Analyst covering Sales Enablement) tweeted:
“Had a briefing from @BizSphere. Very interesting thinking, particularly about the need for an information architecture.”
Displaying your Sales Enablement resources and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…
- a context (an information architecture)
- in Rich Internet Applications using web2.0 technologies
… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past.
BizSphere Sales Web does exactly this. The result can look like the images below and requires an amazingly low number of mouse clicks to navigate.
Finding the right Sales Enablement documents
Imagine the following scenario at a corporation selling to businesses:
One of their sales people is searching on the intranet or on their Sales Enablement site for the search term “Case Study”. Wouldn’t that lead to hundreds of search results even if the corporation was not that big?
Of course you would know better and do a more specific search but the question remains how a large number of search results can quickly be narrowed down to just documents of the type “Case Study” (as oppose to other types of documents that just happen to reference case studies) and how you then drill down to the most recent ones or to the ones your fellow sales people have rated as the most valuable?
Applications that allow this, amongst other things, with an amazingly low number of required mouse clicks are the ‘BizSphere Resource Browser’ and ‘Content Landscape’ from SVA BizSphere (@bizsphere). Check out their Sales Enablement approach at www.EnableYourSales.com
Found at http://ffffound.com
Here is a YouTube video from SVA BizSphere on the topic of finding information:
Sales Communications
A blog post on Sales Communications from rcommins.wordpress.com from April 29, 2009 [links added by the author of this blog]:
“[...] A group of about 30 sales, sales ops and marketing leaders discussed their challenges in most effectively enabling sales and getting “the word” out to sales team without propagating billions of emails and creating random chaos. All of this while the rep really only cares if he is a hero or a zero this quarter.
[...] there are lots of good sales communications methodologies. What makes them suck or not is not the methodology in itself, but whether it was executed well. [...]
So, what does it take to execute a sales communication strategy?
- leadership – the whole leadership team must be bought in and singing the same song every quarter
- technology - in order to scale well and not slaughter the rep, a good tool must exist
- metrics – a closed loop that tells the content creators what’s good and what blows. (some of this is qualitative, some of it quantitative)
I think so many “corporate types” kill themselves over developing a killer strategy, only to put it on the shelf when the end of the quarter rally comes along. Leadership is by far the killer success factor here – focus on that, and you may have a chance to pull things off.
Another hot topic (for another night) was how to leverage social media tools for sales enablement. [...]“
That is what I call a dash board for marketing folks who want to enable sales
That’s what I call a dash board!!! (for marketing folks who want to enable sales)
The vendor @BizSphere calls it ‘Content Landscape’.
- Here marketing can stay on top of sales enablement resources in their lifecycle and track how sales rates them.
- In a different user interface the sales people look at only those resources that are set to ‘published’.
Found at http://ffffound.com
More info
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