define a taxonomy of customer pain points and map your products and solutions against them

One of my posts on the question “where Sales Enablement lives within an organization” got a comment requesting further clarification of the following graphic:

The comment was asking where to find sales people in the graphic and what the role of sales playbooks is. I have to admit that it is difficult to read, but the sales people are actually represented within the green area as indicated by the words Sales Force. (This is not a reference to salesforceDOTcom.)

This speaks to the point that sales people and the legacy sales portals, that are supposed to enable them, sit in between a highly matrixed organization on the one side and just as complex an organization on the client’s side. These legacy sales portals are one-dimensional (they fail to show content & contact details of subject experts in the context of the highly matrixed organization and in context to which pain point on the client side is addressed) and there are often several portals as there are so many silos of information.

Each sales playbook is a great tool for a small subset of the sales force (as shown in the graphic), but comes out of one of the silos, fed by only some of the Product/Portfolio Marketing teams or one regional team. When all content (e.g. customer references from different regions or specific value propositions per industry vertical…) lives in a multi-dimensional business context like it is made possible in BizSphere (which is a Sales Enablement Solution Suite that was designed to cut across all silos. Full disclosure: I work with them.), a completely customized sales playbook for any given sales situation can be auto-generated.

In contrast to legacy sales portals, BizSphere takes at least three dimensions into account. These could be:

• Where is the seller going to a meeting? (Sales regions, countries…)
• What does the seller want to sell (Portfolio of products, services and solutions.)
• What does the seller need in order to be successful in the meeting? (Content types like white paper, case study, ROI-Calculator, contact details of a subject matter expert, etc…)

You might also want to define a taxonomy of customer pain points and map your products against them or add other dimensions that your company thinks in. BizSphere then lets you filter down by media type, language of the content, and/or the sales step you are in with the opportunity you are working.

• Imagine the 1st orange arrow in the graphic above to be a customer reference from a Canadian client for a specific security solution.
• Imagine the 2nd orange arrow to be the contact details of the sales engineer in South Africa who is the expert for a given service.
• The 3rd orange arrow could be an ROI-calculator for the same service but it is really specific to the mining industry and therefore relevant in Western Australia.

Can you already see how here the regional teams can have as much of say in “which content is relevant for specific sales situations?” as the product marketing team?

Can you get lost in BizSphere? No way, because nothing is easier than answering: What do I want to sell, where do I want to sell it and what would help me to close the deal? Once you set your context in these three dimensions you will have filtered down from thousands of marketing assets / pieces of collateral to only the relevant ones.

The Importance of Context

On September 7, 2010, Matthias Roebel from BizSphere.com/blog wrote “The Importance of Context for the Enterprise 2.0″:

Just a few days ago Joe Galvin from Sirius Decisions wrote about how important Social Media – as an approach for better internal collaboration – is as part of a Sales Enablement strategy. I think he is absolutely right. What used to be the informal coffee corner chat before nowadays is mimicked in Social Media platforms. Over time, people will learn that even within an enterprise the sharing of information is beneficial for everyone in the end. Yes, there may be a lot of sceptics around, especially in sales teams, but with the right programs and incentives offered, they will make the jump to the new social collaboration paradigm.

However, the flip side of extensive social collaboration might be the appearance of new information silos as well as growing information overload. Without the social collaboration being moderated to a certain extend, it might lose some of its potential impact on the overall performance of the sales teams. Aaron Roe Fulkerson discussed this in a recent blog post: “The importance of context: why Enterprise 2.0 still fails to deliver value”.

 

A company might use a lot of different types of social collaboration platforms – the challenges is: How can they be orchestrated in a way, that actual knowledge exchange is taking place across existing team and functional structures? And how can the content generated be aligned to some generally agreed upon enterprise structures? What companies, that are serious about implementing a Social Media strategy for sales, should think about, is to create and maintain an enterprise context.

Then collaboration can take place within this context and will add greater value to a broader audience. Ideally, the enterprise context should constantly evolve based on feedback gathered during the ongoing social collaboration (for example as shown below).

 

When people talk about knowledge management, they actually mean information management

Ian Richardson at ianrichardson.com/blog wrote ‘When is Knowledge Management Not Knowledge Management?’ on April 23, 2010. As I write a lot about providing context on this blog, I really liked his second last sentence:

“When people talk about knowledge management, they actually mean information management. You may think I’m playing with semantics, but there is an important distinction and one which applies to people such as I, who are in the business of managing information.

To imply that computer systems manage knowledge, demonstrates a fundamental omission in understanding of how people interact with computers. It implies that if you take information a and apply it to person b, then person b will become “knowledgable” about a. This is far from accurate. People (as the dictionary definitions state) have a mental state of “knowledge” which is affected by whatever new information is added. [...]

One cannot impart knowledge simply by making information available. Knowledge is a state of mind, gained from a gradual layering of learning experiences over time.

Companies implementing e-learning systems often make the mistake of assuming that the same information will have the same effect on all users. This is not the case. How people interpret the information they provide is actually the sum of the knowledge they extract and keep.

Let’s take you for example. You may be reading this because you have an interest in knowledge management and you arrived here from Google. You will have a whole host of prior knowledge about “knowledge management” with which to compare my assertions and either agree, disagree or be ambivalent regarding each point. the sum of this assessment is the knowledge which you will take from it. On the other hand, someone who arrives here from my Twitter feed is unlikely to have this context of being a “knowledge management expert” and they will have a different assessment of the content.

Good learning systems (aha – new term) not only allow for these different user contexts, but react to them by using the information provided by the user to infer one of many possible “contexts” – and then deliver more appropriate information.

At no point do we deliver or manage “knowledge”. [...]“

Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant

On April 5, 2010, I posted the following at EnableYourSales.com/blog:
On March 23, 2010, the German speaking site http://carta.info published an interview with Prof. Peter Kruse about complexity and the net.

The following quote (my own translation) supports BizSphere‘s knowledge management methods and user interface ideas, which aim to reduce the firehose of information (that marketing departments in B2B companies provide for sales people and channel partners plus what web 2.0 / enterprise 2.0 add) to what is relevant for a specific sales situation:

“…on the web, people use language way too undisciplined. Without a guiding context you can never be sure how a word used as a tag was meant. What’s the tag ‘drama’ worth, when one person tags pages from divorce lawyers because he is currently experiencing drama in his marriage and another person tags certain theatre productions in his city?”

In the BizSphere Sales Enablement solution we do allow ‘free tagging’ but in addition we force content, contacts, comments, etc. to be tagged in a defined enterprise language – the context. For example, the intersection points of the following taxonomies – or tagging dimensions – create a clearly defined space for all relevant sales information to “live in”:

• products, services and solutions
• information types
• regions and countries

Thanks to the tagging dimensions being defined specifically for each enterprise, they can be used as a common enterprise language – even across different mother tongues. The benefits for the seller are simple yet effective: Searching for information supported by a commonly agreed semantic enterprise language delivers the results which are making sense in a certain sales context. This is something a classical search approach can’t deliver.

Best regards,
Paul Krajewski

What helps sales reps to achieve their targets? Case studies, case studies, case studies, questions and answers, customer testimonals

On March 1, 2010, Lilia Shirman (@B2BGuru) wrote the post To reach the moon, match enthusiasm with (sales) resources. These 5 really help! on her blog revenueorchard.com:

“[...] Setting big goals at a sales kickoff and barraging reps with information about the newest products just isn’t enough. The top reps will deliver the numbers in any case. The rest will struggle without extensive resources and support.

Sales reps report that the following are especially effective in helping them achieve their targets:

1. Case studies, case studies, case studies. Repeatedly and consistently rated as the most useful sales tool. [...]
2. In-account deal support from subject-matter, industry, or technology specialists. This is especially critical in larger companies, where account managers must be relationship experts, but cannot possibly know the details of every product, business process, or industry (unless they are vertically-aligned). The very fact of bringing in an expert who is perceived as more senior by the customer is often enough to move a deal forward.
3. Business-level messaging and sales tools targeted at the high-level decision makers and budget holders. These should complement detailed product-focused content, which is necessary but insufficient bu itself.  Business messaging targets the audience evaluating the investment rather than the people evaluating your product.
4. Training & tools that enable sales reps to ask great questions and have intelligent conversations with customers at multiple organizational levels and functional roles. Asking great questions accomplishes three critical things: Positions the sales person as an ally and advisor, demonstrates that they can listen, and provides valuable information about the customers that can guide the rep in structuring the deal.
5. Quantitative results achieved for other customers. While compliments (customer testimonials that discuss how easy you are to work with) are good, hard numbers about specific improvements they achieved are always more powerful. Numbers in the elevator pitch get attention and meetings, and numbers in the business case  help close the deal.

[...]“

The two links above have been added by the author of this blog. In relation to point #4 above, there is a slide show on slideshare.net which contains the screen shot below and shows how in a Sales Enablement solution with rating, commenting, uploading of user generated content and similar web 2.0 (enterprise 2.0) features all employees not only sales reps can ask and answer questions. At the same time marketing can benefit from the feedback from the field. This created a closed-loop knowledge management in the enterprise where new industry trends or customer needs which sales people hear about get shared and addressed. Through content audits (content intelligence) areas for which no marketing assets have been developed yet get a red flag and so do areas where content is outdated.

We don’t just need more information – we need more information organized in a way that helps to get the job done faster

The following is a collection of posts from around the blogosphere that make the case that we need to improve on how we organize the firehose of information every B2B enterprise aims at its sales reps (especially in times of web 2.0 / sales 2.0 / enterprise 2.0). My employer SVA-BizSphere AG thinks that semantic search (web 3.0) and providing context in which you can filter down to what is relevant to you, are the approach to take to overcome information overload.

‘Winning in the New World of B2B Sales’ by Sham Sao, CMO InfoGroup’s OneSource:

“Before you can win over your prospects with your charming personality and deep knowledge of how to address their business needs, you need to first open the door by getting in contact with them and holding their attention long enough to get them hooked – or at least hooked enough to continue the conversation. Sure it’s true that effective sales professionals need to be persistent, knowledgeable and confident, self-motivated and good listeners. But these qualities alone are not enough.

They also need accurate information that helps them get to the right person and gives them something valuable to say right out of the gate.

In a recent B2B SalesPulse survey conducted by Infogroup’s OneSource, sales professionals responded that they are relying on business information significantly more today compared to a year ago. It confirms that business information is becoming more and more critical for B2B sales. Using accurate, timely business information is especially important for sales professionals today who are under pressure to raise their quotas while sales staffing and resources remain tightly constrained, or are even being cut.

While sales teams need to access every relevant piece of information they can get from every source they can tap, they don’t just need more information – they need more information organized in a way that helps them get their job done faster. When sales teams spend inordinate amounts of time browsing the web and searching for those tidbits to help them get into the right company or to make a compelling pitch, they spend less time selling. The key is making this information actionable so sales reps can spend more time selling and less time researching.

This includes information from Social Media sources. Respondents to OneSource’s B2B SalesPulse survey rated LinkedIn as the most useful social networking tool, followed by blogs, Facebook and Twitter in that order (and closely grouped together). LinkedIn also showed the most growth with 48 percent of respondents saying they are using it more now versus a year ago. Surprisingly enough, even though LinkedIn showed the most growth, nearly a third of respondents are still not using it. [...]“

Please see the full post and leave your comments here.

Sort of along these lines is the post ‘#6: Focus on Internal Sales Enablement and Cutting to the Chase’, from March 25, 2010:

“Keep the emphasis on quality of collateral and programs, not volume. By providing Sales with top-notch materials and in-depth brand knowledge, they’ll be better positioned to do their job successfully and bring in new business.

Some companies, as the Senior Director of Services Strategy at one large technology corporation points out, have implemented a whole playbook program – internal prospecting, packaging content together, streamlining messages – to deliver content succinctly.

“Better organization of what is already out there makes it more usable and digestible in the field,” allowing Sales to get to the point quicker and, in turn, touch more prospects and generate more sales. [...]“

I have not double checked the following numbers I found in the post ‘Sales people who research cost you big time!’:

“[...] So, what is the actual hourly value for a B2B salesperson? We’ve developed an excel calculator to help do the math. Let’s use a typical experienced B2B enterprise salesperson at a software company and apply these sample figures:

• Annual compensation (at plan, or meeting quota): $200,000
• Benefits Paid (20% of a 70K salary): $14,000
• Annual Quota: $2 million
• Include 2 weeks vacation and holidays

This salesperson’s true “hourly value” is $1,198!

For companies with higher quotas (I’ve seen annual quota’s as high as $14 million), this figure is even higher!

If you’d like to figure out your own salespeople’s hourly value, send me an email at silvia@industrygems.com and I will email you the calculator.

The next time you see your salespeople doing research, take interest. Using salespeople for anything other than selling, negatively affects your bottom-line. Find ways to remove those activities from their daily to-do list. It could be costing you over $1,000 an hour! Your sales people must focus on the thing they do best… selling!”

Reflections on the Sales 2.0 conference 2010

Matthias Roebel (@mroebel) from EnableYourSales.com/blog just posted the following reflections on the Sales 2.0 conference:

“My head is still spinning after two days at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. It was great to see all the new ideas the various players in the Sales 2.0 market are constantly creating. The spirit of innovation is there, and it will help customers to address the Sales Effectiveness and Productivity challenges ahead of them.

Gerhard Geschwandtner put it well in his opening remarks: The Internet is changing the world. It has already changed end customers’ purchasing behaviors significantly, but changes in the B2B world are and will be equally dramatic.

Also, the changes span the entire range from Lead Generation, where social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook are playing bigger roles from day to day, to Sales Enablement, where sellers need to be enabled to have better informed and more relevant conversations with their clients despite the challenges of information overload. However, there’s more: Think about how Sales Compensation or Pipeline Management need to change in a more dynamic, flatter world. Or how (social) Marketing Automation methods could improve Lead Nurturing…

As exciting as all of these things are, as overwhelming they may appear to customers in the first place. However, waiting and observing is not an option. Companies have started to try out and adopt one or the other Sales 2.0 technology/methodology and they are seeing the benefits – as we could hear in the various panel discussions during the conference. Yes, the holistic picture of how the different pieces of the Sales 2.0 ecosystem are playing together still needs to be drawn – but you’ve got to start somewhere, if you don’t want to be left behind.

The next challenge, to quote Gerhard again, is moving from reactive to proactive in using the tools.”

Please leave your comments on the original post.

Miles Austin (@milesaustin) from fillthefunnel.com posted the following observations and learning points from the first day:

“[...]

1. No one can claim that WebTools are just gimmicks any more.  Companies large and small are deploying tools in record numbers and they are getting results.
2. When Gartner Research VP Michael Dunne is talking about tangible, measurable increases in sales revenue across the board you know this is no longer a fringe topic.  Then when the feedback on Twitter says that his was the best presentation of the day, you know you better start paying attention.
3. To  hear customers and WebTool vendors alike state matter of factly that they are using and recommending some of the very tools (Jigsaw) that were considered “evil” by some pundits.
4. It is clear that with the mainstream acceptance of Sales 2.0 concepts, tool mania might become a problem.  The selection of the appropriate WebTool for the specific need will be more important than ever. Expertise and understanding is critical.
5. Collaboration will be a significant focus.
6. Mobile will be the primary access to the Tools.
7. Social Media/Networking should be integrated into your sales process.
8. An effective lead generation strategy is to educate. Customer will return if you have informed with integrity and transparency.
9. Sales teams have higher quotas & fewer resources -have to increase sales efficiency to hit goals (thanks @OneSourceInfo)
10. Functional silos and company hierarchies are breaking down. We need to be prepared.
11. Gerhard Gschwandtner opened the conference with the following:  ”Business is a dance around value”.  Is your company at the dance?

[...]“

Please leave your comments at the original post.

David Thompson‘s ‘Insights from the Sales 2.0 Conference’:

“[...] marketing really is all about Sales. The more of us who jump on this message, the better it is for customers. And that really was the vision of Sales 2.0 from the beginning. In fact, the Fall show will probably be called “Sales and Marketing 2.0″ As I said in my remarks at the first conference, “Sales 2.0″ is really “Buying 2.0.” On Amazon, there’s no difference between the marketing process and the sales process. It’s one seamless buying experience. And that’s what Sales 2.0 needs to aspire too. It’s truly gratifying to see our baby all grown up and embraced by so many new advocates. [...]“

Please leave your comments at the original post.

Jeb Brooks posted ‘Is Sales 2.0 More Than Technology?’, on 11 Mar 2010:

“I’m just back from the Sales 2.0 Conference. I went with the hope that it would give me a clear idea of what “Sales 2.0” is. Unfortunately, it’s still too new. Conference organizer and Selling Power Magazine founder, Gerhard Gschwander, put it well when he said that, “Sales 2.0 is not concrete; it’s agile. We need to build as we go.”

No one seems to have developed a clear, all-encompassing definition yet. Probably the best one belongs to Anneke Seley who wrote the book, Sales 2.0 says that it’s “a more efficient and effective way of selling for both salespeople and buyers that’s enabled by technology.”

I hope that, in time, we’ll understand “Sales 2.0” as more than just technology. I’d like to think of it as a version of sales where customers and salespeople are more closely aligned with each other due, in part, to technology. It will be a version of sales where trust will develop in a different way as a result of technology. In many ways this has already happened. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles allow customers and salespeople to get to know each other before their first meeting. That’s technology supporting human connections.

As of today, most of what’s been hung on the “Sales 2.0” banner is enterprise software designed to gather data from salespeople and (occasionally) provide data to them.

Surely “Sales 2.0” is a more fundamental shift than just more data collection? Sales 2.0 has got to be about more than technology. Technology should support the sales effort, not hinder it. It should make it easier for salespeople and customers to connect. And too much sales-oriented technology stands between customers and salespeople rather than unites them. I have every confidence that sales and marketing automation are critical, but only if they serve to increase and maximize the time salespeople spend with their customers.

In fact, according to a report by Gartner Research (presented at the conference), actual customer contact time for inside salespeople tops out at about 40%, while field reps are lucky to spend between 18 and 20% of their time with prospects. The number is even lower – 10% – for complex sales (like airplanes and nuclear coolers). In a “Sales 2.0” world, those numbers should rise.

My point is that technology fails when it’s too cumbersome, creates extra work, or distracts from customer interaction in any way. Reporting is important, but salespeople must be allowed to build their customer relationships. Like excessive paperwork in “Sales 1.0,” burdensome software just gives excuses to poor performers and frustrates top performers.

However, when technology compliments customer interaction better, it becomes indispensable.

I’m enthusiastic about the future of sales because the interaction between customers and salespeople will become richer. My only fear is that too much software will distract from, rather than support, the sales effort.

Thoughts?”

Please leave your comments on the original post.

Bryan Wilson (@bryanmwilson) then commented:

“I completely agree with this! Sales 2.0 isn’t about getting cooler software that takes the relationship out of selling. It is about enabling more connections and relationships through the technology. The fundamentals of sales remain the same, there are just new ways of developing, nurturing and maintaining relationships in the digital age. One example I have is that of CRM or sales tracking software. There are many programs out there that have a TON of fields to fill out, awesome reports and all sorts of other “management” type features. However, top sales people HATE taking 2 hours of their day to fill out little boxes just so management has a cool report to look at. Our firm in particular uses ACT! for managing contacts. In my opinion, asking a “Sales 2.0″ person to use a program like ACT! is like asking a house builder to use a hammer to build an entire house. Sure, you can do it, and it will work. But isn’t using a nail gun and other power tools MUCH more effective? Why not use programs like HighRise from 37Signals, or some of the newer, less bloated “Web 2.0″ programs like BantamLive? These programs incorporate only the features needed and nothing else. They also incorporate some of this Sales 2.0 stuff like lead generation & development through Twitter & other social networking services.

Sales isn’t changing. Relationships and solution selling will always be here. The WAY in which relationships are being built is what is changing.“

February 2010 issue of CRM magazine: Sales Enablement Tools – The relevant vendors

I keep a work in progress list of Sales Enablement vendors. In its February 2010 issue CRM magazine does a great job at singling out the relevant vendors:

Sales Enablement Tools Make the Selling Simpler: Organizations want sales reps to have access to the right information at the most critical moments By Christopher Musico [...]

“[...] the sweet spot for sales enablement—defined by IDC as “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” Scott Santucci, senior analyst at Forrester Research, says he’s seen an explosion of interest in this area over the past year. [...] Santucci says each of the relevant vendors—including BizSphere, iCentera, Kadient, and Savo Group—cater to slightly different problems. [...]

BY THE NUMBERS

• $135,262 is spent, on average, in support costs per year for each salesperson.
• 7 hours per week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls.
• 50 percent of the information is pushed through email.
• 10 percent is “made available in a useful format.”

Source: Forrester Research & IDC Sales Advisory Service

THE VENDOR SHORTLIST

BizSphere (BizSphere.com) — BizSphere Sales Enablement consists of four separate applications involving both sales and marketing: Sales Web, Document Generation, Content Landscape, and Editors. iCentera (www.icentera.com/solutions-sales.asp) — iCentera Enterprise Edition 6.0 offers wiki-page builders, customizable portals, custom tabs, a company newsroom, and dynamic email. Kadient (www.kadient.com/products.aspx) — Kadient Dynamic Sales Content, Sales Playbooks, and Sales Performance Analytics can be accessed directly from within sales force automation systems via productized integration with Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand. Savo Group (www.savogroup.com/sales/effectiveness) — Savo Sales Asset Manager provides an organizational structure to enable sales pros to rank content, based on business rules, to recommend content for each particular selling situation.”

Read the full CRM magazine article ‘Sales Enablement Tools’.