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 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.
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
Job opening – Enterprise Sales Enablement Manager – Mountain View at Google
Enterprise Sales Enablement Manager – Mountain View at Google
Location: California , Mountain View (San Francisco Bay Area)
URL: http://www.google.com/jobs
Type: Full-time
Experience: Associate
Functions: Sales
Industries: Internet
Posted: February 19, 2010Job Description
This position is based in Mountain View, CA.
The area: Enterprise
As the emerging leader in cloud computing, Google’s Enterprise division delivers cloud services and other IT products to small and large businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. Our team of high-achieving engineers, product managers, and sales and marketing professionals works with a vast array of partners and customers to advance the company’s mission to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. The Enterprise team is among a handful of rapidly emerging new businesses that are becoming front-and-center for Google as it enters its second decade as a company.
The role: Enterprise Sales Enablement Manager
As an Enterprise Enablement Manager, you will head up our global Sales Enablement Operations organization. You should have strong project management and operations experience in a high-performing sales environment. You should also demonstrate excellent analytical, project management, and presentation skills, as well as a track record of executing cross-functionally.
You should be comfortable navigating ambiguity and demonstrate the ability to manage multiple initiatives effectively. This is an opportunity to work with a growing team of experienced, high achieving sales and operations people covering a wide range of applications, including Google’s leading cloud-based enterprise applications. You will work proactively with global and cross-functional teams, and has a demonstrated ability to think creatively.Responsibilities:
• Thought-lead and build sales enablement function to address unique global enterprise requirements for support in the field.
• Define, hire and manage key roles in the areas of instructional design, web/UI design, program management, infrastructure operations and delivery.
• Deliver new hire, product,competitive intelligence and sales process certification programs to Enterprise sales teams and Partner organizations globally.
• Deliver reporting on program and sales force skill effectiveness and iterate programs to ensure increasing levels of sales capability and performance.
• Partner with our Learning and Development team and subject matter experts, including marketing and product management to integrate wider Google learning programs into the field sales enablement curriculum.Requirements:
• BA/BS degree preferred with strong academic background.
• At least 10 years of work experience in sales, marketing, consulting with 4+ years management experience.
• Solid process, project management, analytics and strategy development and implementation skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills – ability to collaborate across functions, geographies and levels to build and deliver business solutions.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills.
• Experience in field training and enablement tool and collateral design.
Additional Information[...]
What new hire salespeople want to know
In the blog post ‘Sales Enablement’ from September 22, 2009 the salestrainingdrivers.com author looks at what new hire sales people want to know:
“How do you enable the sales team?
Millions of Internet pages are dedicated to the subject of sales coaching and sales training. Have you conducted an Internet search for it lately?
With all that content available, it’s amazing that sales teams have any trouble hitting their performance goals. Have you ever thought about it from a salesperson’s shoes? Think about it: there are many different resources available for salespeople on how to close, how to manage time, how to ask questions, how to manage a territory, and how to stay motivated.
Yet, despite all this, the next evolution in selling is upon us, and it requires all salespeople to conduct a thorough review [...]. If salespeople aren’t actively embracing this evolution, they will be passed by.
[...]
New hire salespeople want to know:
- what are my expectations?
- what are the goals?
- what does success look like?
- what is in it for me?
- what do I need to do?
[...]“
I would add:
- what do I need to know?
- where do I get the latest information?
- who are the subject matter experts in the organization?
The author goes on to speak about…
“[...] each salesperson’s ability to fully customize their own selling system to the needs of the clients and their territory. Seasoned sales pros of today have a deep command of the basics, and they’ve come up with something that is uniquely their own over time. [...]“
The first part reminds me of the extend to which this kind of knowledge is geography specific as well as specific for industry verticals and client needs. In a global enterprise Sales Enablement knowledge needs to be organized by all this concurrently. Does your organization have an information architecture that allows that?
The second part shows the reality of people having their own unique ways of doing things. Hence, gathering tribal knowledge / best practices from peers can only go so far… as Gerhard Gschwandtner points out in his blog post ‘Is Sales Enablement just Lipstick on a Knowledge Management Pig?’:
“I read, “Clone top performers.” Excuse me! Why not promise, “Clone your Swiss bank account”?”
Do not waste time with visiting twitter.com or blogs – Aggregate everything via RSS
When someone writes to me that they plan on visiting my blog frequently then I’m honored but wondering why they don’t just subscribe.
Don’t waste time with visiting twitter.com or blogs randomly! Aggregate everything via RSS in one dashboard (e.g. with iGoogle like below) and then only go to posts you are interested in.
Subscribe to the RSS feeds of searches for your company, your products, your competitors etc… on Google Blog Search, Blog Pulse, Twitter search, etc…
surchur.com also provides an interesting dash board for searches across a lot of web2.0 sites.
Users do not have to wait until Google buys Twitter
Users don’t have to wait until Google buys Twitter to combine the best of both search engines. As shown below or in my earlier post, this Greasemonkey user script displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are searching for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page. The only question is how long Twitter will keep its API open for this kind of mashup. (In the screen shot Firefox add-on CustomizeGoogle removed paid links and added links to alternative search engines.)
This has been said about Google and might be said about Twitter soon: What you can’t find via its search doesn’t happen
This has been said about Google and might be said about Twitter soon: What you can’t find via its search does not happen (is unnoticed).
Believe it or not, but recently I find myself using the search on Twitter or looking at RSS feeds of certain keywords’ searches on Twitter more often than I google. Maybe that is due to my current projects but it might be a shift that many people will experience to some extend.
Being able to tap into what people are saying right now is just as much of a revolution as the first good search engines were. Obviously checking what the industry is saying about your company, your product, your competitor, etc… the second before walking into a sales meeting prepares you for questions and delivers great conversation starters. It is Conversation Enablement.
A lot has been written about the value of real-time search since the Twitter search became popular. I’m sure if Google ran the Twitter search a “TweetRank” (or however the equivalent of PageRank would be named) that ranks by number of followers, re-tweets and external links to your tweets and Twitter account would be a great option next to the simple real-time search.
In terms of a revenue model for Twitter (“The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web”): If Google doesn’t buy Twitter then and I don’t see why Twitter wouldn’t be able to either licence Google’s AdWords algorithm and auction platform or built its own.
What ever happens, for now we can use this Greasemonkey user script (that displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are searching for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page) or check out the new social media search engine http://surchur.com.
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