Sales Enablement bloggers on Knowledge and Context
On December 1, 2009 Matthias Roebel from EnableYourSales.com/blog wrote the following post entitled “It is time to think about creating an enterprise context”:
“Hang on a second! Could the following be happening? By implementing an enterprise social network a company is solving all its Sales Enablement Challenges? Well, I doubt it.
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.”
Please see the original blog post and leave your comments here.
On November 22, 2009 Scott Santucci from blogs.forrester.com/tech_sales_enablement/ wrote the following in his post “It’s Been A While, Why — And What’s Going On With Sales Enablement These Days?”:
“[...] Too often people are focused on very tactical, short-term things to boost sales or improve skills, but a year later have very little to show for that effort. Why?
Enterprise selling is complex, and that complexity creates a paradox [...] where making things simple for customers and sales requires you to confront the fact that you have a variety of people in your company who each carry different perspectives of who your customers are; and what needs to be done to solve them.
Declaring you need better sales people (or smarter sales people), or focusing on more activity (more leads, more calls); misses the point entirely.
Your customers have access to more information now [...] than they have ever had before in the history of mankind. Preparing your sales people with more product knowledge is not suitable today as you are arming your field with the vary information customers can get themselves.
Buyer/seller relationships are stratifying right before our eyes into a new caste systems of strategic, value-added vendors on the one end; and undifferentiated, commodity-type suppliers on the other. Addressing this issue requires a fundamentally different way to go-to-market than we have had in the past and it means we’ve got to confront the mismatch in our business unit construct and product-centric view points with the new selling model of actually co-creating value with customers and focusing on helping those customers drive business outcomes.
[...] you would be very surprised at the number of your competitors who are building strategic programs right now to address these exact issues. The trick is to first understand this is a holistic problem, and then break it down into a set of manageable projects where you can “fix the plane while it’s flying”.”
Please see the full blog post and leave your comments here.
In response to Scott’s blog post Ken Knickerbocker wrote the following on December 1, 2009:
“Scott stated “you have a variety of people in your company who each carry different perspectives of who your customers are; and what needs to be done to [help] them.”
So true. In your presentation Scott you refer to this as blind men describing an elephant challenge. All the blind men see the elephant differently depending on which part of the animal they happen to be touching.
[...] I’ve begun calling it the Mexico Dilemma. How one defines Mexico is largely dependent on where in Mexico they’ve visited. [...]
So it is within any sales system. To someone tasked with ramping new sales people, knowledge management is an essential element in helping new recruits find the material and best practices needed to make a c-level call or position the company’s wide portfolio of products and services in the first meeting with that executive. But the Chief Sales Officer, with a singular focus on closing deals and meeting quarterly objectives, objectives the CFO and Wall Street are counting on, may not place the same emphasis on knowledge management. Instead knowledge management becomes just another SG&A line item to that CSO, one that is easily paired back in tough economic times.”
Eight Skills for Today’s Marketers
I couldn’t agree more with Kathleen Schaub’s post ‘Eight skills for tomorrows marketers’ at the GroupEffects Marketing Blog from November 9, 2009. However, I’m with Keith who commented on her blog that the title should read ‘Eight Skills for Today’s Marketers’:
“[...] Marketing’s most interesting new roles require skills from non-traditional disciplines.
For your next marketing hire, consider people experienced in the following areas:
1) Sales Skills: Now that 100% of B2B buyers repeatedly touch the web (both vendor’s sites and those of 3rd parties) throughout the buying process, marketing must stay active from “cold to close”. No more filling the top of the funnel and passing leads off to sales. Tony Jaros, VP of Research from Sirius Decisions asks a radical question – why is the web still in Corporate Marketing? No longer just a corporate brochure, the web is central to revenue generation. IDC’s CMO Advisory Practice says that some leading organizations (Intel, for example) are hiring CMO’s with sales backgrounds. With new organizational structures such as Demand Centers and with pressure for better sales enablement taking center stage, people with working knowledge of sales AND marketing are golden. All marketers should learn about selling.
2) Social Media Skills: It’s no secret that social media dramatically changes the buyer-seller-influencer dynamic. But only those actively participating in social media tangibly appreciate the differences between old-style one-way media conversations and the group interactivity.
3) Influencer Marketing Skills: Advocacy and relationship roles such as AR, PR, developer relations, customer advocacy, community managers and evangelists continue to move beyond traditional boundaries and broaden their role to more types of influencers. Influencer50 has identified 24 types (Barbara French lists them here).
4) Journalism/ Storytelling Skills: With buyers getting the majority of their information from the web and with sales enablement increasing in priority, there’s no end to the need for juicy, targeted content. David Meerman Scott suggests that wehire trained journalists. Our customer segments and our eco-systems would be their “beat” – listening for stories, mashing them with our messages and placing fresh, relevant, content within the conversation.
5) Process Design Skills: Marketing automation is just beginning to penetrate its market. Forrester says it’s less than 5% adopted. As anyone who has been part of a re-engineering effort can attest, it’s not the automation that increases productivity. It’s the process changes that automation enables and enforces. Deploying marketing automation will require skills such as process modeling, project management, the ability to train and manage change, as well as ease with technology.
6) Data/ Analytics Skills: Technology captures and makes available enormous amounts of data about buyer and seller behavior. What does it all mean? Two of the most valuable uses of data are the ability to reveal a buyer’s “digital body language“, as Eloqua’s Steven Woods’ new book discusses, as well as the ability to closely link marketing performance to business performance. Real data about customer behavior and real ties to revenue promise marketing leadership a bigger seat at the executive table.
7) Design Thinking Skills: CEO’s want to know, “how can I make my company more innovative?” In addition to R&D, marketing would be a natural place to source talent. In his new book, Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of design shop IDEO, talks about how leading companies are tapping into right-brain tricks that those schooled in the arts practice, such as brainstorming, role-playing and scenario-building (see his TED talks here).
8) Domain Expertise: Customers don’t care about our products. They care about themselves and their problems. Building a bridge between our products and the customer’s care-abouts requires knowledge of both realms.”
The importance of video in Sales 2.0
Over at newsaleseconomy.com Chad Levitt wrote the great blog post ‘Next Generation Sales Reps Use Video To Win’, on February 7th, 2009. Mike Meisner commented:
“[...] I don’t see many [...] posts out there about the importance of video in web/sales 2.0. People would rather casually watch a demo/video than have to attend a scheduled presentation or even a webinar [...]. It’s the ultimate in providing accessible information. [...]“
From Chad’s post:
“[...] The next generation of sales reps are using technology to grab mindshare through surrounding their prospects with helpful content. They do this without being intrusive and let the customer engage at their own pace. The content you can surround your prospect with is endless.
Video Presentations are the easiest way to surround your customer
[...] sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler allow you to store and share your videos easily. [...] Once your video presentations are created you can begin to e-mail your customers links to your presentations and create many types of interesting campaigns. [...] By using video, you give your presentation more reach and increase the chances of it being watched again. Your prospect can review the parts that were important to them on their own time in their comfort zone. And prospects make the buying decision in their comfort zone first and then tell you about it later. [...]
Video presentations are less intrusive than standing in front of your customer delivering a live presentation. The world is moving towards less intrusive ways of connecting with people and you can get ahead of the pack by developing videos of your sales presentations. Your video presentation will also help reinforce the message you delivered in your live presentation and increase the chances of you making the sale. [...]“
Obviously the text above has been written from a sales perspective. If you are in marketing you should google the term ’social media release’ as a video should be a part of every social media press release. The nice thing about having your video uploaded to a public site is that everyone can email the link to others and once in a while even in a b2b settings things go viral.
Those of you who have posted videos on YouTube might know this already; the ‘Insights’ part where the owner of a video can track metrics around it has been improved by Google. The following is a screen shot for a video I posted during my studies and for me it is interesting to observe who is embedding it / where it gets how many views from and which audiences I reach:
When it comes to Sales Enablement, it goes without saying how important it is to not only provide sales people with streaming versions of videos but to also provide downloadable versions of these videos in the Sales Enablement application/site. That ensures that the sales people can screen high quality video in front of the customer even in situations without access to the intranet or internet.
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