Information Architecture?

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- 28% Information is missing or outdated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

Source: Translated from STIMMT Intranet Report 2003 http://topics.stimmt.ch/intranet/




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.”




The need for an information architecture that cross-references content based on taxonomies to establish context for sales people becomes clear when looking at old-fashioned sales portals like the ones many businesses expect their sales people to navigate still:



In case you are 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”.)

Or with the words of Bruce A. Brien from his blog post ‘Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement’ from July 16, 2009:

“It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed. That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked. If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need. Marketing is not supporting them. Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.”

Displaying your content and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…

1. a context (an information architecture)
2. in Rich Internet Applications using web 2.0 technologies

… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past. These web 1.0 sales portals have to become tools that help sales people excel at selling. From my point of view they need to offer a highly customized experience for each user based on…

- what we know about their job,
- what we know about their language and location,
- what we know about their last visits to the tool,
- what they want and don’t want to see (they might have taken the time to adjust some settings),
- what marketing or corporate want them to see (news alert/announcement, promotion/campaign, etc…)
- what their peers have rated, tagged, contributed…
- and what they are allowed to see (channel partners aren’t allowed to see everything etc…).


BizSphere Sales Web is one Sales Enablement application that…

1. starts with establishing a context as mentioned above
2. and then encourages to break up all content into small nuggets,
3. which get tagged according to the parts of the context they are applicable to.
4. Finally, for sales people this allows to simply auto-generate a polished client-facing presentation or document that includes all the right nuggets (e.g. customer references from the right country and industry vertical etc…).

Check out www.enableyoursales.com/en/solution/documentgeneration/ and request a demo.

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…

1. a context (an information architecture)
2. 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:

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

Content Landscape – feature rich web application for Sales Enablement

The videos below by Moritz Stefaner (his blog), a recognized expert on interface design, visualization, statistics and data mining, show how he applied his ‘Elastic Lists’ (Example 1, Example 2) to Sales Enablement resources. The result is called ‘Content Landscape’ and has been developed by the Sales Enablement vendor SVA BizSphere.

From http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/content-landscape/

“Content Landscape is a feature rich web application for searching and browsing digital resources in the enterprise. It facilitates not only content access, but also the understanding of resource distributions. [...]

A regional marketing manager for a product group wants to retrieve resources only for his specific region and product, restricted to marketing materials. Other users may be interested in the latest news across all areas, or material only related to contract preparation. [...]

The browsing mode allows to select multiple filter settings in flat (’Content Area’, ’Sales Step’, ’Media type’), hierarchical (’Region’, ’Offering’ and ’Resource type’) and numerical facets (’Rating’ and ’Date created’). [...] Understanding resource production, use and distribution across departments, regions, and product groups is one of the core challenges of knowledge management in the enterprise.

’What are the most downloaded contents?’, ’do the presentation materials for a given product cover all important sales regions?’, ’what parts of my resource collection are growing? and which are declining?’ are typical questions in this area. [...]“

Article on a Sales Enablement application

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? In its March 2009 issue E-3 Magazine published an article in German about a Sales Enablement application from SVA BizSphere.

Here is what Google Translate makes of the article.