Shortlisting Sales Enablement solutions

In the metrics of this blog I see that a lot of readers come here via Google searches for “iCentera vs. salesforce.com”, “SAVO vs Microsoft SharePoint” or “Kadient versus SAVO Group”.

As you can see in my work in progress list of Sales Enablement vendors, there are a lot of players.

destinationcrm.com wrote an article on that as well. Their shortlist is the following:

THE VENDOR SHORTLIST

BizSphere (www.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.

When you are in the process of compiling a short-list of vendors let me know. No matter whether you are looking for SaaS or on premises solutions to arm your B2B sales force, I would love to give you a demo of BizSphere (I work with them).

Social Media Trends for 2010

HarvardBusiness.org blog post ‘Six Social Media Trends for 2010′ by David Armano (@armano) from November 2, 2009:

“In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, [...] In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that’s my guess. What are the near-term trends [...]:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more “exclusive.” Not everyone can fit on someone’s newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it’s likely that user behavior such as “hiding” the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it’s not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy’s Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

3. Social business becomes serious play
Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted “mayorship.” As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
If the company you work for doesn’t already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what’s considered competition, it’s likely that you’ll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.

5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.

6. Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

[...]

David Armano [@armano] is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services. He is both an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web. [...]“

Comment by Daniel:

“One thing you missed, David: People will use lifestreaming platforms to add more context to their content. For instance, you may post that you’re eating a hamburger via Twitter — alas, the dreaded “what I ate” tweet — but if you were to use a lifestream platform such as Brightkite or Foursquare, you can add dimension to your content so it actually helps others.

But this is one part of lifestreaming. The other, you see, is aggregation ['Don't waste time with visiting twitter.com or blogs - Aggregate everything via rss'].

Look for companies to develop storystreaming platforms that enable brands — and individuals — to stream in content from the social web. Since content curation is a key part of this, look for this year’s “killer app” to be a tool that enables power users (brand managers, agencies, community managers, etc.) to fine-tune the content that gets pulled in. [...]“

Comment by Jason:

“Social media will become more global in 2010.

With Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter all gear up on their language translation capabilities, we will see an interesting growth of international users on all these platforms.

Social media will become an increasingly important medium for global brands to market toward oversea consumers. It will be interesting to see how multi-national brand managers can tap into rich social data and engagement oversea without having to leave the corporate headquarter.”

David Armano’s response to comments:

“Seems that the most common, high value use of social media mechanisms is to bypass bad operating designs (service models).”

Yes. Yes. Yes. Social service design possibly? The signs are here, this will probably get traction in the next year in a more formalized way. Again, Twelpforce is an early indicator.

Jason, Global is a good point.

Other themes here that I think would emerge is the popularity of anything that can support the real time Web or as we call “dynamic signals” As Daniel eludes to , storytelling in a real time Web becomes storystreaming. Brands and content providers will have tremendous opportunities here if leadership can persuade the lawyers.

And most definitely social commerce. I already know of a few players planning these initiatives.”

Comment by Loraine Antrim:

“One trend in social media as we approach 2010 is that the “media” aspect will increase dramatically. Video is exploding on the web; more and more blogs include links to video content and as mobile devices expand the use of video, we will see even more video content in all aspects of social media. Also, the idea of “Social” will take second seat to corporations’ use of social media, but the real trend is the increase of SMBs who will start to use social media as a strategy for attraction and retention of customers. [...]“

Ted Koppel on the Information Overload

From the 1980′s. More relevant than ever before, isn’t it?

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.

Social Media Revolution

Via Chad Levitt’s post ‘Do You Believe in the Social Media Revolution?’ from August 24, 2009 I found the video below:

“Very interesting video from Erik Qualman (@equalman) over at socialnomics.com that highlights how social media is changing the ways companies do business and ultimately the world economy.

What does this have to do with the sales profession? Well, everything.”

How many emails do your sales people write to find a contact they are looking for?

This post is with regards to cutting down the time wasted by your own employees (and your channel partners) researching who to contact or which contact details to pass on to the customer when it comes to a specific kind of expert for a specific offering in a specific country.

Real life example

Don’t you know these email trails of at least 10 emails which started off like this: A sales rep asking his boss who in product marketing to contact for the product BCM50 when it is about a customer in Poland?

Sales writes to marketing and marketing writes to each other and before there is a meaningful answer you easily have had ten people involved and a lot of time wasted. (Business cases for how much time of information workers is worth here.)

Statistic

70% of all attempts to find an expert by email are unsuccessful
according to www.thinkbeforeyousend.com

What can Sales Enablement do about it?

Let me show you how the sales enablement application I’m looking after for our 4,000 sales people world-wide cuts down the time to research this kind of contact information. Actually it works just the same if you searched for documents, tools (like ROI calculators), relationships (like cross-selling opportunities), summary descriptions (like updates when a product will be GA) etc.:

This is what we train our marketing and sales employees to do.

1. You drill down from ‘Global’ to ‘Poland’ on the top of the screen or by clicking on a Google Maps like map.
2. In the search form in the upper right hand corner you type in the full name or the acronym of the product/service you are interested in.
3. In the left hand side navigation you pick the kind of information you are looking for.
4. Given that you have now set the context you can pick from the list of experts in the middle of the screen and even call them with one click (UC / Unified Communications that is).

How long does that take? 10 seconds for one person instead of ten emails from different people that everybody is then copied on each time.

Why is it possible to save so much time? The reason is we established an information architecture and lots of people are empowered to keep it up to date by just doing a right click on a piece of information to edit it.

For contact details the following happens: Information that is missing will be filled in the moment the contact from the higher level gets all the requests. He/she will be quick to provide the contact details of who should really be contacted for the specific situation. Basically “forced crowd-sourcing”.

The areas where all this helps you can call sales enablement, conversation enablement, channel enablement or just knowledge management. The application comes from SVA BizSphere (@BizSphere) www.enableyoursales.com:

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

Here is a YouTube video from SVA BizSphere on the topic of finding information:

Buyers want the sales rep to provide information that is tailored to their unique needs

Jeff Ernest (@jeffernst) from thesalesenabler.com wrote “Sales 2.0″ term still not used or recognized by sales leaders on May 19, 2009:

“[...] when a speaker asked a room full of sales and marketing folks “Who’s heard of the term Sales 2.0?” About 25% of the hands went up, almost entirely vendors. My take on the reason for this is that the definitions of Sales 2.0 that the vendors are bandying about are too focused on the usage of Web 2.0 tools by sales reps…namely social networks, blogs, wikis, etc. I’ve got a very different definition of Sales 2.0, and it starts with the buyer…

Because of all of the social media resources available to buyers today on the web, power has shifted from sellers to buyers. No one can deny that buyers today are much better educated about a seller’s offerings long before they talk with a sales rep.

Sales 2.0 is all about how the changing buying process requires changes in how companies sell. Buyers get frustrated if sales people are giving them the same general information they already have. They are demanding that sellers add much more value, by giving them information that’s tailored to their unique needs, at the exact time they need it.

Once we stop talking about Sales 2.0 as Web 2.0 tools for sales reps, and start recognizing it as a fundamentally different way to sell, it will become more relevant to and recognized by sales and marketing practitioners.

In a Sales 2.0 world, sales reps need to be better prepared than ever. What are you doing to prepare your reps?”

For my company I can respond that we are not calling it Sales 2.0 yet but simply Sales Enablement and we are using this application from www.enableyoursales.com / www.bizsphere.com:

“Why re-creating content again and again? Why ending up with multiple versions of the same content across your enterprise? There’s a way to create a sustainable content base for your enterprise. BizSphere content re-use and single sourcing technologies allow you to plan and execute your content production in an organized way enabling content consumers to auto-generate the documents they need, when they need it – instantly and on-the-fly.”

This goes well beyond slides libraries! Basically brings it to the next level by breaking up slides into what they call ‘content nuggets’ and using web 3.0 concepts to auto-generate customized files out of a mind-bobbling number of possible combinations. Saves real dollars / time normally spent on designing PowerPoint or other doc types. No more outsourcing to graphics agencies. Just pick the template and hit “generate”. The result will be polished and include cross-selling opportunities and case studies from the chosen country…

See http://www.enableyoursales.com/en/solution/documentgeneration/ for more information.

www.vaztinc.com/blog/ published the post Six issues that content and inbound marketing technology fails to address on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009:

“[...] Generic content does not work anymore, you need to address each stakeholder, if you are selling to a CIO, CFO, HR, you need specific content to address their business requirements.”

Sales 2.0 Technology – Real Opportunity or Sales SOS? March 21, 2009 by Darren Cunningham, Director of Product Marketing at LucidEra [Links added by the author of this blog].

“[...] make my sales team more effective, not just efficient?

According to a recent IDC study (Don’t Understand Sales Enablement? You’re Not Alone!, 2009) 57% of customers feel that sales reps are not sufficiently prepared about the solution they offer, the country they are in and the industry the customer is working in. Therefore, by providing the seller with the latest and most specific content and experts within the organisation can help him prepare faster and better before his/her pitch.
Cross-Referencing the own offering portfolio (this product can be sold with this service, logistics say that this product is often shipped together with that product, etc) can enable upselling as well.”