A Case For Sales Enablement

A Case for Sales Enablement Jeanne Hellman, Sales Enablement Leader

In tough economic times, some companies just weather the storm: others capitalize on the economic downturn to realign, streamline and prepare for the rebound. Part of a successful transformation should be crafting a winning sales enablement strategy, which will position sellers to take the lead and out-sell their competition. A winning sales enablement framework will support Sellers in their ever changing and complex selling environment. It is comprised of tools, processes, people and content that, when managed in unison, will deliver value added information when they need it. Benefits to the organization include: • Decreasing seller preparation time; • Improving marketing and seller productivity; • Leveraging knowledge experts and sales leaders to help all sellers become better informed; • Providing training, mentoring, coaching and contacts every step of the way.

What is a winning Sales Enablement strategy? Sales Enablement comprises a set of cross-functional activities specifically targeted at preparing members of a sales team for a successful customer engagement. It establishes the tools and formal processes needed to increase sales team performance and aligns the people and content to ensure the right messages are being delivered at the right time. Think of this as the same concept as “Just-inTime” delivery, but instead of delivering goods, it delivers the right message into the hands of sales at the right time ─ what they need, when they need it. It is similar in concept to Sales Readiness or Sales Effectiveness, but tends to focus more on improving the synergies with Marketing and pre-sales content. Still not sure what this means to your organization? Look at it this way: It’s your corporate messages that will differentiate you from your competitors and tell customers why they should purchase your product or service over someone else’s. If applied correctly, it will help your sellers articulate your 30,000 ft corporate messages at eye level and ensure they are correctly conveyed to a customer from the first handshake through the closing of the deal. But it’s not easy. It requires change from multiple facets within an organization. It requires agreement to align the tools, messages, processes, and methodologies across product, marketing, sales engineers, and sales business groups. It takes a whole new thought process and commitment to move the organization from document management to content management. And it takes the desire to have everyone within the organization help sales make a sale.

The Four Legged Chair Analogy Most organizations start with implementing a new technology portal (the easiest tactic) and call it a

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day – then they are surprised when the tool isn’t adopted and seller frustrations are not alleviated. But the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies perfectly here. Just introducing a new portal won’t improve the quality of a poorly written value proposition or update an outdated presentation. And just filtering the massive amount of information through a new portal won’t make templates consistent or add a missing brief. Instilling content discipline within the marketing organization and repositioning long established mindsets of content delivery and timing are paramount to any success. In fact, without this, the tool won’t be used and time and money will be wasted. Another way is to think about this is to use a chair as an analogy --- The main purpose of a chair is to be a seat. It’s most stable and provides the most value with four legs; it can work with three legs but begins to get a little wobbly. However, if you try to use it as a seat with anything less than three legs, it’s not very effective and becomes too much of a balancing act. Many organizations have one or two legs that work adequately, but not many can claim they have four stable legs. A comprehensive implementation of the four legs will alleviate some common pitfalls that most enterprises encounter: •Corporate messages go unread and unused •People never really adopt the new changes and continue to bypass them •Content is not presented to sales in a way that they prefer to learn ─ they need it now, presented for a specific purpose. They won’t attend something they get today intended for next week, next month, or next year. •Tools don't match collateral delivery or the sales cycle •Tools that should build momentum and simplify the buying cycle too often impede it

People, Technology, Processes and Content – the Four Legs of the (Sales Enablement) Chair All four tracks (the four legs mentioned above) need to be present to move an organization to the next level successfully. People: Both content contributors and sellers will need to change the way they think about content and the way it’s delivered. Marketing teams need to understand sales strategies that will drive revenue; identify the critical buying conversations; connect the insights and expertise of knowledge experts to sales reps; and deliver it all when and where sellers need it. Sellers need to break their preferred habit when it comes to content: they have to go and get it as opposed to emailing or calling someone else for it. It is also incumbent on the organization to provide constant reinforcement and training to both audiences to ensure adoption and understanding. “I used it (the sales enablement portal) today to follow-up on a number of requests related to my customer engagement. It literally took me minutes to find all the right material and get it to the customer. In the past this may have taken hours, which I just cannot afford!!! Now that’s productivity.” Account Director, Top Wireless Phone Company in Canada ─ talking

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about using the sales enablement portal to find his information. Technology: Most companies have separate content portals for sellers, sales engineers and partners, which means a seller needs to learn and navigate through three or more portals to hunt for information. A single, agile portal can serve all three internal audiences seamlessly (with permissions handled by the technology). A good portal can also help “slice and dice” content so that is it presented to users when and how they are using it--- by the steps of the sales cycle and in context to region and offering taxonomy. Another thing to consider is integrating different communication vehicles in this single experience. This is more important now than ever before, especially as content contributors and knowledge experts are also being downsized. Sellers can be one click away from accessing the knowledge experts within an organization by instilling a quick means for sellers to talk to sellers, such as social networking (or social media), blogs, wikis, presence awareness and VoIP clients. "I used to review 20 different websites when putting together customer presentations. Now I just review our Sales Enablement portal." Account Rep, ASIA─ talking about using a single content repository portal. Processes: Most companies that have multiple portals don’t have a unified submission process for posting content. This means duplicate files, redundant roles, and multiple processes. By implementing one submission form and letting the technology post the content, contributors can focus on the experience as opposed to managing portals. Another option is direct content publishing. With a traditional web publishing model many folks own documents, who send to gatekeepers of the content, who forward to gatekeepers of the portals, who then cut and paste into various forms for publication. Compare this to a non-traditional publishing model where each content owner has the ability to publish directly to the internal portals, with authorizing agents to serve as gate keepers if the need exists. Fewer hands touch the content, which frees up resources and accelerates the time to publish. “Posting content myself is so much quicker that with the other portals. I can get documents up in hours where it would take me two to three weeks before.” Product Marketing Prime, NA ─ comparing the traditional web posting process with the more innovative style of posting documents to a portal. Content: There is so much content being produced now that many companies don’t even bother to try and expire or update it. But what does that do to the sales force? IDC reports that as much of 60% of sales facing content is never used3. This is caused by distrust and is compounded by the fact that there is so much clutter sales can’t find anything they deem as useful. Companies can use technology to instill life cycle management into their existing document repositories. These systems make it more

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palatable for the owners since they can proactively manage their content via email. Instilling document management principles and best practices throughout an organization will not only save sellers time in data collection, but reduce duplication, eliminate outdated content, simplify information overload, and alleviate archiving nightmares. In turn, any redundant marketing resources can be freed up and realigned to more strategic and productive endeavors. “Centralizing and maintaining core presentations assure a reduction in recreating them by the masses. I think this has great potential!” Sales Engineer, EMEA ─ discussing the ability to auto-generate a customer presentation in the sales enablement portal.

Everyone Wins Every piece of content marketing creates or facilitates should enable a sale: if that doesn’t happen, then nobody gets a paycheck… it can’t be expressed any simpler than that. Sales Enablement will provide the ability to connect the dots between marketing and sales, thus enabling a company to work smarter, reduce the risk of misinformation, and achieve a sales knowledge advantage by adding more value and quality to customer interactions. As an unanticipated benefit, a winning Sales Enablement strategy can reduce the learning curve of new sales hires by helping build their networks at an accelerated pace. CSO Insights indicates the time it now takes to get a newly hired sales rep up to full productivity has increased 32% during the past four years4. It can also move less effective tenured sellers to the right of the bell curve by strengthening their networks and skills. IDC states that sales turnover averages 10-50%, and companies spend an average of $20K to $30K per rep each year on training and asset creation, anticipating success in two to three years1. With this type of integrated sales support, any sales person can handle any sales task, event, or obstacle quickly and efficiently. “As a new employee (4 weeks currently) our new sales enablement portal has tremendously helped me and other new employees in our department learn the product portfolios with ease... I believe it exceeds the current complex website design when you need to learn product offerings for a variety of applications very fast.” Sales, NA: discussing how an integrated strategy and a single sales portal can reduce the learning curve.

Industry Expert Opinion According to IDC, the average company is spending $12.5K per rep per year on sales enablement. They also state that through better teamwork and a cohesive focus by both sales and marketing on enablement, sales productivity will improve by $260K per rep per year2. It’s not a leap to agree that increased productivity, effectiveness and performance in your sales organization will result in higher close rates and reduced operational costs. The benefits to any organization willing to embark on such a venture are tremendous and at minimum

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should yield: •A reduction in unused documents (estimated that companies spend an average of $20K to $30K per rep each year on training and sales assets, yet over 60% sales documents are never used by sales2); •A reduction in reformatting time (estimated impact of $5,600 annually per seller3); •An improved success rate of sales finding their ever elusive content (estimated that over $5,000 per seller per year wasted in unfruitful searches by sellers3); •The elimination of duplicated content and a reduction in sales facing portals (estimated to cost organizations over $4million per year3)

Case Study A global Telecom company decided to implement a Sales Enablement strategy at the end of 2006 as part of a larger business transformation initiative. At this time, the company had revenues of $11.28B, 31,550 employees, approximately 3,500 sellers, and around 450 products, 30 solutions, and over 90 different services. During an average month, there were 6,000 documents on the sales portal at any given time, and the web team posted an average of 145 new documents a month. There was no document life cycle in place, nor did they have standard templates across the product lines (other than branding requirements). Depending on the product mix, it was not inconceivable that a seller may have to access over 30 portals to conduct business (such as pricing tools, information portals, CRM tools, proposal tools, partner tools and compensation tools). In addition, there were over 20 portals that contained various forms of competitive information. Needless to say, it took sellers hours to look for basic information. Seller confidence in Marketing was very low and complaints were high. The ultimate goal was to implement a sales enablement strategy that would raise seller confidence in marketing and improve seller satisfaction through addressing their long standing complaints of outdated/poor content and difficulty in finding information. The overall strategies were to: champion seller needs, refocus marketing efforts to improve the quality of content and enhance the delivery vehicles, processes and technology. Due to the massive undertaking, it was decided to break these challenges into phases. The first phase focused on four immediate, short term improvements that would show good faith to the sales teams: 1) Focus on the delivery of content, 2) Establish accountability for content, 3) Ensure content availability, and 4) Auto-generate key customer collateral. Tactical solutions included: • •

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Create a state-of-the art, VoIP enabled application to support the content delivery through the steps of the sales cycle that would serve as the first stop for finding sales facing content. Improve the content experience: Ensure content had an owner and was assigned to region/country and offering/function; Establish minimum content requirements for key portfolio tabs; Standardize templates for key document types; and Monitor and report on gap analysis for missing content. Develop new publishing processes, content governance models and structures.

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•

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Regularly interact with Sales and Sales Support teams to assess needs, Identify and recommend resolution for pain points; and Gather/analyze ongoing feedback around quality of experience with the portal and future requirements. Provide seller feedback into the Marketing teams regarding content needs.

Phase 1 of the deployment paid dividends in just 18 months. So far, the Sales Enablement initiative has: 1. Reduced costs associated with maintaining non-value added information sites through aligning, repurposing, consolidating or decommissioning information portals: Consolidated 3 information portals into 1—reducing IT costs and eliminating 64% of outdated documents. 2. Improved efficiency by reviewing and streamlining cumbersome, redundant or unnecessary processes—contributing to the reassignment of web publishers. 3. Reduced the time it takes sellers to find value added information by 25%—from 4 to 3 hours per customer call. 4. Slashed time required for sellers to create presentations—by 33% through auto-generating documents. 5. Increased Sales Confidence in marketing by establishing content governance and workflow initiatives, reducing resource types and ensuring minimum content levels for offerings— resulting in a 69% increase in document downloads.

Can’t Rest on Your Laurels As we’ve seen, a winning sales enablement strategy is more than implementing a new tool and filtering existing data. In today’s economy, customers are willing to sacrifice a “perfect fit” for products that are “good enough” to meet their needs. Joe Galvin, Vice President and Research Director from SiriusDecisions stated that the effectiveness of preset collateral (that is produced by marketing teams) diminishes in value after the first or second sales call. After that, it’s the knowledge of the sales team that will be needed to close the deal4. This means that your corporate messages are more important than ever to help differentiate you from your competitors. It also means that you must rely on your sellers to deliver those messages in a way that resonates with your customer. You need to empower your sellers by providing them access to this knowledge to be successful. A winning sales enablement strategy will help your sellers get there faster and more efficiently. 1

IDC report: Best Practices in Sales Productivity: Sales Enablement. Oct 2007. IDC Marketing Investment Planner 2009: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators. 3 IDC’s Providing the Value of Content Technologies Study, 2004. 4 CSO Insights’ Sales 2.0 Whitepaper, 2007 5 Excerpt from a presentation made during a Sales Enablement workshop held November 2008 in Chicago, Illinois by Joe Galvin, Vice President and Research Director from SiriusDecisions. 2

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