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A Sales Optimization Strategy - Sales Enablement
ByJeanne HellmanSales Enablement Leader September 2009How does your company plan to optimize your sales force in 2010? This activity seems to be almost ayearly ritual for many companies. Over 1,800 CSO Insights’ Survey
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respondents listed their “13 TopInitiatives to Improve Sales Performance in 2009”, and these items were almost identical to the 2008 list.How disruptive is it to your sales force to keep introducing this type of change year after year? And hasyour tactical implementation been successful in the past? I would argue it has not or you wouldn’t needto keep redoing it. Instead, consider going in a new direction and implement a Sales Enablementinitiative to lead the way. After all, Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over andover again, yet expecting different results.One Sales Enablement initiative would address half of your action items and bring them together in amore cohesive, seamless and cost effective way. It is important to note that increasing revenues is andalways should be at the top of the list. But just making more sales calls or hiring more sellers (typicaltactical response plans) won’t necessarily lead to more revenues; better quality calls will. SalesEnablement is the catalyst that will connect the dots between sales and marketing, thus enabling your company to work smarter, reduce the risk of misinformation, and achieve a sales knowledge advantage.Of the 13 initiatives listed in the CSO Insights’ Survey
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, six fall under the realm of a good SalesEnablement strategy. These include: #2: Improving rep access to knowledge to sell effectively (31.8%);#3: More closely aligning sales and Marketing (30.8%), and #5: Enhancing sales team communications(28.7%). Doing these activities successfully will add more value and quality to customer interactionsthough better communication, sales collaboration and access to relevant messaging. IDC states that withbetter teamwork and a cohesive focus by both sales and marketing on enablement, sales productivity willimprove by $260K per rep per year 
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. It’s not a leap to agree that this, in turn, will result in higher closerates, reduced operational costs and increased revenue.
T
URNING
 
COMPANY
 
SPIEL
 
TO
 
CUSTOMER
 
VALUE
 
In today’s economy, customers are willing to sacrifice a “perfect fit” for something that is “good enough” tomeet their needs, since in most instances there are multiple options available that will deliver their minimum requirements. Your corporate messages are what will differentiate you from your competitorsand demonstrate why your product is the best fit for your customer. But too many times, your sellers onlyknow how to talk about your product and company, and don’t know how to converse about the businessand customer needs; yet this type of conversation needs to happen with the first handshake or they maynot get a second chance. Respondents of the CSO Insights’ Survey
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validate this when they confirmedthe reasons they are winning deals is based on relationships (55%) as opposed to product superiority(41%). Unfortunately, only 7% felt that the marketing messages contributed at all.We are seeing the top analyst firms confirming that access to knowledge is key to sales force success.But what type of knowledge should your sales force have, and how do they get to it? Sellers need to
 
prepare for their “pitch” to the customer, put together the proposal, close the deal and follow the deliveryof the contract. Ideally, you need to give them access to what they need quickly (company offerings, RFQ,supply chain, etc.) and match it to customer requirements (delivery expectations, interoperability, price,etc.).
T
HE
 
STATE
 
OF
 
KNOWING
: A
RM
 
 YOUR
 
SALES
 
FORCE
 
WITH
 
ACCESS
 
TO
 
INFORMATION
Typically, the 30,000 ft. corporate messages (I refer to this as “corporate knowledge”) are mostly presetand intended for mass distribution, delivering “one voice” consistency for your audience. How your salesforce takes these and converts them into customer value during the handshake (3 ft level) is traditionallyleft up to your sellers to figure out.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 salescall. After that, it’s the knowledge of the sales team that will be needed to close the deal
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. This meansthat you must rely on your sellers to deliver those messages in a way that resonates with your customer.To enable the best conversations, give your sellers access to both corporate and personal knowledge inone setting.
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“Corporate knowledge” is preset in nature. In most medium to large organizations, each type of information is managed by different teams and mass distributed through online tools, indocuments, on web sites and other online portals to a large audience. Most of the presetcollateral is impersonal and generic in nature and very few of the marketing teams that create ithave ever supported a sales person or been in the field and interacted with a customer.
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“Personal knowledge” lives inside the heads of your top sellers, top performers, sales engineersand other sales support staff within your company. It consists of intimate details and customer insights that have been gained through years of personal experience and interaction. This insightis usually kept close to the chest within designated teams and distributed in emails and IMsamong and between small core groups or individuals. Some companies are starting to recognizethe need to try and capture this knowledge as most of it walks out the door when an employeeleaves.For most B to B interactions, your sellers have to convert the company-centric messages into customer-centric value to prepare for the face-to-face conversation that will hopefully lead to the next conversationand eventually persuade the customer to take action. In most cases, this takes several hours of preparation and reformatting time for a single engagement. IDC estimated that companies waste almost$11,000 per seller per year with unproductive activities like searching and reformatting
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. Multiply that byevery seller and every engagement, and there is a lot of opportunity to improve your processes andbottom line.
A
CASE
 
STUDY
A global Telecom company decided to implement a Sales Enablement strategy mid 2006 as part of alarger business transformation initiative to reduce SG&A (Selling, General and Administrative expenses of an operating budget) and to address long standing complaints from the sales force. It was a heavilymatrixed, global organization with around 450 products, 30 solutions, and over 90 different professionalservices, and every seller was expected to sell “everything on the truck”. Information was spread around
Sales Enablement: Achieving Your Sales Knowledge Advantage
 Jeanne Hellman, Sales Enablement LeaderSeptember 20092
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