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A Case for Sales Enablement
Jeanne Hellman, Sales Enablement Leader 
In tough economic times, some companies just weather the storm: others capitalize on the economicdownturn to realign, streamline and prepare for the rebound. Part of a successful transformationshould be crafting a winning sales enablement strategy, which will position sellers to take the leadand out-sell their competition.A winning sales enablement framework will support Sellers in their ever changing and complexselling environment. It is comprised of tools, processes, people and content that, when managed inunison, will deliver value added information when they need it. Benefits to the organization include:
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Decreasing seller preparation time;
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Improving marketing and seller productivity;
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Leveraging knowledge experts and sales leaders to help all sellers become better informed;
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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 preparingmembers 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 theright messages are being delivered at the right time. Think of this as the same concept as “Just-in-Time” delivery, but instead of delivering goods, it delivers the right message into the hands of sales atthe right time ─ what they need, when they need it. It is similar in concept to Sales Readiness or SalesEffectiveness, but tends to focus more on improving the synergies with Marketing and pre-salescontent.Still not sure what this means to your organization? Look at it this way: It’s your corporate messagesthat 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 fromthe first handshake through the closing of the deal.But it’s not easy. It requires change from multiple facets within an organization. It requires agreementto 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 theorganization from document management to content management. And it takes the desire to haveeveryone 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. Butthe old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” applies perfectly here. Just introducing a new portal won’timprove the quality of a poorly written value proposition or update an outdated presentation. And justfiltering 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 repositioninglong 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 twolegs 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 mostenterprises encounter:
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Corporate messages go unread and unused
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People never really adopt the new changes and continue to bypass them
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Content is not presented to sales in a way that they prefer to learn
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they need it now, presentedfor a specific purpose. They won’t attend something they get today intended for next week, nextmonth, or next year.
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Tools don't match collateral delivery or the sales cycle
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Tools that should build momentum and simplify the buying cycle too often impede it
People, Technology, Processes and Content – the Four Legs of the (SalesEnablement) Chair
All four tracks (the four legs mentioned above) need to be present to move an organization to the nextlevel successfully.
 People
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Both content contributors and sellers will need to change the way they think about content and theway 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 tosales reps; and deliver it all when and where sellers need it. Sellers need to break their preferred habitwhen it comes to content: they have to go and get it as opposed to emailing or calling someone elsefor it. It is also incumbent on the organization to provide constant reinforcement and training to bothaudiences to ensure adoption and understanding.
“I used it (the sales enablement portal) today to follow-up on a number of requests related tomy 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!!! Nowthat’s productivity.” Account Director, Top Wireless Phone Company in Canada ─ talking 
 Jeanne Hellman, Sales Enablement LeaderPage 211/19/2009
 
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 aseller 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 thetechnology). A good portal can also help “slice and dice” content so that is it presented to users whenand how they are using it--- by the steps of the sales cycle and in context to region and offeringtaxonomy.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 knowledgeexperts are also being downsized. Sellers can be one click away from accessing the knowledgeexperts within an organization by instilling a quick means for sellers to talk to sellers, such as socialnetworking (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 singlecontent repository portal.
 Processes
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Most companies that have multiple portals don’t have a unified submission process for postingcontent. This means duplicate files, redundant roles, and multiple processes. By implementing onesubmission form and letting the technology post the content, contributors can focus on the experienceas 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 forwardto gatekeepers of the portals, who then cut and paste into various forms for publication. Compare thisto a non-traditional publishing model where each content owner has the ability to publish directly tothe internal portals, with authorizing agents to serve as gate keepers if the need exists. Fewer handstouch 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 documentsup in hours where it would take me two to three weeks before.” Product Marketing Prime, NA
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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 andexpire 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 used
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. This is caused by distrust and is compounded by the fact thatthere is so much clutter sales can’t find anything they deem as useful. Companies can use technologyto instill life cycle management into their existing document repositories. These systems make it more
 Jeanne Hellman, Sales Enablement LeaderPage 311/19/2009
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