Sales enablement is the pragmatic discipline of translating high level corporate business strategy, marketing messages and sales strategy into everything your revenue generating groups need to ‘go Tell and go Sell’.

EQAgency.com is a sales enablement agency. Here I’m introducing the discipline of sales enablement, the tactics for delivering it, and demonstrating why this is more relevant than ever. Going beyond the mechanics and traditional explanations, I’ll talk about why I believe that a successful journey can only start with a sincere human connection between company leadership and its sales force.

1.     Introduction

Some of you might be well versed in what sales enablement is, but since most companies do not have a distinct group focussed on this, many are not.  Often referred to as sales readiness, it’s commonly rolled-up under the umbrella of marketing or sales training. What is sure, is that medium to large organisations definitely feel it if they don’t have it, and so does their bottom line.

“It’s the glue between the story your company tells, and what your sales force sells.”

As you think about the need for sales enablement, think about some of the most common complaints from sales. Ever heard any of these?

I am over-loaded with info, I don’t remember what info we have and where to find it! Our corporate message is inspiring, but how can I connect it to my day to day work?!  What does marketing do anyway ?!!

It can feel a bit like this!!

“When sales is not enabled to tell and sell your company’s story it means the glue has come unstuck.”

2.     The financial risk

The financial risk of not addressing these issues is intuitive, and the statistics bear this out.

According to a recent study by IDC, ‘Marketing Investment Planner 2009: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators’:

• The average company spends $12,500 per rep per year on sales enablement.
• Reformatting of collateral costs the organisation an estimated $5,600 annually per seller.
• It’s estimated that over $5,000 per seller per year is wasted in unfruitful searches for information.
• Duplicated content and overlapping sales facing portals costs organisations an estimated over $4 million per year.

This signals a disconnect between sales and marketing, and IDC reports in the, ‘CMO research study: Closing the gap: The Sales and Marketing Imperative’, that as much as 60 percent of sales facing content is never used.

“The ability to differentiate product, sell value over price and consistent brand reinforcement, are the top 3 sales success drivers at risk.”

The figures speak for themselves and would be of concern even in a buoyant environment, but nowadays waste, inefficiency and anything that harms revenue generating prospects is unacceptable.

3.     Selling in today’s reality

The basic necessity of articulating your sales story has never been so important. According to the IDC study, ‘Sales Enablement 3.0: A Transformation of Sales Enabled by a Transformation of Marketing’:

‘Buyers increasingly consider “relationship ROI”, as well as product ROI.  And, buyers will tell you that, in this economy, they no longer have tolerance for uninformed vendor representatives who come through their doors’.

With increased competition for dollars, sellers are often challenged to fall back on price when differentiation is even more critical.Short term revenue gains driven by price cutting, are of course completely unsustainable and devalue the brand. Sales need to be armed to push value and quality over price, and one of the ways of doing this is to push solution sells over pure product sells.  This approach has been favoured by large to medium enterprises during the past 10 years; it promotes business value, offers economies of scale to customers and creates cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, but it’s hard to pursue successfully.

Depending on the maturity of the business, gearing up for solution selling involves a change in sales behaviour. Frequently many sellers retreat into their comfort zone and push their favourite products, thereby reducing brand differentiation in a crowded market-place. At the other extreme, sellers may be very confident in evangelising the brand, but may not be able to connect this to the product detail and therefore substantiate the brand claims. Realistically, pushing a solution sell may not be appropriate for every scenario, but every seller needs to be fully armed and trained-up to instantly identify which scenario is right, and flex to tell that story. Below we look at the mechanics of taking your story to the field, and talk about the importance of creating a sincere connection with your sales force.

“Sellers must be as confident in articulating your top-level story, as a solution story, or a product story.”

4.     Taking your message to market

i.            Structuring your marketing proposition for consistency and clarity

The marketing proposition must start at the brand rather than the product level. Ensure the brand story is first underpinned by solutions, which in turn are underpinned by the products. Sounds obvious, but this often requires a mindset shift for companies with a strong product heritage. Cross-selling and up-selling mean that your messaging needs to work harder to connect across, up and down.  Establishing a clear brand picture must be balanced with sharing the nuts and bolts of product information.

ii.            Delivering the marketing proposition

Typically we would move on to the go-to-market mechanics at this stage, training, tool-kits and information sharing. However, if you want to get your sales force to live and breathe your message and confidently evangelise this to customers, this requires more than pushing out information. From my observations, the absolute foundation of a successful sales enablement programme, and one which is often lacking, is creating a genuine human connection between a company’s leadership and its foot soldiers. I believe that large corporations often pay ‘lip-service’ to this, and yes this cannot be solved by sales enablement alone;  but think how much more confidently your sales people will evangelise your story, if they truly feel it, and how much more motivated they will be, if they believe that you feel their customer reality.

iii.            Creating a human connection with your sales force

“Attract, Engage, Inspire, Connect.”

Where to start?

An easy approach is to simply think about your company message as your brand, and your sales force as your most important customer.

How would you; Attract, Engage, Inspire and ultimately Connect?

Sales people have a propensity to learn through visual stimulation.

This should be your first consideration when deciding on your approach.

With imaginative and surprising visual creativity you will grab your audience’s attention within 60 seconds, without fail.   When creating your slides, imagine if you couldn’t use any words, and only the image could do the talking; that should be the foundation of your creative approach. Of course you can’t always work with images alone, heavier information is often needed, but pepper this with powerful imagery, and your presentation will work harder.

Secondly, when building sincere connections, remember that this is no different from how you would appeal to an individual if you wanted to build a personal relationship. The language of empathy as the foundation of the connection, is so much more important in today’s challenging environment. Keep away from corporate jargon which people become inured to, and just speak as if this were a normal conversation.

“Sales people need you to demonstrate that you get their customer reality.”

Never underestimate the power of music that perfectly captures your message and expresses what you want your audience to feel.

A great way to combine all these key creative elements and to powerfully connect with your audience within seconds is through video based ‘movies’.

Imagery should always go beyond the conventional. So often we are presented with trite images to represent business concepts.

Look at the two examples conveying a message of trust – which one is more memorable?

Once you’ve established those building blocks, then you are in the position to support it with the more traditional aspects of sales enablement.

iv.            Training

• Apply the creative techniques explored above to inspire and connect, before getting into the deeper information.
• Where affordable conduct training face to face in groups of no larger than 30 people, if not, online training modules or live meetings are the next best options.
• Up-weight the usage of peer and customer vox-pops to achieve credibility, over leadership messages.
• Practice articulation of the brand and cross-sell and up-sell sales pitches in break-out groups, and pick out individuals at random to present these back to the group. Video these and share on your sharing platforms.
• Hand-out physical tool-kits wherever possible.

v.            Challenges to content usage and information sharing

Easy access to the right information is essential, but the figures referred to above show that much content goes to waste. The four major contributors are:

• Difficulty finding the information
• Content in multiple locations
• “Content is not effective to prepare me to sell.”
• “Quality of content is unacceptable.”

‘An Inconvenient Truth:  The Role and Value of Information in the IT Buying Process’ ( IDC special study #209985, January 2008).

“Sellers spend hours searching for and gathering information.”

Information sharing and community building

Most companies are guilty of having too many sharing platforms – SharePoints and intranets. SharePoint is a great storage facility foryour materials, templates and data, but sales people are rarely enthusiastic about it. It’s not particularly easy to navigate and doesn’t allow for user interaction. Instead of pushing information out, consider enticing users in; make it entertaining as well as useful. Make a commitment to enable sales to become a community, through investment in sharing platforms which can be built onto your existing SharePoint.  Communities encourage peer-to-peer learning, and when combined with uploads of ‘official’ material from your marketing department, this makes your budget work harder. Creating a private Facebook community, or using properties such as Windows Live are inexpensive ways of doing this, and these can then link through to the SharePoint.  Encourage people to upload user generated content and upload your company podcasts. The community will need to be managed to ensure fresh commentary, and that the quality of content is appropriate.

“Think of your SharePoint as the sales counter within a department store, and your community site as the shop window that lures customers in.”

Relevance of content

Once sales have actually found the content, what they find is often not sufficiently relevant or up to date. The problem is compounded by overlapping content on related topics from multiple marketing groups eg. product marketing and brand marketing groups, which usually sit in different parts of the organisation. Furthermore, when pursuing the solution-selling approach, easy access to the different content elements which can be assembled into an integrated presentation, is vital.

Assembling content

Sales need pitch information that caters for a plethora of situations, including pushing the brand and a particular solution, or a solution and a variety of products. These might also need to be tailored to a specific vertical, a target audience, or client objective. Catering to all of this ‘manually’ would require a great deal of resource and marketing budget, today this is far from realistic. What is needed is a presentation ‘collator’ with simple search functionality which enables sales to look up their customer vertical/target audience and then find the solution, the product information and research that best fits. Sales then assemble the content using a standard template.

“Ask your sales people about the steps they undertake when responding to a brief or preparing for a client meeting, and match content accessibility accordingly.”

Think about this as a kind of ‘pick ‘n mix’ that you find in a cinema, people select from a vast array of sweets, take away the perfect mix for them, and all the sweets are presented in the same type of bag.  Of course no tool meets every situation, or replaces the sales person’s judgement and each company requires different levels of information, but after the initial set-up, this will reduce reliance on marketing resource and boost sales productivity.

vi.            Tool-kits

Printing materials is of course more expensive, but sales people do like having physical materials on their desk, or pocket information to take out when with clients. External tool-kits should contain at a minimum:

• Client ready deck covering your all-up story – no more than 10 pages. This should also work as a shell where sales can incorporate relevant content.
• Client ready1 slide PowerPoint for the brand, each solution and product, for inclusion in all-up client ready deck.
• PowerPoint and word templates.
• Client ready1 pager PDFs for the brand, each solution and product, for emailing.
• Battle-cards.
• Top-line data cards.
• Budget permitting, or for more complex propositions; videos, DVDs and demos are very popular with time poor clients and sales people.

This is just a guide to the basic elements, each organisation will need a variation of this.

5.     In summary

“Where the rubber hits the road”

Sales enablement gives your sales force all the practical tools and expertise they need to ‘go Tell and go Sell’. That’s why I call it, ‘where the rubber hits the road’.

If you are debating whether to invest in this area, ask yourself how much resource and investment is currently wasted. Listen to the concerns of your sales force, and to your client feedback. Finally, consider the cost of sending out an ill-equipped sales force to face the toughest economic climate for 70 years.

6.     Further reading

Sales Enablement Implementation & Case Study – Jeanne Hellman

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22779625/Sales-Enablement-Implementation-Study-Sept09-final

Improving Sales Force Performance – Ogilvy & Mather

http://www.scribd.com/doc/11302881/Improving-Sales-Force-Performance

Sales Enablement 3.0: A Transformation of Sales Enabled by a Transformation of Marketing – Clare Gillian, Lee Levitt, Seana Dowling (IDC)

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=218546&sessionId=PV0AYH1SSC5EGCQJAFICFGAKBEAUMIWD

7.     Contacts

At EQAgency.com we offer 3 forms of sales enablement:

Marketing Services.

Digital Media Expertise

Yield Management for Online Publishers

To find out more about how sales enablement can help your business, please contact us at:

info@eqagency.com.  Or visit our website www.eqagency.com

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~ by eqagency on December 23, 2009.