Sales Enablement Tools - destinationCRM.com

Sales Enablement Tools - destinationCRM.com

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Introducing the launch of a new Sales Enablement SaaS website: www.navigateknowledge.com

Sales Enablement – An Inverse Definition

Instead of defining sales enablement, I prefer to focus on the inadequacies of the existing legacy sales portals (many large companies have more than 6). Sales Portals widen the gulf between sales and marketing.

An investment in sales enablement pays dividends in several ways but perhaps the strongest benefit is the alignment of a customers marketing investment with their sales resources. The legacy sales portals that are still being used by most businesses actually reinforce the practices that keep marketing and sales teams misaligned. Marketing teams are rewarded based partially on their ability to create sales collateral, brochures, presentations, campaigns, and such; whereas sales teams are rewarded based on their ability to retire quota. Legacy sales portals provide no feedback mechanisms to ensure the marketing team is actually producing valuable material to aid the sales effort, and the sales teams are too busy working to meet/exceed their numbers that they can’t take time out to address the issue. The longer this problem goes unchecked, the more systemic it becomes. The only time anyone in sales talks about it is when they don’t make their numbers or hit their accelerators, at which point the “complaints” are largely ignored. The problem is compounded year after year as more marketing materials get posted onto the portal with little or no governance in place to remove “dated” items, making finding useful material even more difficult. The useful material that is found typically has to be reworked, taking valuable “selling” hours away from sales. It is estimated that from 70% to as high as 90% of the material produced by marketing goes unused by sales. (IDC).

By providing a foundation for collaboration with integrated communications, by making it easier to find material, and through content management best practices, the benefits of Knowledge Navigator include a much improved Marketing return on investment, increased sales force productivity, and better feedback and collaboration between the two groups. For the leadership team, this amounts to reduced COS, lower SG&A, a much more competitive organization (with selling & marketing aligned), and quite likely better top line revenues.

Sales Enablement solutions like Knowledge Navigator are ideally suited to recognize this cause and effect and they are ideally suited to be deployed on a semantic web platform like BizSphere. The bottom line is that sales people needs to have the right information at their fingertips in order to ensure companies meet and exceed their revenue and profit targets.