- Are you in Marketing/Sales Enablement at a business that sells to businesses all over the world?
- Would it look anywhere close to the image above when all products and services, that your company needs to enable sales people and channel partners for, were shown in a taxonomy/hierarchy?
- Do you have traditional intranet pages for each country or sales region that you have sales people or channel partners in?
If so, then you have thousands of silos to maintain and your users have hundreds of mouse clicks stealing their time! (Also see “Important characteristics of how typical sales reps at large organizations roll”.)
On May 15, 2009, @scottsantucci (Forrester Analyst covering Sales Enablement) tweeted:
“Had a briefing from BizSphere. Very interesting thinking, particularly about the need for an information architecture.”
Displaying your Sales Enablement resources and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…
- a context (an information architecture)
- in Rich Internet Applications using web2.0 technologies
… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past.
BizSphere Sales Web does exactly this. The result can look like the images below and requires an amazingly low number of mouse clicks to navigate.
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 
Paul,
The file structure screen shot is a great (and realistic!) example of the ‘archaeological dig’ that so many salespeople face. Clearly we’re not enabling salespeople if we force them through this sort of hierarchy.
Solving the dig requires being 1) relevant to the salesperson, and 2) encouraging the ‘discoverability’ of useful but unknown sales assets. Essentially what this means is that:
– To be relevant to the salesperson, a Sales Enablement solution needs to be relevant at multiple levels: based on the organization I’m in, the role I’m in, the ‘play’ I’m trying to execute, and the customer. Filters, like you’ve shown, can be a big plus in this regard. An additional thing to consider is how well does the system automatically provide the right assets? In other words, if I’m in a particular division, do I only see the assets and sales methodology that matter in my organization? Do I only see what’s relevant to me as a field, or inside, or partner salesperson? And can I easily find the right assets for different plays—e.g. cross-selling—and allow me to customize them for my customer, e.g. editing a PDF with customer-specific ROI information?
– Discoverability is also critical. In the hierarchy screen shot, you’d be lucky enough to find what you knew you needed, let alone some surprise gem! Sales Enablement also needs to promote the best assets even if you didn’t know what you were looking for. In additional to filters, which tend to be set up top-down by marketing people, bottom-up community usage (what do other salespeople use, like, or what’s new?) can also be really useful in pushing the hidden gems to the top.
Thanks again for all the great posts. I’m looking forward to more.
Peter
VP Product Management
SAVO
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Hi Peter
Thanks for your comment.
I agree with you that it needs to be a highly customized experience for each user based on
– what we know about their job,
– what we know about their language and location,
– what we know about their last visits to the Sales Enablement app,
– what they want and don’t want to see (they might have taken the time to adjust some settings),
– what marketing or corporate want them to see (news alert/announcement, promotion/campaign, etc)
– what their peers have rated, tagged, contributed…
– and what they are allowed to see (channel partners aren’t allowed to see everything).
Regards
Paul
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