Month: February 2010

Job opening – Sales Enablement Programs Manager at Peopleclick Authoria

Old! Outdated!

Sales Enablement Programs Manager

Job Summary

Company: Peopleclick Authoria
Location: Raleigh, NC 27601
Job Type: Full Time Employee
Years of Experience: 5+ to 7 Years
Education Level: Bachelor’s Degree
Career Level: Experienced (Non-Manager)

About the Job

WHAT WE ARE DOING

Peopleclick Authoria is the largest private talent management vendor in the HCM space with approximately $100 million in revenue. Our company brings together one of the deepest talent acquisition vendors, Peopleclick, with one of the most robust talent management vendors, Authoria and provides a single source of talent-lifecycle technologies that will help organizations expand not just their workforce, but their entire business. Peopleclick Authoria has a global presence serving over 2,400 customers in 214 countries and territories around the world. Combined, the company now serves nearly 60 percent of the Fortune 100.

This is an opportunity for a talented Sales Enablement Programs Manager to help create our sales enablement strategy. Our award winning solutions are designed to address business problems arising from the demands of Talent Management for companies ranging from 3,000 to 50,000+ employees. At Authoria, you will be supported by a dedicated and capable team, committed to success, customer service, and creating innovative award-winning products.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

In this Marketing role, you will be responsible for creating a sales enablement tools, building and deploying sales enablement programs that empower a global sales force to solve customer’s problems and help them grow their business. You will work closely with product marketing, marketing communications, sales operations, account executives, regional sales managers, and account managers to understand market needs, collaborate on vision and package enablement materials. You will also help develop sales training programs.

RESPONSIBILITIES & EXPECTATIONS

  • Work with product marketing and product management to understand customer problems, messaging and positioning
  • Use messaging to create a scalable framework of sales tools that can be used in client meetings and sales training
  • Create sales tools such as presentations, sales guides, etc
  • Partner with Sales to build effective training programs and help the sales organization understand and use the tools
  • Measure sales enablement activities to quantify impact and success of materials and programs

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

  • Minimum 4 years sales and/or marketing experience for enterprise software applications
  • Track record of producing high quality documents and passion for training others
  • Excellent communication and writing skills
  • Results oriented with a passion for details
  • Knowledge of standard sales processes
  • Must have ability to manage simultaneous projects and meet aggressive deadlines
  • Willing to travel 25%

This opportunity may be performed at one of the many Peopleclick Authoria office locations. We encourage qualified applicants to apply. You must be able to legally work in the United States.

Peopleclick Authoria is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse workforce. M/F/D/V

Sales Enablement means a clear value proposition for each of the audiences: business lead, their researchers / support in the deal, and technical folks who implement

On February 10, 2010 Andy Hasselwander (@ahasselwander) wrote the very insightful post ‘Cascading detail for sales enablement’ on his blog b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com:

“I’ve been working on a lot of sales enablement kits lately. My biggest learning on sales enablement came about ten years ago, when I did a study for a big enterprise technology company on marketing effectiveness. We looked at three marketing objectives: Generate demand, drive awareness and comprehension, and enable the sales force. In hindsight, it was ultra-simple. But, we came up with a really powerful conclusion. The most effective programs, in terms of ROI, were sales enablement programs. However, when we spoke to reps, they complained about 90% of the content they were provided. What really mattered was the 10% “really good” stuff that made the deals.

So, the recommendation had two parts: First, invest more in sales enablement. Second, only produce 1/5 of the material. This sounds like a “duh” recommendation, because we’ve all heard the trite adage about the CMO who says “I know I could cut 50% of my marketing spend, I just don’t which 50%”… but there was more to it. The number one thing reps needed, it turned out, was cascading detail about the solutions they were selling. Reps selling into complex organizations need to be enabled with at least three levels of detail–one for the business lead, one for his or her researchers / support in the deal, and one for the technical folks that will actually be doing the implementation. Without a clear value proposition and component model for each of these audiences, reps spend hundreds of hours spinning their wheels. In most cases, these levels of detail don’t exist, at least not in distilled form.

Another interesting observation I’ve had is that companies are usually really good at selling into one of the above audiences, but lousy at selling in to the other two. For example, Microsoft seems really good at selling into the implementers, but not so good with the decision makers and researchers.  They’re ok, don’t get me wrong, but every company has its strength. So, if you can figure out how to make selling into role a strength, you’ll outcompete your rivals and win.

Each level of detail should also cascade. If we’re focusing on a value proposition, it might cascade like this:

  • Decision Maker: Acme helps me realize my performance targets by providing my teams with the best possible productivity tools, while functioning flexibly with my existing systems.
  • Researcher: Acme provides superior performance management tools across the finance and HR functions, at a superior value / price ratio to the competitive set; Acme’s core APIs are best-in-class and can be integrated with a minimum of effort compared to the competitive set.
  • Implementer: Acme’s integration services are flexible and best-in-class, and can be installed on any of my core systems using its easy-to-use customization kit; Acme’s load balancing services make it the least impactful to our overall operating environment

The idea here is that the value proposition builds from one level to the other. Researchers and implementers will still be interested in the “core” business value proposition, but the value we can provide them needs to be more specific to be sufficient for them to be comfortable.

The same concept applies when we get to component model. For a decision maker, a component model should be purely functional, but should show exactly how the solution in mind meets their business needs and enables the value proposition. The component model would then be filled in with detail and potentially blown into a few pages for the researcher. Finally, when it came to implementation, the component model would turn into a full-blown technical design. The key is that it’s translatable top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. An example is shown below:

cascading component model

Thoughts about this topic? What are some examples of cascading sales enablement / core content that have worked for you?”

Please leave your comments on the original post ‘Cascading detail for sales enablement’.

Legacy sales portals provide no feedback to ensure marketing produces valuable material. Sales is too busy to address the issue

feedback from sales

On February 7, 2010 navigateknowledge.blogspot.com posted ‘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 six). 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). […]”

I could not have described these pain points better. I’m sure that pretty much everyone in the B2B environment can relate to the them. No matter which Sales Enablement vendor you decide to work with, what needs to be done is the following:

  • Implement ‘Content Governance’ (automate a life cycle for content, define responsibilities for roles, send them automated reminders to rework what the life cycle has pulled off the portal, …)

life cycle for content

  • Add ‘Social Features’ everyone is familiar with from the web 2.0 like rating, commenting and uploading of their own content or links (gets everyone engaged and gathers feedback on the content as well as new insights from the field)

sales-web_social

  • Analyze (‘Content Intelligence’) the usage of your improved sales portal and how the two steps above yield fruit
  • Take action with ‘Content Planning’ based on your findings

Content Intelligence
The example above shows that there are 19 customer reference documents for EMEA but not a single one about a customer in Luxembourg. If you wanted to target a prospect in Luxembourg that might be a problem. A dash board overview for your Content Intelligence like the showcased Content Landscape from BizSphere helps you to identify gaps in your content inventory.

Job opening – Head of Sales and Partner Enablement, Enterprise – Singapore at Google

Old! Outdated!

Head of Sales and Partner Enablement, Enterprise – Singapore at Google

Location: Singapore

URL: http://www.google.com/jobs

Type: Full-time
Experience: Associate
Functions: Sales
Industries: Internet
Posted: February 7, 2010

Job Description

This position is located in Singapore.

The area: Enterprise

As the emerging leader in cloud computing, Google’s Enterprise division delivers cloud services and other IT products to small and large businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. Our team of high-achieving engineers, product managers, and sales and marketing professionals works with a vast array of partners and customers to advance the company’s mission to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. The Enterprise team is among a handful of rapidly emerging new businesses that are becoming front-and-center for Google as it enters its second decade as a company.

The role: Head Of Sales and Partner Enablement, Enterprise

In Google Enterprise, we believe a salesperson’s success depends on the customer’s success and we offer our clients technology solutions to help them grow their business and maximise their return on their information software investment. This requires our Sales team to have varied skills and talents, including thorough knowledge of the SaaS business and Google offerings, understanding of information system infrastructure and the ability to sell effectively. This also requires our sales team to have highly effective communications material and collateral at their disposal.
As the Head Of Sales & Partner Enablement, you will be responsible for enabling our sales teams to grow their businesses across many product lines through effective and results-focused training, field tools, communication and marketing programs. You responsibilities include working with Product Marketing Managers, Corporate Marketing, Product Operations and Google Sales Training to create and deliver consumable, highly impactful field collateral, client presentations and product training to the Americas’ sales teams. You will own the vision, message/story structuring and packaging, orchestration and delivery of your sales enablement programs collaborating with many contributors as necessary. You will be able to and willing to operate at both strategic and tactical levels designing and delivering materials, programs and workshops on your own if need be. The overall vision is to grow this function and its team over time with successful strategies.

Responsibilities:

• Work with Product Marketing team to solidify product core messages and guide the structuring and packaging of core messages into highly compelling sales training and client facing presentations/collateral
• Create and produce client/vertical specific presentation decks to address highly strategic sales situations and to provide to resellers/partners to leverage on behalf of Google
• Define and plan Enterprise sales product training curriculum incorporating skills based programs from other sales training units of Google
• Develop and implement measurement methodology for the Sales Enablement capacity
• Oversee work and eventually manage small team of Sales Enablement partners

Requirements:

• BA/BS or equivalent experience required, MBA a plus
• At least 12 years of working experience in sales, sales strategy, sales operations, sales communication or field marketing, vertical marketing, marketing communication
• Superior capabilities in communication – creation, production and delivery and desire and willingness to train sales people to master this craft
• Detail orientation and passion for continuously learning and understanding Google Enterprise products and how to best sell/position these in specific situations
• Solid cross functional collaboration and project management skills
• Track record of high productivity and delivering results in highly ambiguous situations, startup environments

Additional Information

  • Applicants with recommendations are preferred.

Sales Enablement is the top investment area for 2010 – Who owns it inside an Enterprise?

On February 5, 2010 IDC’s Michael Gerard (@michaelgerard) posted the following on Twitter:

“Preliminary IDC data – Sales Enablement is the top investment area for 2010! More at IDC Directions #dir10”

That is obviously very exciting for us in this field, who for years now have been saying that Sales Enablement is going to be huge one day. Let’s take a look again at the term Sales Enablement in order to understand in detail what’s all included in what is projected to be a top investment area for 2010:

Michael Gerard’s definition of Sales Enablement as posted as ‘Musings on the Science and Art of Selling’:

“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format [often forgotten] and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward”

Sales Enablement as per IDC
http://www.slideshare.net/lml999/idc-sales-enablement-jan-2009-presentation

IDC_Macro_SE_Framework

In its February 2010 issue CRM magazine looked at Sales Enablement:

“Scott Santucci, senior analyst at Forrester Research, says he’s seen an explosion of interest in this area over the past year. As with any technology, however, those rushing to buy the hot newness without first establishing a clear strategy are doomed to fail. It’s not that there’s a lack of information—far from it. Instead, it’s hard to wade through the sheer tonnage of information and determine what’s up-to-date, relevant, and in a form amenable to the particular sales conversation. “It’s a very simple, yet really complicated problem,” Santucci says.

IDC’s Gerard says the first step is to figure out who owns sales enablement in your organization. While the prevailing view has the niche bridging both sales and marketing, no one seems able to agree on exactly who owns which pieces of the pie. (See “The Shotgun Marriage of Sales and Marketing.”) Marketers lay claim to 69 percent of sales enablement, according to IDC, while sales pros estimate they control 60 percent. It’s not hard to imagine the damage caused by that disconnect, Gerard says: “There’s confusion amongst companies, some misalignment as to who’s doing what.”

These are nuanced problems, and Santucci says each of the relevant vendors—including BizSphere, iCentera, Kadient, and Savo Group—cater to slightly different problems. […]”

In the comments of the article quoted above Tamara Schenk (@tamaraschenk) from T-Systems International GmbH (Portfolio & Offering Management, Head of Special ICT Innovation Projects) wrote the following on February 4, 2010:

“[…] The discussion on “who owns sales enablement” is really interesting – from my point of view this question brings as back to the “functional silos”. Didn’t we want to overcome the functional silos by implementing sales enablement? We had a similar discussion when we started our sales enablement project. Now we have a cross-functional team which is lead by portfolio & offering management, in our approach the “backbone” of sales enablement.

[…] If an organization has a complex offering portfolio with different kinds of relationships within the portfolio you will need a lot of taxonomy features – but make sure that your first step is the consolidation of your portfolio and the second step is implementing sales enablement, including working on content quality, governance, processes, change management etc. The better you design the portfolio structure the easier you can analyze the content quality later on. From our experience that’s one of the critical success factors – and the other one is change management – how do I motivate sales reps to use the sales enablement platform and to use the collaboration features? Communicate, communicate, communicate… and you could give the sales user groups the responsibility for a successful change!

The objectives of sales enablement initiative could be different, e.g. one collaboration platform instead of ten different portals, get consistent messages, optimize go-to-market, deliver right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place, break functional silos, reduce applications, reduce ramp-up time for new hires, improve sales efficiency etc. […]”

February 2010 issue of CRM magazine: Sales Enablement Tools – The relevant vendors

I keep a work in progress list of Sales Enablement vendors. In its February 2010 issue CRM magazine does a great job at singling out the relevant vendors:

Sales Enablement Tools

Make the Selling Simpler: Organizations want sales reps to have access to the right information at the most critical moments
By Christopher Musico
[…]
“[…] the sweet spot for sales enablement—defined by IDC as “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”
Scott Santucci, senior analyst at Forrester Research, says he’s seen an explosion of interest in this area over the past year. […]
Santucci says each of the relevant vendors—including BizSphere, iCentera, Kadient, and Savo Group—cater to slightly different problems. […]

BY THE NUMBERS

  • $135,262 is spent, on average, in support costs per year for each salesperson.
  • 7 hours per week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls.
  • 50 percent of the information is pushed through email.
  • 10 percent is “made available in a useful format.”

Source: Forrester Research & IDC Sales Advisory Service

THE VENDOR SHORTLIST

BizSphere — BizSphere Sales Enablement consists of four separate applications involving both sales and marketing: Sales Web, Document Generation, Content Landscape, and Editors.
iCentera (www.icentera.com) — iCentera Enterprise Edition 6.0 offers wiki-page builders, customizable portals, custom tabs, a company newsroom, and dynamic email.
Kadient — Kadient Dynamic Sales Content, Sales Playbooks, and Sales Performance Analytics can be accessed directly from within sales force automation systems via productized integration with Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM On Demand.
Savo Group — Savo Sales Asset Manager provides an organizational structure to enable sales pros to rank content, based on business rules, to recommend content for each particular selling situation.”

 

%d bloggers like this: