Tag: sales enablement

Job opening – Sales and Marketing Enablement Specialist

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SALES & MARKETING ENABLEMENT SPECIALIST

COMPANY: Allegro Development
LOCATION: Dallas
WORK EXPERIENCE: 5+ to 7 Years

Allegro is a leading provider of energy trading and risk management (“ETRM”) software solutions. […] Allegro is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and serves customers worldwide with offices in Calgary, Houston, London, Rotterdam, Singapore and Zurich.

Allegro seeks a Sales and Marketing Enablement Specialist to support the general operational duties for the marketing and sales organization and be aid in several key areas of performance: sales enablement (systems, training material, research, messaging), business process analysis (lead management & marketing programs), demand generation support (campaigns and related assets), along with planning and analytics. The successful candidate will aid in identifying opportunities for improvement and effectively and driving change as required to meet the business’ objectives and support the sales organization’s success. Will develop and work on problems/projects of diverse complexity and scope, exercise independent judgment within generally defined policies and practices to identify and select solutions.
Challenges of the position include:
  • Support the development, launch and maintenance of a corporate sales portal and support the integration with other sites currently maintained by sales and marketing teams.
  • Aid in the communication of established sales and marketing metrics through this portal. May include, but not limited to: revenue forecasts,, account status reports, new business opportunities and market intelligence.
  • Will support the mapping of sales and marketing processes to identify gaps and inefficiencies that can then drive consistency. Then develop solutions that may involve policy, program or system changes. Topics to include demand generation activity, go-to-market strategy, and sales communications.
  • In addition to portals, will have responsibility for support and maintenance of sales and marketing tools, within systems that may include: CRM systems (ie NetSuite, Siebel, SAP, Salesforce), demand generation/campaign management tools (Eloqua, eMail Labs, etc), and ROI measurement tools.
  • Support training of sales, marketing or other constituents in the roll out and ongoing support of deliverables.
  • Maintain prospect, partner and customer databases used by the marketing teams to assure opt in/opt out lists are preserved and that anti-spam laws are assured.
  • Will manage campaigns through CRM/campaign management system and support the processing of responses from activities to assure proper process and that metrics can be reported.
  • Other responsibilities to be assigned as required.
Qualifications for consideration:
  • Minimum of 3 – 5 years of business process, sales operations, marketing operations, and/or campaign management experience
  • SharePoint experience a plus
  • Education: BA / BS in Business Administration, Marketing, Sales Management, IT, BPA, Sales Administration, or other.
  • Strong communication and analytical skills
  • Positive attitude and passionate
  • Customer focused
  • Ability to make decisions quickly and implement
  • Knowledge of Sales Operations processes. Experience in research techniques and sales and marketing processes is also a plus
  • Good understanding of the sales/ channel mechanics (GTM, sales jobs, sales management ) is desired
  • High level of autonomy and personal initiative required – self starter
Lives the Allegro Values.  It is important that the potential candidates recognize that Allegro Development and Allegro leadership place significant value, manage to and assess performance on Allegro Values.  These are as follows:
EXPERTISE – We are domain and subject-matter experts, encouraging knowledge sharing and ongoing learning.
INNOVATION – We are driven to continuously innovate, creating high-quality and high-value solutions.
INTEGRITY – We are accountable for our actions, promoting truthfulness, candor and sincerity.
PASSION – We are enthusiastic about customer success, producing outstanding results and exceeding customer expectations.
PEOPLE – We develop and reward our employees, knowing the contributions, talent and diversity of our employees drive success.
TEAM – We collaborate, treat everyone with respect and have fun working together

 

Sales Enablement groups on LinkedIn etc

In “LinkedIn Groups-Where The Action Is” on fillthefunnel.com @MilesAustin recommends a few LinkedIn groups to join

“The real action on LinkedIn can be found within Groups.  If you want to increase the benefits and rewards of being a LinkedIn user, consider joining one of over 212,000  groups on LinkedIn.  These groups  typically are open to everyone, and are comprised of professionals that have a specific area of interest, experience, affiliation or goals.  There are Groups for Alumni associations, Community organizations, Industries, Professional Certifications, software programs and even geography.   These Groups are an effective way to develop connections with others in your profession or area of interest. […]

To find a group that interests you, the Groups Directory allows you to easily find the right group.
[…]

In my opinion, LinkedIn should be required for anyone participating in our Web 2.0 world .  If you want to break through to the real power of this, or any tool, you need to go deeper into its capabilities. Utilizing the power of Groups in LinkedIn will enhance your experience.

For SalesMakers, here is a short list of some of the Sales Groups that I belong to and recommend exploring and joining if you are so inclined:

  1. Sales Blogcast.com
  2. The Sales 2.0 Network
  3. Jigsaw User Group
  4. Selling to Big Companies
  5. Inside Sales Experts
  6. Friends of the Funnel

Join one of more of these groups, start one of your own, and most importantly jump in and contribute ideas, answer questions and share experiences. You will get out of this what you put into it.”

More groups on LinkedIn:

Sales Enablement Gurus

Sales Enablement Leader Exchange:

“Welcome to our LinkedIn Group dedicated to exchanging ideas about Sales Enablement.

What exactly is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the process of arming an organization’s sales force with access to the insight, experts, and information that will ultimately increase revenue. It is a term that has gained momentum in the last decade. It is often used to describe a variety of tools, processes and methodologies that are applied to enable a sales force, both direct and indirect. The terms “sales effectiveness” and “sales readiness” are sometime used interchangeably to denote Sales Enablement as well.

Sr. Field Marketing Manager – Sales Enablement, Global Online Display

Title: Sr. Field Marketing Manager – Sales Enablement, Global Online Display

Start Date: ASAP
Location: Seattle, WA
Date Posted: 3/14/2009

Description
As a member of the newly formed Global Online Display Advertising group, the Sr. Field Marketing Manager will be part of building a world class marketing organization from the ground up. We are seeking a seasoned marketing professional who can develop the functional departments needed to launch our online display advertising business to the digital advertising world. The Sr. Field Marketing Manager will oversee a team of individual contributors and report into to the Director of Business Management and Yield for Global Online Display Advertising.

This role will require a solid background in media sales, experience in sales enablement and building out best practices relating to sales effectiveness, as well as the ability to influence and work collaboratively across sales, operations and product development teams.

Specific functions are as follows:

Go-to-market — a core responsibility of the Trade Marketing team will be to deploy ad products to the sales team via scalable and efficient communication channels. Go-to-market involves the preparation of highly effective sales tools, ensuring a seamless sales process, communicating to offices throughout the world, education of product information to the entire organization, and the development of case studies to influence future sales.

Field Marketing — develop an effective event presence at major advertising industry and category events. The presence must deliver measurable results in terms of leads, brand awareness, client touch points, etc.

Training — development of an on-going training program to educate new sales staff on navigating the organization, positioning the offering to the marketplace, selling skills and product information. These programs must deliver top-notch sales staff and constantly address the ever changing challenges of the digital advertising industry.

Research — to achieve thought leadership, the research function of Trade Marketing should assemble research tools in order to win business from the advertising community. This involves competitive intelligence, advertising effectiveness studies, synthesizing of syndicated research, and membership to research organizations.

Public Relations — Trade Marketing will be responsible for positioning our online advertising business to the trade publications to drive positive buzz and interest amongst the advertising community. This may include the placement of ad buys, response to inquiries from the media, press releases during notable events, and act as the liaison to Amazon Corporate on external communication efforts.

Brand Management — creation of a new brand to achieve recognition in the marketplace. This involves the development of the brand, collateral standardization, messaging, and brand principles.

Qualifications
Our ideal candidate will have:

  • Deep knowledge of the advertising community
  • Financial and budget management skills
  • An ability to manage and negotiate with vendors
  • An understanding of online media fundamentals (how media is bought and sold, pricing models, optimization and targeting)
  • Channel marketing and event management experience
  • An ability to drive performance metrics which can deliver a positive ROI
  • Solid presentation skills to win stakeholder approval
  • 7-10 years marketing, relationship marketing or online marketing preferably in a recognized consumer or technology organization/brand
  • MBA or equivalent experience

 

Content Landscape – feature rich web application for Sales Enablement

The videos below by Moritz Stefaner, a recognized expert on interface design, visualization, statistics and data mining, show how he applied his ‘Elastic Lists’ (Example 1, Example 2) to Sales Enablement resources. The result is called ‘Content Landscape’ and has been developed by the Sales Enablement vendor BizSphere.

From http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/content-landscape/

“Content Landscape is a feature rich web application for searching and browsing digital resources in the enterprise. It facilitates not only content access, but also the understanding of resource distributions. […]

A regional marketing manager for a product group wants to retrieve resources only for his specific region and product, restricted to marketing materials. Other users may be interested in the latest news across all areas, or material only related to contract preparation. […]

The browsing mode allows to select multiple filter settings in flat (’Content Area’, ’Sales Step’, ’Media type’), hierarchical (’Region’, ’Offering’ and ’Resource type’) and numerical facets (’Rating’ and ’Date created’). […] Understanding resource production, use and distribution across departments, regions, and product groups is one of the core challenges of knowledge management in the enterprise.

’What are the most downloaded contents?’, ’do the presentation materials for a given product cover all important sales regions?’, ’what parts of my resource collection are growing? and which are declining?’ are typical questions in this area. […]”

Definition of Sales Enablement and Conversation Enablement

Definition of Sales Enablement

This blog follows Michael Gerard’s definition of Sales Enablement as posted on his blog ‘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 and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward”

John Neeson also has an excellent definition:

“Channel and Sales Enablement. Provide sales (direct and channel) the tools that will give them access to the knowledge assets that support in-process sales pursuits. Foster sharing of information on a two-way basis as information learned in the field can be used to tune, refresh, and continuously improve the knowledge base. […] focusing on “searchability and findability” of information.”

Definition of Conversation Enablement

Building on Michael Gerard’s definition of Sales Enablement, Conversation Enablement can be defined as:

The delivery of the right knowledge(=information provided in context) in the right format
and the right questions to ask (“Conversations are about discovery”)
to the right person at the right time and in the right place
necessary to move a specific conversation forward.

Without sales enablement, there are inefficient processes, communication flows, and more required rework

Brian Lambert posted “Sales 2.0 impact on Sales Process, Sales Enablement, Sales Development”

From July 15, 2008:

“[…] As more knowledge is provided to buyers through the Internet, opinion sites, and more research oriented sites, the power-shift from the seller to the buyer will certainly continue as international competition increases creating new and emerging markets for many industries.

The changing landscape of the sales environment is not only found in the buyer-seller relationship, it’s also found within the sales team. Turnover continues to be high and the talent shortage continues to create challenges for even the best and most-reputable sales teams. Sales managers sit at a critical junction point between sales execution and sales strategy — yet many are not provided resources, tools, and (perhaps most importantly) the time necessary to ratchet performance over the long term. To compound the issues, the system’s approach required to address unique customer challenges, respond to the competitive landscape, and create an agile, responsive sales organization involves more people than just the sales manager and sales team. It requires the alignment of sales development and training efforts as well as Sales Enablement and operational execution. […]

Sales Process Execution (SPE) requires the complete alignment of company resources to facilitate a responsive and agile customer relationship.  Without sales process execution, there are no sales. SPE is enabled by Sales 2.0 largely through CRM, SFA, Knowledge Management Tools, and customer-driven communications such as knowledge bases and wikis. […]

Sales Enablement improves sales capacity of the firm overall. Without sales enablement, there are inefficient processes, communication flows, and more required rework. While Sales Process Execution is mostly focused on the external relationships and buyer-seller interface, Sales Enablement (SE) is mostly concerned with the internal efficiency of the company.  SE initiatives are most impacting when optimizing existing work flow, processes, and administrative tasks.  The goal of SE therefore becomes is to “substitute” as much of the sales team member’s work as possible. By providing adequate task substitution as a primary goal of Sales Enablement,  sales teams are more free to spend time with customers. Sales Enablement in Sales 2.0 is largely the world of large-scale CRM tools, company intranet tools, and peer-to-peer sharing tools. There is more room for Sales 2.0 to support the internal working of the organization especially on critical inter-departmental communication and alignment. […]

Sales 2.0 tools can help organizations synchronize to individual buying organizations while freeing up sales team members from routine administrative tasks. […]”

Alignment of sales and marketing organizations

Over at her blog “MarketSense” Pamela Hudadoff wrote about Success in a Sales 2.0 World – a Marketing Viewpoint. Alignment of sales and marketing organizations is one of two aspects of Sales 2.0 that she believes are essential for marketing’s success in today’s web-based business climate:

“[…] Alignment of sales and marketing organizations.

The customer’s buying process crosses the boundaries that exist between marketing and sales organizations. Sure, there are problems of transferring information about the customer from one organization to another. But more important is the creation of a seamless buying experience that builds persuasive momentum from the first customer touch. That seamless buying experience can only be achieved when marketing and sales tackle the design and implementation of the buying experience together. […]”

Conversation Enablement – Presentations are about delivery. Conversations are about discovery.

Mark S. Bonchek took the time to answer some questions I had asked as comments on his blog post “Can We Talk?”.

Here are his answers as published in his blog post “Conversation Enablement” from February 3, 2009:

“Commenting on my earlier post “Can We Talk”, Paul agreed that “conversation enablement is the way to go” and asked some great questions.  They were so good that I’m going to use them as the structure for this post.  Hopefully they will spark further comments … and perhaps a conversation.”

Who is a thought leader in that space?

“I actually haven’t seen many thought leaders on real conversation enablement in sales situations.  There are a number of thought leaders on conversational marketing, but they don’t really address what happens one-on-one with a buyer, nor how to enable conversations that a buyer has internally with stakeholders.  Some of the sales training companies like The Complex Sale or Executive Conversation cover the conversational dimension of selling, but they tend to focus on sales skills, not what needs to happen to enable the conversation. […]”

Where can I find an approach for Conversation Enablement that works?

“Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a systematic approach yet for conversation enablement.  Or at least I haven’t found one.  I think one of our companies, Truman Company, knows as much about it as anyone, but it isn’t yet systematized.  Perhaps we should start a stub on Wikipedia?”

Are we talking wikinomics and opening up of enterprise social networks to our customers to get the voice of the customer in our organization?

“I think this could be considered in a broader definition of conversation enablement.  In some sense, even the scripts used in call centers could be considered conversation enablement — whatever helps employees hold productive conversations with customers and buyers.”

Or are we talking about our internal sales enablement application having more web2.0 components and providing the sales force with more food for thought for better conversations?

“This is where my interest has been:  in B2B settings, enabling better conversations among sales people about how to sell, enabling conversation among customers, and enabling better conversations by sales people with customers.”

Should the conversation with the customer happen online more often and face to face less often to leverage the collective conversation skills of more of my employees?

“It depends on the level of the customer in their organization.  As you move up into the managerial and executive ranks, you need to have a much greater focus on face-to-face.”

Or are we looking for more dynamic client presentations that can be generated customized by audience, industry vertical, type of meeting, country, etc…?

“This is necessary but not sufficient.  And it leads to my main point.  A conversation is not a presentation, no matter how customized it might be.  A presentation can help to provide context and be a catalyst for a conversation.  But it is not a conversation.  In a presentation, you know where you are going.  In a conversation, you don’t.  Presentations are about delivery. Conversations are about discovery.

We are having a conversation about conversation enablement because I don’t know the answers. If I did, I could just give a presentation.  But for now, we’ll need to discover the answer together in the context of a conversation.”

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