“Aspect enlisted SAVO’s services within the scope of a very aggressive implementation timeline. SAVO stepped up with their best practices approach and industry expertise to assist Aspect in accomplishing our objective to launch a comprehensive, efficient, and easy-to-use and maintain Sales Enablement system in just five weeks. SAVO’s commitment and proficiency proved the company to be an integral component of our Sales Enablement strategy.”

To read the full press release, please click here. Additionally, if you would like a copy of the Aspect ROI Case Study from Nucleus Research, it’s available on our website here (click “Case Study: Nucleus Research – Aspect Software” in the lower right panel). Congratulations Aspect!

This paradigm affects all business professionals because of the inefficiencies associated with software that is difficult to use. The issue is highlighted by the amount of time we spend with our enterprise applications. I may know a few people that put in six hours a day on Facebook, but the majority of us spend hours toiling away on corporate applications; entering data, pulling reports, and most likely having no fun.

So how did we get into this mess? Software consumers tend to blame the vendors. “Why can’t it just work like Twitter?” Now that there are popular examples of sophisticated software design, users expect the same types of interfaces when they come to work.

On the other hand vendors tend to blame consumers. “We’d love to give your users a simple interface but your requirements are so complex…” The number of disparate and complex processes within a large application makes information management extremely difficult. To manage this growing complexity corporate IT spending has grown from 9% in the 1990’s to a whopping 22% today. Complexity usually means choices, and the more choices presented to a user increase the cognitive load to understand the screen, isolate their task, and complete that task without error.

Regardless of who is to blame, at SAVO we are always searching for ways to improve our contribution to enterprise design, by creating a software that’s as easy and intuitive to use as consumer software. We also have the added challenge of working within a multi-client application. If one customer wants a document preview to appear directly under the title, another would like to see the description before the content, and a third has a legal note that must appear before anything on the page…what is a designer to do?

One tactic we employ to ease our user experience is the reduction of choice, or at least, the perception that we have removed choices. Take for example our current upload page:

The first two inputs require the user to provide a title and a file for their new document. These choices are pretty straight-forward. The next area is called “Library Publisher” which potentially introduces a barrier for users. What if you don’t know what a “Library” is within the context of this application? The first option “Put this document in my private library” may raise additional questions. If I choose this option is that making the document private to my account or private from other companies that use SAVO? Is this location really private, or will my manager still be able to see it? Even the buttons at the bottom of the page have the potential to present confusion. Generally the primary action should be on the left, in a natural position as I read the form from top to bottom. Here we are initially given an option to “Cancel”, and then options to “Upload and Done” or “Upload and Edit”. What steps are left if I “Upload and Edit”? What’s wrong with just uploading the file and being done with it?

Sounds Complicated? That’s because it is complicated! These are the types of challenges that our design team embraces for each task you may attempt in SAVO.

When we examined this process for our new Forum feature we wanted to target these pain points such that:

• Selecting a library to publish to is easier
• Fewer options are presented in order to complete your task

For visibility reasons, questions also belong to SAVO libraries. However in this interface we abstracted the library choice and instead, asked our user to select a topic that best fits their question (topics are connected to libraries behind the scenes). Since questions tend to always be on a particular topic, there is less guesswork than presenting private vs. public library selection. If none of the choices in the topic drop-down fit your question, there is even an “I don’t know” option that will automatically route the question to a default topic. We also removed buttons for “Cancel” and “Ask and Edit”. This way, there is a single and clear action to complete your task.

While these changes may seem small, simplifying and/or removing choices can significantly influence the success rate when users are filling in forms. Nuances like these directly correlate to adoption and the ultimate success of each SAVO implementation.

So I’m sure our existing customers are wondering “So what about that document upload page?” We already have design improvements that are pending development. Stay tuned to those monthly releases!

The good news is that Sales Enablement appears to be a real thing. Ten years from now we’re all going to be able to say that we were pioneers. Or at least that’s the way it plays out in my head. But in between now and then we have some real challenges. It’s always the case when you’re blazing new trails – the one in front has to swing the machete. So how do we clear a navigable path while saving some energy to enjoy the destination when we get there?

At the last SalesCraft event in June, we were fortunate to be joined by Joe Galvin of Sirius Decisions. Joe is a passionate thought leader in the area of Sales Enablement and arguably years ahead of the rest of us when it comes to seeing what’s possible. Joe brought out the fire hose and we all struggled to take notes. The room was immersed in the possibilities of what Sales Enablement could deliver to our organizations, why it was important and where to start.Here are a few key points from Joe’s talk.

• Evolving Requirements – The knowledge required to be a salesperson in today’s environment is constantly changing. Acquisitions, product enhancements, and competitive threats all contribute to a constantly changing environment. At some point, it is too hard to keep up, so many salespeople will stop trying and simply stick with what they already know. A real challenge when you’re acquiring new companies or introducing new products.

• Digestibility – Marketing becomes so intent on getting their message to the Field, that in order to capture mindshare, they create more content and repeat it in various forms. The Field is in “content overload” and they lose their ability to digest it all.

• Sophisticated Buyers – Thanks to the ready availability of information, buyers know a lot more than they used to when contacting sales for the first time. When they are ready to engage, they expect an informed, knowledgeable salesperson. Sales needs to be able to meet them where they are if an effective meeting is going to take place.

• Measuring Productivity is Key– More calls of higher quality is the goal. Drive towards delivering more active opportunities, increased conversions, and higher close rates. Revenue performance is relative, but tied to too many external variables.

What Does a Sales Executive Think About Sales Enablement? If you’re lucky it’s just now hitting their radar. They want their teams “enabled”, but what does that mean? This is the challenge before you – to help the sales executives at your company to see Sales Enablement as mission critical. And you’re going to have to define it for them. What is it? How is it different? How do you get from where you are to where you want to be? And what about funding?

What is the Vision? When all is said and done, what are you building? The goal is a robust, flexible, innovative enablement strategy that takes into account your company’s goals and objectives, growth strategy and culture. Equally important is a plan that is modern, scalable and integrated. Enablement encompasses training, communication, leadership, motivation, and development. Integration among these components is key to enablement. The real goal is to enable sales to have customer conversations that are relevant and even revolutionary for the customer while ultimately being financially impactful to your business.

Translation, Packaging and Gate-Keeping. As a Sales Enablement professional, you play a very unique role. Essentially, you sit at the intersection point between Marketing and Sales. It may not feel like the safest place to be, but try to think of it as an adventure. The whole company wants to get to the sales team. For Sales Enablement to work, they have to go through you. It’s your job to represent their interests in a responsible, effective manner and package information in a way the field can use it, and deliver it to a customer.

Milestones. Sales Enablement utopia is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take awhile, probably longer than you would like; so pace yourself. And since this is unchartered territory, how do you know if you’re heading in the right direction?

Enablement 1.0

- Establish a Leadership Platform– Your executive team is key to enablement success. People crave leadership and enablement cannot happen unless your enablement efforts are aligned to leadership objectives.

- Cleanup Communications – Everyone communicates, right? Exactly. And everyone in your company wants to communicate with your sales team. It all becomes white noise very quickly. Streamline and up-level your field communications. The focus needs to be on the audience. Remove vanity projects.

- Invest in Technology – Technology plays a significant role in enablement. Some combination of audio, video, HTML, Sharepoint, etc. will factor into your enablement strategy. It should be flexible and provide options to support the message and the audience. Invest in foundational technology early and make sure that it is flexible enough to meet your needs over time.

- Emphasize On Boarding – If there is one aspect of training that is critical, it’s getting new hires ramped up and productive quickly.

- Solidify a Sales Methodology – Which one doesn’t matter. Pick one, stick with it and reinforce it. Most of your reps have a favorite – pick that one. Don’t over invest, but be consistent and commit.

- Align with Kickoff – Kickoff should be a year long experience. Use Kickoff to set the stage for the year and reinforce the objectives throughout the year.

Enablement 2.0

- Specialize by Audience – The Field is more than Sales, right? It includes technical teams, channel folks and more. Their needs are unique from Sales.

- Line Managers – Target them as your extended enablement team. Through them you reach the sales team. They want to help their teams and do the right thing. Help them, help you.

- Content Strategy – This is where less is more, governance and a “bill of materials” comes into play. It’s also the point where you need to move beyond the subject matter experts creating their own strategy for content to a uniform, consistent approach that is consumable for Sales.

- Mobile – Your salespeople live on their iPhones and Blackberries, some are even toting around iPads. Emphasize mobile access for all of your deliverables.

- Video – Video is becoming huge and it needs to be simpler than it has in the past. Get your leaders and experts camera-ready and figure out how to use a flipcam and edit on your laptop.

- Be Prescriptive – Bucket enablement into what they must know, extra credit and on demand. Be clear that’s what you’re doing. They will appreciate it.

- Differentiate Between Global and Local – What needs to happen at headquarters versus what is better executed in region? Define it and facilitate strong relationships with the regional teams. They are critical to your success.

Enablement 3.0

When you get to 3.0 please call me, I would love to talk to you.

Executive Buy-In. No matter what stage of Sales Enablement you’re in, you need buy-in from sales leadership. Paint a vision for them and ask for permission to pilot enablement efforts. Metrics are key, but stay focused on higher-level performance numbers.

Permission From Marketing. Enablement is a partnership with Marketing. Avoid setting it up as a competition. Marketing teams may see enablement efforts as treading on their turf. Emphasize their role as experts and yours as translators. Find out where they’re frustrated and offer to help. Engage them early in the process. Be sure to close the loop so they feel they’re getting something out of the partnership.

Emphasize Process. While there is a lot of art in Sales Enablement, be sure to build process into the mix. Think about the quantity of people involved on both sides. Defined processes will facilitate communication, provide air cover and force you to think through scalability.

Low-Hanging Fruit. Get started today by shutting down worldwide distribution aliases; put together a communication plan for your senior executive and invest in a technology platform. Create a “family” of deliverables and launch them under a unified them or naming convention. Consolidate wherever possible, kill vanity projects. Whether you see yourself as a trailblazer or not, you are definitely mapping new territory. Most of the people I’ve met through SalesCraft are passionate about what they do and that makes all of the challenges worthwhile. The blueprint for Sales Enablement will be refined many times as we all figure this out over the next few years, but before you know it every sales executive will take it for granted that a strong Sales Enablement effort is critical to success.

So what exactly is it?  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – it is the format for distributing news and other web content through ‘feeds’ – (aka) linkable lists of your content!  You can add feeds to your Assets, Users, and/or other documents (through the ‘subscription’ link) and tap in to the power of the social web, as a feed will increase the ease by which your subscribers/users have access to your feed updates/information. You can use RSS to distribute  Press releases, educational articles, videos, tech support updates, specials, product news, announcements, job openings, etc…  But the best part?

RSS feeds can be used for all and ANY type of content from SAVO!

The RSS feed contains an index – a list of items – and each one is identified by a link o the content on your site. Most RSS feeds include a title for the link and a description of the content:

RSS can be used in two ways: RSS feeds can bring external information into SAVO, or they can bring information that’s in SAVO into other tools. When you bring RSS feeds into SAVO, you can keep track of external news directly in the application. For example, you can pull in feeds of key prospects, financial results, or company news. When you link RSS feeds from SAVO into other programs, RSS feeds keep your audience constantly updated, as they allow people to see your content (and sometimes a brief synopsis) without having to enter the application – or they can use their browser to track real-time updates to our new Forum feature, including new questions asked and new replies, as well as comments and new uploads, and newly added Blogs. RSS beautifully fills an underutilized role, as with RSS feeds, once someone subscribes the content, it then comes directly to them.

True to its simple form, RSS has become so mainstream that all the browsers now read RSS (or one can use one of the many RSS readers, such as Google, Yahoo, etc) Once you set up your reader with your preferences, it will collect the feeds you’re interested in every time there is an update – You’ll never miss an important update again!

Next time:  Utilizing RSS feeds for Blogs, Questions/Answers, and Custom Pages.

The challenge became evident with the very first customer I worked with when the champion said, “Our last sales portal was great when we launched it…and then it gradually became useless”.  Nearly five years later, as the Director of Implementation, I now lead the team that is having these conversations with our customers every day and the buzz around this topic has only gotten louder.  While many of the roles and responsibilities to execute a strategy are already in place, it can still be a challenge to answer questions like, “Who should own Sales Enablement?”, “How do we ensure that as our objectives change our Sales Enablement efforts remain aligned?”, “How do we know that the work we are doing is relevant and valuable for sales?”, “How do we ramp new sellers more quickly”, “How do we balance compliance with contribution”, and “Which metrics are important”, just to name a few.  These are key questions for Sales Enablement: not just related to technology or content questions, but to governance as well.

Technology alone does not equate to a Sales Enablement program, but it is a powerful component.  A great first step in building a Sales Enablement program is scoping a solution that allows for rapid deployment of technology to immediately create efficiency and make sellers more effective in executing against the top objectives today.  From there, it is critical to consider how the organization evolves to support Sales Enablement governance and success long-term.  The best part is you don’t have to change your organization in order to implement or govern a Sales Enablement program. The people already exist, and are already tasked with enabling sellers. It’s really about aligning them appropriately – in the end, the goal is not to create new jobs or responsibilities, but empower the existing team to do the things they’re responsible for today, in a smarter and more relevant way.

In my next post we”ll cover the roles involved in Sales Enablement Governance, in “The game is Sales Enablement Governance, but who are the players?”.

Interestingly, one of the biggest reasons for the decline in 2009 was not the “these economic times” doldrums that plagued nearly every business conversation and news headline last year. Instead, failure was impacted most by the lack of valued relationships between too many sellers and buyers out there. As the study noted – and as the cliché goes – oftentimes it’s not what you sell, but how you sell that determines how likely you are to obtain and retain business – no matter what the economic climate.

We all know that relationships between salespeople and customers can run the gamut – while some folks are perceived to be no more than an approved vendor, others become trusted partners to their customers, and an indispensable resource at every turn. It’s no surprise that the sales reps with more strategic relationships tended to exceed quotas in 2009, with 67% of “trusted partners” surveyed in the CSO Insights study gaining, retaining, and growing business despite a more challenging selling environment.

This data validates what we at SAVO have posited for years – and more importantly, what our customers have shared with us time and time again. Consultative salespeople who deliver value well beyond the actual products and services they sell will always be a company’s top revenue driver. These sales reps will retain and even grow business despite macroeconomic pressures. So what’s the problem? There aren’t enough of these sales reps! Identifying the top performers is easy – replicating their performance across the sales force, however, is significantly more challenging.

One of our customers recently led an initiative designed to identify the traits that made top performers within their organization successful – and then to replicate these behaviors across the sales team. Above all else, they learned that those reps who were comfortable meeting with true economic buyers exceeded quotas, whereas those “stuck” in conversations at the procurement or mid-management level struggled to stay afloat. Based on this, the organization codified best practices in a sales conversation playbook, trained the sales force on messaging geared toward the executive suite, and reinforced all techniques real-time via SAVO. The result? The organization realized a 4 fold increase in salespeople meeting with true economic buyers. 17% of the company’s revenues for the year were attributed to this shift in how sales reps thought about their business and executed sales conversations.

Bottom line? If you do nothing else for the rest of 2010, it is worth your time to take a good hard look at what makes your top performers tick. Talk to them, talk to their managers. Talk to their customers. Find out what traits, strategies, and techniques consistently lead them to success and find a way to bring these best practices to the rest of the organization. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money. Just open the door to conversation with these folks, and then find a quick, easy, and repeatable way to share this information with your sales force when and how they need it. You’ll be astonished by the results you can have simply by building a real-time “water cooler” for conversations, best practices, and information sharing to take place.

Field sales knows the stories.  They know what clients are saying and what your competitors are doing, but they may not be sharing it. There are a couple of reasons:

• It’s not in the salesperson’s mindset to share information, or they simply don’t want to
• They’re not incentivized on it

Right now salespeople are incentivized to close deals. The unstated truth is that this content – from themselves and their peers – is going to foster them closing even more deals themselves. With this in mind, what can we do to give them an example to contribute, and an incentive to contribute?

SAVO recommends that whenever you are introducing a piece of functionality that asks individuals to submit content, you assign someone or some group to lead by example.  Identify and select a group of people to lead, to set the trend for others to follow.

First, have this team lead the rest of the company by submitting new content.  Once new content is submitted you should then take the next step by promoting those contributions across the entire site.  In SAVO, you can do this on pages or in asset promotion.

In addition to making them the example, make this content submission responsibility part of their regular responsibilities and deliverables.  Ask each member of this group to submit a certain amount of new content each week.  For example, if gathering best practices around “Objection Handling” is important as a company, select a specific amount of people to submit 5 objections and 5 answers to those objections each week.  Over time you will begin to have a good library of objections, but more importantly others may follow suit by submitting other objections or answers.  Once you have gotten the contribution from your trail blazers, you can now focus your approach towards the field by giving them incentives.

As the select group acts as the trail blazers, a secondary strategy is to offer incentive to the field to get them to add to the contribution.  Incentive can be in the form of monetary compensation, but it does not have to be.  Alternative ways to incentivize contribution could be in form of “Your Name in Lights.”  By adding a section on your landing page with a picture of the salesperson that submitted the best piece of field contribution that week, the salesperson will gain company recognition and will have their work highlighted for the week.  What sales person would not like to be highlighted as a star performer?

Below are a few examples of incentive strategies that clients have used in the past.

• One of my clients, an innovative technology company specializing in bar code and RFID technology, put together an adoption campaign around a “Road Rally.”  One of the steps in the Road Rally was to submit an objection, or best practice.  As a result, they got a new influx of content without marketing having to create it.  People who performed well and completed the contest the fastest won prizes.

• Another one of my clients specializing in education had the goal of capturing competitive intelligence.  They decided that every week they would run a contest giving the person in field sales who submitted the best piece of competitive intelligence a monetary prize.

Finally, another way is to create competition within a team.  At the team level create competition among peers to get the best new content in the system.  This strategy will have to have buy-in from department managers, but is also a way to get smaller groups to participate.

The next time you are asking the field sales to help with contribution try to follow some of these steps to get the most out of your new initiative!

Salespeople won’t write whitepapers. They don’t give all the written feedback that you want.  They may not respond to emails imploring them to fill out forms or success stories.  And why should they? Salespeople are busy. They identify business problems, manage sales processes, understand the needs of different roles in the buying process, and navigate their own organizations.  All this work is hard enough, so don’t expect salespeople to write books.

But they do ask questions.

Salespeople ask questions because they need to. Even if you’ve got perfect sales assets (and who really does), the market is complex and changing.  A new competitive move, a new need, or a new offering will prompt questions that can’t be answered in formal sales materials.

So asking is a critical part of the dialog between Sales, Marketing, and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

Asking drives participation from sales.  When the questions make it to the right SMEs who are motivated to answer, the questions drive content, because the SMEs provide answers. Content that is just-in-time relevant for the field. And if questions drive content that is institutionalized in a sales platform, they drive insight that is available for the entire field, not just for the asker.

Today SAVO is releasing our Tribal Knowledge capability, a major update to our Sales Enablement platform.  With the Tribal Knowledge release, any salesperson can ask a question—in the application or in email—that is automatically routed to the right SMEs who have the answer  and are motivated to respond.  And instead of that response being lost in email, the SME can respond—in the application or in email—in a way that captures that Tribal Knowledge for others to see.  So the next salesperson who has the same question, can get a response, in the application or via email. In this way, the Tribal Knowledge release solves a number of challenges at once, all with the goal of allowing salespeople to have a better conversation.

Want to see how this can work in your organization? Just ask.

The customers and prospects I talk to understand and believe in the value of Tribal Knowledge to their organization, but they don’t always know to how to start, or have been frustrated by early efforts that have not succeeded.  In each of those cases, they either don’t know how or haven’t succeeded at institutionalizing the process of capturing Tribal Knowledge.  The best advice I have was inspired by a former colleague of mine, David Armano, now of Edelman Digital.  The formula: Seed, Feed and Weed.  (see David’s post in the Harvard Business Review.)

The concept is that, to succeed with Tribal Knowledge, like any form of social media, people are required to participate and drive the initiative.  Further, to succeed with a group such as a sales team (who are time constrained by nature), you need to have a critical mass of content on day one, to make sure you attract and hold people’s attention.  To do that, you need to invest in starting or Seeding the repository.  I recommend you start with a few existing experts in your organization who are predisposed to this.  You know they’re out there.  They’re the ones who have started their own wiki or who are constantly looking for better ways to share their knowledge.  Find them and invest some time in harvesting what they know.

The next step is Feeding the repository.  The hope is that this will happen organically with people posting their own thoughts, and commenting freely on the thoughts and ideas of others.  However, even in an active community, as new topics emerge, the best practice is to have a role defined whereby someone monitors the flow of content and spends some time ensuring the community remains relevant and active.

Finally, the content occasionally needs to be Weeded. That is to say, while technology may help surface the best content, sometimes communities need a little help ensuring the best knowledge bubbles to the top around any given topic, and conversely, sometimes pruning is needed to maintain focus.  At least one of our customers assigns “librarians” to review the incoming content, promoting the best and retiring content as needed.

To quote Dave’s post, “Being social (or tribal) means having real live people who actively participate in your initiatives.”  If Tribal Knowledge is important, put some people behind the initiative, just like you would anything else.  It doesn’t take a lot – probably an hour per week to maintain – and the potential is tremendous.

Another facet that was touched on in a breakout that I was not able to attend (they had too many relevant ones at the same time that made it hard to choose), was Engaging Employees – this topic was also touched on by Philip Clement, Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, at Aon Corporation. A lot of his discussion revolved around getting people engaged (there’s that word again) with the brand. It was a great presentation and you could feel the passion he exuded about the things going on with Aon and their new partnership with Manchester United.

But there is another element to engaging internally. Beyond the rah rah, there is a real business objective involved with creating revenue that should be factored in.  Your customer-facing people, especially your salespeople, are the face of the brand, and they need to know how to actively and intelligently promote it. Beyond the flashy launch videos and one off launch campaign, you need to sustain your engagement with your salespeople. They need to know that they are not on an island, that the marketing activities support their objectives, and they are in fact always engaged with the people internally that can help them push deals through the cycle. With that in mind, how engaged are your people?