- Are the facts correct?

- Does the asset already exist in the site?

- Did you determine the audience when choosing the library?

- Did you apply the appropriate tags?

- Did you reflect the appropriate creation date on the edit tab?

- Did you set the necessary compliance features on the compliance tab?

If you’re interested in learning about how we’ve helped our customers establish governance policies for their SAVO implementations, please contact your Account Manager. If you’re not a SAVO customer and would like to learn more about Sales Enablement governance, please contact us! We’d be happy to schedule a call with you.

We’ve developed the SAVO Mobile apps with one goal in mind; give the “road warrior” – whether that’s a sales person, implementation consultant, or subject matter expert –  the information they need, when they need it, in the palm of their hand, so that they can have that fluent conversation with their customers. That involves having access to the best materials, information and experts at a moment’s notice.

Everyone here at SAVO is excited to finally extend our Sales Enablement platform to the mobile devices in the hands of the “road warriors” across our customers. You can check out the mobile apps for yourself by clicking the links below.

From a technology perspective, implementing SAVO is easy…  The SaaS platform is a key element of SAVO’s Time to Value, and the flexible design of the software itself enables project teams to build powerful solutions incredibly quickly.  As a result, every month I have the pleasure of seeing our clients launch sites with meaningful business impact that took less than 90 days to from kickoff to site launch.  And while I find those successes incredibly rewarding, it’s not the whole story.

My real passion is building services organizations by partnering with clients to seize their greatest opportunities and solve their greatest challenges.  With SAVO’s rapid implementations, I wondered if SAVO’s clients really needed and wanted help.  Of course, our clients’ needs and wants vary greatly.  We have many clients who are incredibly capable, properly staffed, and effectively sponsored.  They effectively build content, govern their Sales Enablement programs, administer their SAVO systems and reap incredible rewards.  But not all of our clients have the time, resources, or expertise to take best advantage of their investment in SAVO.  So, we’re building and growing the SAVO Consulting team.  As our clients’ Sales Enablement partner, we’re committed to understanding where they need help, and being creative about how that help is provided.

In the coming months you’ll be hearing from me about new service offerings designed to help you maximize the return on your SAVO investment.  We’ve heard from our clients about their needs in the areas of tailoring search, promoting adoption, governing content, integrating SAVO and managing system administration, and are working with many clients in creative ways to address these needs.  Where can you use more help from SAVO?  I’d love to hear from you! Please feel free to drop me a note at david.sosnow@savogroup.com.

I know you’re thinking this sounds great, but considering the look on your face, you’re probably wondering where to start. In an earlier blog post from Brian Study, he brings to light a successful formula of Seed, Feed and Weed. It’s not enough to just turn on any Web 2.0 functionality (blogs, wikis, etc.) and expect your sellers to participate. Ultimately, the success or failure of being social depends on the participation of your organization. With that in mind, don’t pick a starting point that is too broad or try to rollout too fast unless you are sure your culture and process are ready for it. There’s no harm in starting small if it helps make sure your initial effort is wildly successful.

When SAVO launched the Tribal Knowledge functionality, we published a white paper suggesting three places you could start your deployment. The first is to hook to an existing process. This could be started by repurposing your SMEs FAQs or content from your product training manual. This may sound simple, but you might be surprised to learn how many of your sellers don’t know the information already existed. Next, we suggest piloting the Tribal Knowledge Q&A with one expert or team. Provide that person or team with a platform to share their knowledge and respond to new questions from the field using Tribal Q&A.

The third suggestion for launching Tribal Knowledge is to pilot a hot topic. What is the sales team talking about? What is the number one thing they think will prevent them from hitting quota this year? Have you been considering how best to capture objection handling techniques? Change is happening all the time, and change creates questions. Rather than product managers, field-marketing, and other subject matter experts responding to each question on a one-off basis, establish a topic in SAVO around the hottest issues your team faces, and capture these question and answer pairs for every sales person’s benefit.

One of my customers is focusing on the “hot topic” approach as they prepare for the rollout of a large-scale deployment of a new sales process and supporting training program. Prior to launching this initiative, they identified at least one SME for each of the six training tracks for this new program. SAVO assisted with their setup by creating a topic for each training track and assigning their SMEs as moderators. Each SME has been asked to “seed” their topic proactively with some questions they received during the first training sessions – the hot topics, so to speak. They have set the expectation with their sales team and SMEs to continue “feeding” SAVO with more questions and answers as they begin to execute on the new sales process. SMEs have also been asked to “weed” their topic over time as content gets stale or outdated.

The “hot topic” approach is one way to start with Tribal Knowledge in a very focused way that addresses the needs of your sellers. The other members of the Customer Success Team and I would be happy to talk through a few of these hot topics that make sense for your organization, just drop us a line!

SAVO recommends to our customers to begin generating awareness about the new site several weeks prior to launch.  Assuming you have identified the appropriate stakeholders (who your audience is), determined their needs and have brainstormed how to best articulate the benefits of using SAVO, you are in good shape to begin creating tactics to communicate the right message that will resonate with your audience, and will subsequently generate excitement about the upcoming launch.  How much you want to “give away” with each of your communication tactics will depend on your users.  Some clients opt for partial disclosure by, for example, providing demos of SAVO during sales meetings, but stopping well short of on-the-fly training, while many customers will opt for using a campaign strategy that simply emphasizes the fact that “something” is coming that will greatly enable the sales force to perform their jobs better–sell more!

A few examples of rollout campaigns that SAVO clients have developed:

• A strategic workforce solutions company generated a series of teaser email broadcasts from a key Executive, the VP of Sales, that were sent to users over the 4 weeks prior to their launch date using a “What If…” theme, such as “What if you could find the right expert to answer your questions in a matter of seconds?” and “What if you could respond to an RFP with speed and ease?” The idea is that these emails touch on specific key items that are areas due for improvement in a seller’s day to day life.  At the conclusion of each email, there is a reference to the fact that in x amount of days, you *will* be able to do these things.  The value of teaser emails is that they are targeted specifically to the audience that will need to adopt the tool, it sells the benefits without having to dive into any specific functionality about the product itself, it builds anticipation of a resource that can enable you to do your job better in the very near future, and it’s all coming from Executive Management.

• One of the world’s largest office supply providers developed a series of fun, yet targeted, Flash videos that cleverly execute on the same concepts that teaser emails do, but took it a level further by animating visually the existing inefficiencies.  Our customer also branded the videos to align to their campaign theme, emphasized the fact that SAVO is where they can alleviate those pain points and encouraged users to GO there first before taking any other step.  In a few of these videos, screenshots of the new tool are also shared in a very specific manner as to demonstrate that solutions for sellers have been accounted for in SAVO.  The videos were very effective to convey how specifically SAVO will help reduce inefficiencies and reinforces the change management process that accompanies the rollout of new software.

• A leading seller of data center equipment and systems created several contests that were shared within a week of the official launch via a 2-page brochure that also listed out the new site’s benefits.  The first contest was set up so that users logged into the site and began using the search capability.  There were 8 hidden treasure chest images scattered throughout the site.  Users had to use various searching methods that reinforced their new knowledge about the site to find these images and, once found, they were able to follow instructions to claim their prize.  Once an image was found, it was removed from the site to ensure that there was no overlap in winners.  On a monthly basis, the customer is having a drawing for various prizes (e.g. a set of golf balls or gift cards).  Users are entered into the drawing if they have rated at least 3 documents, created at least 1 piece of tribal knowledge such as a success story or competitive insight and commented on at least one post.  Finally, one key contributor will be chosen at their National Sales conference later this year from all the people that met the monthly criteria and be awarded an Apple iPad!  As my colleague, Sandeep Shelke, shared in a recent blog post, incentive matters!

There are many other rollout campaign methods that have been successful in engaging the target audience such as flyers, training video tutorials, small signage posted in the sales office, and direct mail, but the key to developing your launch strategy is to never lose sight of the message you’re trying to convey to your users.  The goal is to create excitement by being specific about the reason your sellers, subject matter experts and other users will want and *need* SAVO.  Keep it targeted and have fun with it!

Scott framed the Sales Enablement challenge by detailing the importance of the perspective of various leaders and stakeholders, explained the complexity of the problem and detailed the different states of the Sales Enablement journey.  He then asked how the group defines Sales Enablement; answers varied but can be summarized as a combination of efficiency and effectiveness initiatives, including moving the organization to a solution selling model, improving the process and quality of RFP responses and strategic account management.

Next, Scott asked how Sales Enablement relates to business strategy and what is communicated to Wall Street.  The group discusses how leaders communicate objectives externally and managers and their subordinates must deliver the results.  The conclusion was that aligning the right Sales Enablement strategy to key objectives facilitates the execution required to achieve of these goals.

Additionally, there was significant discussion around the topic of adoption. These conversations revolved around the notion that you can’t pick a technology and hope it is well adopted.  Adoption is part of a larger objective, often tied to a strategic initiative; technology doesn’t solve a problem – it’s a component of the solution to the Sales Enablement problem.   And most importantly, successful adoption is not an accidental afterthought; it’s a critical component of success and must be planned early on.

It’s important to note that Forrester’s Brian Lambert was also in attendance; we look forward to some of his upcoming work about sales coaching, a critical component of Sales Enablement.

In short, this was a great event where leaders tackling Sales Enablement everyday came together to discuss Sales Enablement and share their challenges and perspectives.

SAVO’s offices are in the southwest Loop area of Chicago, right across the street from the old post office. Over the past couple of years it’s become a popular filming spot (see “The Dark Knight“), and now the cast and crew of “Transformers 3″ has taken up residence there. Check out the pics from the set!

"Bumblebee"

"Optimus Prime"

"Megaprime"

Attaching cameras to Megaprime

Setting up a driving scene

Helicopter camera

The view from our office

Shia LeBoeuf running across the street (in suit)

SWAT Team extras

SAVO Corporate Controller Patrice Scott with Josh Duhamel

Photo credits:

Ashley Jonas, Implementation Analyst

Eric Sands, VP Quality Management

Patrice Scott, Corporate Controller

Todd Wickens, Sales Enablement Consultant

In my last post, “Technology + Content ≠ Sales Enablement” I highlighted the importance of governance in a successful Sales Enablement program.  I concluded that post with the point that 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 particular, there are three primary audiences who play an influential role in the development of a Sales Enablement program: leadership, subject matter experts and sellers.  Keeping all three on board with the same game plan and engaging them at the appropriate times can be challenging.  For those tasked with managing this it probably evokes images of trying to maintain a bunch of spinning plates atop jittery poles with the right balance of observation and interaction.  From working with dozens of our customers on their governance strategy, I can assure you that it’s not as challenging as it may first appear.

Sales Leadership

It is important to understand what is top of mind for sales leadership and how they will use that to incent and compensate the selling organization. This will help prioritize focus, drive which metrics are important and shine light on what will provide the most value for sellers.  Equally important is the ability to demonstrate the achievement of sellers in meeting those objectives and the impact and effectiveness of enablement resources charged with supporting the sales team.

Subject Matter Experts

There are people today, formally or informally, who support the sales organization in meeting the objectives defined by sales leadership.  Whether the crux of their responsibility lies in content creation, sales training, product management, or they were informally appointed a subject matter expert by the masses because they have insight deemed valuable, they are already spending time on Sales Enablement activities.  For this audience there has to be a mechanism to gain insight into the objectives from leadership as well as seller needs, to  ensure that their enablement activities are the relevant ones.  Additionally, once in use, feedback is critical about whether or not the enablement efforts were in fact relevant and met the seller needs.

Sellers

Sellers can provide important insight into the challenges they are facing in trying to meet their objectives to help guide enablement activities.  Additionally, they need a clear process for requesting, identifying and evaluating the effectiveness of the support they are receiving.  At the end of the day, if the objectives and focus are not clear or the support is not impactful and relevant, sales execution will suffer.

Each of these audiences in many ways informs and directs the focus and activities of the others. Leadership prioritizes focus, which creates new support needs, which drives new enablement activities, which require feedback from sellers.  The investment in these activities and outcomes are then all evaluated by leadership as part of future planning and prioritization.

In my next post well cover an example of one approach to bringing Sales Enablement Governance to life, in “Creating the cadence, governing a Sales Enablement program”.

“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!