Sales teams are the lifeblood of every organization as they are tasked with acquiring market share and growing revenues and profits. Ensuring that sales teams are equipped with the right sales content and tools, at the right time and location, is critical in order to realize the highest yield out of a sales opportunity pipeline in the shortest period of time. As the use of mobile devices by sales teams continues to increase, organizations are finding that they are improving sales engagement at the point of customer/prospect conversation.
But technology alone does not improve sales execution. In fact, having the productivity tools that enable them to engage with content and the customer is more important than the mobile device itself. Consider the financial impact that is being created by the time it takes to find content across fragmented content silos and the replication of work that is going on across an organization because content cannot be easily found when needed. By identifying the biggest inhibitors of sales effectiveness, organizations can implement strategies to address these and quickly maximize sales team’s efforts.
Inhibitors of Sales EffectivenessTwo timeless problems for sales professionals around the world are wasted time and lack of organization at work, both of which have a direct impact on a company’s revenues. Much of these issues are caused by content-related issues.
A 2011 EMI Industry Intelligence Report found that in an average week, technology sales professionals spend eight hours developing client presentations, five hours looking for marketing collateral and four hours searching for customer information outside the organization. Over a full year, 17 hours each business week translates to approximately 106 full sales days lost. A 2013 KnowledgeTree survey showed that 84 percent of marketers believe they’ve done a good job in making it easy for salespeople to find content they need – yet only 51 percent of salespeople feel that the right content is readily accessible. That’s a lot of time that could be spent more productively – especially if the marketing team has already developed resources for sales reps to use.
Another challenge: customers today are much more educated than even before. A recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 business-to-business customers found that nearly 60 percent of purchasing decisions have been made before having a meeting with a supplier sales representative. Additionally, IDC Research on sales enablement discovered that buyers felt that 57 percent of sales reps were either not or only somewhat well prepared during their initial meeting. If an organization’s sales rep is not well prepared for a meeting with a well-informed prospect, the results will be disastrous.
The numerous content repositories that sales reps are required to navigate also make it very difficult to find the latest sales content and selling tools. It’s not just enterprise file shares and portals where sales content is typically housed; it’s also across applications such as Salesforce.com, Seibel, ERP systems or content management systems such as OpenText and Documentum. Asking mobile device users to search and surf through massive directories of files and folders is not an effective or cost-efficient way to look for content.
Minimizing Time Wasters to Maximize Sales Teams’ EffortsMobile technologies provide sales professionals with a significant advantage to maximize their efforts and be more engaging with customers. Customers who are short on time need relevant content that’s personalized and customized to the challenge that they’re facing, and mobile devices such as tablets are ideal in these situations. Sales representatives can preload content specific to the customer and present it to them quickly, even engaging them interactively by incorporating simple questionnaires to be completed by touch. Tailoring the discussion with a prospect or customer will always get better results for sellers.
Beyond the mobile device itself, organizations with the right mobile productivity tools in place that help with customer engagement can rapidly improve its sales team’s effectiveness. Here are a few examples:
Push relevant content. Mobile users asked to use a desktop search and surf paradigm get frustrated navigating content because it’s not optimized for the form factor of the device. This, in turn, prevents mobile users from being successful in finding the information they need to do their job. Tools that enable marketing departments and sales teams to push the right content to the right sales rep at the right time and location, directly to their device, are vastly superior to the alternative.
Unlock sales tribal knowledge through expert networks and collaboration. By identifying the exact content that top sales performers use and sharing that tribal knowledge with the rest of the sales team, organizations can improve the performance of the collective group by transforming individual success into repeatable behavior across the entire sales department. The key: transfer knowledge in a passive manner so that it doesn’t burden experts in the sales team with a mentoring role or requirement to post on an internal social network. Instead, leverage the ability to collaborate on content by providing mechanisms to comment and annotate directly on content. Leverage social media network techniques by enabling sellers to subscribe and follow content and content publishers to understand what content sellers are using or creating.
Reduce administrative tasks and automate paper processes. In an ideal world, sales reps are spending their time selling, but the reality is there’s a large amount of administrative work that must be completed. Tools that automate manual processes on mobile devices, including ones that embed content into forms and workflows to capture data on mobile devices in real time, free up significant amounts of time for the sales rep.
As most sales organizations today are mobile, there are innovative solutions that are emerging to enable a mobile sales workforce to be more effective when engaging with customers and more productive to increase their available selling time. By focusing on providing dynamic, on-demand content that sales teams can access during a selling situation, organizations can improve execution, reduce costs and increase revenues.
Brian Cleary is chief strategy officer at bigtincan, a leader in mobile content enablement whose products provide access to all relevant content combined with all the tools needed to enable a mobile workforce to be productive.
But technology alone does not improve sales execution. In fact, having the productivity tools that enable them to engage with content and the customer is more important than the mobile device itself. Consider the financial impact that is being created by the time it takes to find content across fragmented content silos and the replication of work that is going on across an organization because content cannot be easily found when needed. By identifying the biggest inhibitors of sales effectiveness, organizations can implement strategies to address these and quickly maximize sales team’s efforts.
Inhibitors of Sales EffectivenessTwo timeless problems for sales professionals around the world are wasted time and lack of organization at work, both of which have a direct impact on a company’s revenues. Much of these issues are caused by content-related issues.
A 2011 EMI Industry Intelligence Report found that in an average week, technology sales professionals spend eight hours developing client presentations, five hours looking for marketing collateral and four hours searching for customer information outside the organization. Over a full year, 17 hours each business week translates to approximately 106 full sales days lost. A 2013 KnowledgeTree survey showed that 84 percent of marketers believe they’ve done a good job in making it easy for salespeople to find content they need – yet only 51 percent of salespeople feel that the right content is readily accessible. That’s a lot of time that could be spent more productively – especially if the marketing team has already developed resources for sales reps to use.
Another challenge: customers today are much more educated than even before. A recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 business-to-business customers found that nearly 60 percent of purchasing decisions have been made before having a meeting with a supplier sales representative. Additionally, IDC Research on sales enablement discovered that buyers felt that 57 percent of sales reps were either not or only somewhat well prepared during their initial meeting. If an organization’s sales rep is not well prepared for a meeting with a well-informed prospect, the results will be disastrous.
The numerous content repositories that sales reps are required to navigate also make it very difficult to find the latest sales content and selling tools. It’s not just enterprise file shares and portals where sales content is typically housed; it’s also across applications such as Salesforce.com, Seibel, ERP systems or content management systems such as OpenText and Documentum. Asking mobile device users to search and surf through massive directories of files and folders is not an effective or cost-efficient way to look for content.
Minimizing Time Wasters to Maximize Sales Teams’ EffortsMobile technologies provide sales professionals with a significant advantage to maximize their efforts and be more engaging with customers. Customers who are short on time need relevant content that’s personalized and customized to the challenge that they’re facing, and mobile devices such as tablets are ideal in these situations. Sales representatives can preload content specific to the customer and present it to them quickly, even engaging them interactively by incorporating simple questionnaires to be completed by touch. Tailoring the discussion with a prospect or customer will always get better results for sellers.
Beyond the mobile device itself, organizations with the right mobile productivity tools in place that help with customer engagement can rapidly improve its sales team’s effectiveness. Here are a few examples:
Push relevant content. Mobile users asked to use a desktop search and surf paradigm get frustrated navigating content because it’s not optimized for the form factor of the device. This, in turn, prevents mobile users from being successful in finding the information they need to do their job. Tools that enable marketing departments and sales teams to push the right content to the right sales rep at the right time and location, directly to their device, are vastly superior to the alternative.
Unlock sales tribal knowledge through expert networks and collaboration. By identifying the exact content that top sales performers use and sharing that tribal knowledge with the rest of the sales team, organizations can improve the performance of the collective group by transforming individual success into repeatable behavior across the entire sales department. The key: transfer knowledge in a passive manner so that it doesn’t burden experts in the sales team with a mentoring role or requirement to post on an internal social network. Instead, leverage the ability to collaborate on content by providing mechanisms to comment and annotate directly on content. Leverage social media network techniques by enabling sellers to subscribe and follow content and content publishers to understand what content sellers are using or creating.
Reduce administrative tasks and automate paper processes. In an ideal world, sales reps are spending their time selling, but the reality is there’s a large amount of administrative work that must be completed. Tools that automate manual processes on mobile devices, including ones that embed content into forms and workflows to capture data on mobile devices in real time, free up significant amounts of time for the sales rep.
As most sales organizations today are mobile, there are innovative solutions that are emerging to enable a mobile sales workforce to be more effective when engaging with customers and more productive to increase their available selling time. By focusing on providing dynamic, on-demand content that sales teams can access during a selling situation, organizations can improve execution, reduce costs and increase revenues.
Brian Cleary is chief strategy officer at bigtincan, a leader in mobile content enablement whose products provide access to all relevant content combined with all the tools needed to enable a mobile workforce to be productive.
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