A Look At Possible Software-as-a-Service Solutions
Sales and marketing have to work together effectively. Your revenue depends on it. But as we’ve seen from our recent survey of sales and marketing professionals, at many companies there’s a lot of friction between the two teams. In fact, one data point showed that 50% of sales teams are not satisfied with their Marketing relationship.
A Closer Look At Our Latest Sales Enablement Solutions
Last month we released KnowledgeTree for Salesforce, the first release of many geared toward empowering enterprise sales organizations to curate and surface just the right content at just the right time. This month, we're excited to share with you some improvements we've made to KnowledgeTree for Salesforce and introduce our brand new KnowledgeTree for Mobile application for iOS. Both help close the loop between marketing teams curating content for the field, and sales teams taking advantage of content in the field. Let's find out how.
KnowledgeTree for Salesforce
Publishing content for use in the field should never be a fire-and-forget process. The best content portfolio is pruned and refreshed as needed. But, how can you determine what content needs pruning and why? Your sales team, the ones using the content, can be a great source of feedback about what's working and what isn't.
Imagine a sales rep working diligently in Salesforce. He's got a good opportunity, International Mining, on the hook. Because KnowledgeTree for Salesforce is installed he has instant access to collateral that his marketing team has curated for opportunities such as this.
In the sea of software acronyms one is forced to navigate in the blogosphere, "MVP" (which stands for Minimum Viable Product) frequently floats to the top. "Ship an MVP" is a mantra reflexively recited by product guys from lean startups to Google, and for good reason. Getting "just enough" solution into the hands of real customers quickly is sound business practice.
Why? Because in today's hyper-competitive enterprise software world, it's critical to validate (or explode) your assumptions about product/market fit ASAP. Whether you're founder-bootstrapped or VC-funded, investing money and many man-months building out that great idea you whiteboarded last week is a tough sell. Without early customer feedback to help you course correct along the way, the failure risk is too high to tolerate.
Great Salesforce Implementations Will Enable Sales
Forbes contributor Gene Marks published a great piece a few months back that I just had a chance to read. In the article, “What Salesforce.com Won’t Tell You”, he looks at the challenge that anyone implementing a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool faces: it’s not about the tool, it’s about the processes you wrap around it.
He’s very right. Many tools, including CRM tools, may require cultural or process changes in an organization. For instance, he cites the example of a sales organization that moves to Salesforce.com but allows some sales professionals to not use the tool. The result is a failed roll-out of the CRM.
Companies need to appreciate the process changes that are required in order to successfully implement any technology, including Salesforce.com, or any CRM. And there’s another angle here too. It’s not only that processes need to change to conform to new methods that a tool automates. The tools must be flexible enough to conform to the needs of a process.
The Right Collateral at the Right Time Enables the Closer
Your product is the top choice of your prospect. They like its fit, your price, and they want to work with you. But you’re not done selling. The prospect still has to get over a few major hurdles internally before you can close out the pursuit. So what will help the prospect buy your product?
In any sales situation you need to equip your champion with relevant information and materials that will help them to build a business case for the solution and specifically for your products. Different stages in the sales cycle mean different kinds of content should be shared.
Early in the sales process you might share case studies and general value summaries. But what sales enablement should you do, what sales tools should you deliver late in the process. It’s all situational, but generally tools that emphasize the business value and support the construction of a business case will be more useful at this stage.
That could be ROI calculators, best practice and implementation guides to support roll-outs, and other content that helps the champion. But where is that content and which collateral should the sales person use? With large sales teams and lots of products sales people can’t be expected to efficiently locate the content they need.
Surfacing the Right Marketing Collateral at the Right Stage of the Buying Cycle Enables Alignment
There aren't many companies out there that can say their content marketing strategy is aligned with their buying cycle. Typically, this because Marketing is not aligned with Sales. This was apparent in our Sales and Marketing Survey we conducted last month. It's the classic case of the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.
In the fast evolving marketing space, content marketing has become the latest hot-trend in marketing. Marketers everywhere are scrambling to create engaging content and get it seen by as many eyeballs as possible in the hope to generate leads. But is Marketing creating the content that Sales needs to close the opportunities they engaged in? How would you know?
Last week we launched a new solution for Salesforce.com users. These tools help sales teams discover and utilize the right content at the right time for any sales engagement. Instead of wasting time digging for the content they need, KnowledgeTree for Salesforce enables sales teams to quickly find targeted collateral based on specific information about their leads, prospects, and customers.
So, to help you understand how the technology can help, let’s step through the process of discovering great content in Salesforce.com. Finding and using the right content is a holy grail of sales enablement.
Sales Enablement Example
Let’s start with an example. A sales professional at Satco sells Satellite Array technology. He’s pursuing a deal with International Mining. He logs into Salesforce.com to view his opportunity and see what needs to be done next. We can see in the screenshot below that the opportunity is set at 10% probability and the product being sold is for the Satellite Array.
Have Collateral Ready When the Competition Challenges
You’re moving through a sale quickly. The buyer is interested, likes your product, has the budget, and a business case. But then a curve ball kicks in. One of your competitors joins the pursuit. Now, suddenly there’s a fight on your hands.
Sales teams need to be equipped with the right materials to address competitive threats. But which materials are going to work? As we’ve talked about before, marketing can help by matching content to certain sales situations. If you have specific strengths in certain industries, you should use collateral that highlights that. Or, if you have multiple product lines then tailoring which messages can confront the competitor for a particular product might be useful.
In addition to discovering the right content at the right time, there’s another element. Sales teams are at the coal face day-in and day-out, confronting competitors and learning what works. Marketing can target messages that can undermine competitors, but they can do it so much better when they know a competitor inside and out.
Sales people sell more when they’ve got the best messages on hand. So, marketing and sales operations goes to great lengths to make sure that these teams have the collateral and content they need.
That means case studies that capture prospects attention early in the sales cycle. It means presentations that build business cases and close deals. And it means implementation guides that turn customers into upsell opportunities.
Discover the Best Content for any Sales Situation
Sales people are under tremendous time pressure. And if they can’t find exactly the right collateral they need now, they’ll often use what’s worked before. But what works for one customer doesn’t always work for another. Case studies that hit home in one industry may fall flat with other verticals. And collateral that resonates early in the sales cycle may not be effective later in the campaign.
Marketing Needs the Freedom and Agility to Manage their Cloud-Based Services.
This is a guest post by Elias Terman, VP of Product Marketing at OneLogin, the innovator in cloud-based identity and access management and a KnowledgeTree partner.
Almost every marketing department uses cloud applications like KnowledgeTree as well as services from public Web sites that offer a variety of login methods. Cloud-based identity management is a great way to secure these applications and partner with IT, but without slowing down your ability to get work done quickly.
It takes a village to run a marketing department–a village that often includes employees, agencies, clients, freelance designers, and optimization experts.
It also takes a village of cloud apps. If you’ve launched a Web site in the past two years, then you know what I’m talking about. I was recently charged with the relaunch of our own Web site, and I was struck by the number of cloud apps we leveraged–17–to create and run the new site.
