The New Rules of Sales Enablement, Rule 1: Conversations, Not Collateral

If your company is like most, you equate sales enablement with collateral and sales tools. You’ve treated sales enablement as a task—loading your sales and marketing collateral into a sales portal or intranet site and giving your salespeople a login. Then you ring the dinner bell, cross your fingers and wait for the magic to happen.

One of my clients is a large technology company with five businesses, a field sales department, and a corporate marketing group. A few years ago, they launched a sales enablement initiative. The product folks within each business unit had to compete for the attention of the sales team to try to get them to sell the new and updated products they kept launching. So they would work with corporate marketing to create a ton of product collateral and 75-slide PowerPoint presentations. They created a sales portal, which their salespeople could access by clicking a big blue button right on the front page of the corporate intranet site, and they posted all their collateral to the sales portal.
I asked my client how often the reps use this content. She said there was no way to know.

So we polled some of the salespeople and shadowed a few experienced reps on sales calls. We heard the same story from each rep. It sounded something like this:

“When I first joined the company, I got a couple of documents and presentations from
my sales manager. Every time I have a meeting, I take these files and modify them for
the current opportunity. I now have dozens, no, hundreds of versions of these
documents and presentations on my laptop. The sales portal? I don’t remember how
to get to it or what my login is.”

Can you imagine what the conversations are like between this salesperson and his customers?

The sales portal is fundamentally flawed

Every company I have worked with has previously deployed one or more formal sales portals and has a proliferation of maverick portals or intranet sites that have popped up over the years. And without exception, sales management considers them failures.

This “collateral in a box” approach to sales enablement has three fundamental flaws:

1. Too much information! :: Most sales portals have become dumping grounds for everyone in the company who has information they think would be useful to the sales team. The collateral in a sales portal is usually high-level, one-size-fits-all content and is way too hard to keep up-to-date. How does a salesperson know what to use? No wonder they rely on the content they keep on their laptop!
2. Not aligned with selling situations :: Sales portals organize information in ways that are logical for the people posting the content, such as by file type (PDFs, PPTs, DOCs), by type of content (case studies, product briefs), or by product line. They don’t deliver it the way salespeople think, which is situational (for example, attempting to qualify the opportunity of selling to a CFO in a manufacturing firm who’s worried about managing cash).
3. Disconnected from daily reality :: Sales portals require reps to log in to a system that is separate and disconnected from the tools and applications they use every day, such as their Blackberry, email, and CRM system.

So salespeople feel overwhelmed, lose confidence, and stick to the stuff they’ve saved on their laptop.

I wish I had a dollar for every person I talk to who thinks that sales enablement is nothing more than deploying a better sales portal, with no regard for the buyer’s information needs.

We need a new definition of sales enablement

In my next post, I'll describe that new definition of sales enablement. Follow me to see each new rule as I post it, and let me know in comments if you can relate to any of these points.