“In this paper, several core team members of SVA BizSphere AG line out the main challenge of information overload that the organization sees for enterprises in the 21st century. Applying the problem of the explosion of unstructured information and therefore decline of information relevance to Sales and Marketing, this paper describes the discipline of Sales Enablement. In the second part, SVA BizSphere AG’s approach to Sales Enablement is further discussed with main stress on how to structure information using proper meta-information management (Information Space), keeping track of content production using inventory methods as well as enabling applications to generate documents for its users. For this conference most relevant, two components of SVA BizSphere’s knowledge management concepts are discussed: managing contacts in the information space and connecting them with unified communication.”

“Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas. Technology and workflow processes support knowledge worker success and are increasingly sources of comparative differentiation. Those able to use new technologies to reshape how they work are finding significant productivity gains. This article shares our research on how technology can improve the quality and output of knowledge workers.

Knowledge workers are growing in numbers. In some sectors of the economy, such as healthcare providers and education , they account for 75 percent of the workforce; in the United States, their wages total 18 percent of GDP. The nature of collaborative work ranges from high levels of abstract thinking on the part of scientists to building and maintaining professional contacts and information networks to more ground-level problem solving. Think of a buyer for a retail chain whose distributed web of contacts span fashion designers in Tokyo to experts on manufacturing in Brazil.

For companies, knowledge workers are expensive assets—earning a wage premium that ranges from 55 percent to 75 percent over the pay of workers who perform more basic production and transaction tasks. Yet there are wide variations in the performance of knowledge workers, as well as in their access to technologies that could improve it. Our research shows that the performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors. And that underscores what remains a significant challenge for corporations and national economics alike: how to improve the productivity of this prized and growing corps of workers (Exhibit 1). [...]“

To see the full article, footnotes and exhibits please visit ‘Using technology to improve workforce collaboration’

As indicated in the graphic below, I would hope that even Customer Service taps into and participates in the harnessed collective intelligence of Sales and Marketing by using the Sales Enablement application.

Graphic from Dion Hinchcliffe http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe but altered with regards to ‘Sales Enablement Application’ instead of ‘online community’.



For such a Sales Enablement application to play together with the rest of the intranet / Enterprise 2.0 and the customer facing website, information architectures need to be aligned.

Information architecture?

Information architecture is the organization of sites, the content management system(s), metadata, ontologies, taxonomies, etc … This has actually been the biggest problem for users of intranets as the following data shows (not too fresh anymore but I think it holds true still):

Pain points of Intranets

- 42% Problems with the information architecture
- 38% Search functionality is missing or unsatisfying
- 28% Information is missing or outdated
- 19% Graphical User Interface (GUI) is cluttered/crowded
- 11% Performance problems
- 9% Too little relevance to day-to-day job

Source: Translated from STIMMT Intranet Report 2003 http://topics.stimmt.ch/intranet/

On May 15, 2009, @scottsantucci (Forrester Analyst covering Sales Enablement) noted:

“Had a briefing from @BizSphere. Very interesting thinking, particularly about the need for an information architecture.”

The need for an information architecture that cross-references content based on taxonomies to establish context for sales people becomes clear when looking at old-fashioned sales portals like the ones many businesses expect their sales people to navigate still:



In case you are in Marketing/Sales Enablement at a business that sells to businesses all over the world, would it look anywhere close to the image above when all products and services, that your company needs to enable sales people and channel partners for, were shown in a taxonomy/hierarchy?

Do you have traditional intranet pages for each country or sales region that you have sales people or channel partners in?

If so, then you have thousands of silos to maintain and your users have hundreds of mouse clicks stealing their time! (Also see “Important characteristics of how typical sales reps at large organizations roll”.)

Or with the words of Bruce A. Brien from his blog post ‘Marketing Alignment is critical to Sales Enablement’ from July 16, 2009:

“It is one thing to create a massive library of assets with a navigation structure that only a marketing guru could navigate, it is quite another to enable your sales organization by delivering just the right assets at the right time in the buying process, related to the right industry and business issues being addressed. That’s right, your sales teams will not be able to nor will they want to navigate some intranet or “knowledge garden” as it was called at one company at which I worked. If this is what you have done, your assets will get stale and sales will claim that they can’t find anything they need. Marketing is not supporting them. Don’t waste money creating the asset if you can’t deliver it when and where it is needed.”

Displaying your content and the feedback from your sales people and channel partners in…

1. a context (an information architecture)
2. in Rich Internet Applications using web 2.0 technologies

… makes the scary amount of traditional intranet pages from the image above a thing of the past. These web 1.0 sales portals have to become tools that help sales people excel at selling. From my point of view they need to offer a highly customized experience for each user based on…

- what we know about their job,
- what we know about their language and location,
- what we know about their last visits to the tool,
- what they want and don’t want to see (they might have taken the time to adjust some settings),
- what marketing or corporate want them to see (news alert/announcement, promotion/campaign, etc…)
- what their peers have rated, tagged, contributed…
- and what they are allowed to see (channel partners aren’t allowed to see everything etc…).


BizSphere Sales Web is one Sales Enablement application that…

1. starts with establishing a context as mentioned above
2. and then encourages to break up all content into small nuggets,
3. which get tagged according to the parts of the context they are applicable to.
4. Finally, for sales people this allows to simply auto-generate a polished client-facing presentation or document that includes all the right nuggets (e.g. customer references from the right country and industry vertical etc…).

Check out www.enableyoursales.com/en/solution/documentgeneration/ and request a demo.

“So many presentations and seminars on new technology and new ways of working. It is mind dazzling sometimes. And I am working in IT, so most of the new stuff I know what to think of and how to place it. I do worry sometimes how customers who try to run their business handle this growing complexity.

To help a little I’m trying out a new way of bridging new ways of working and business.

Content
All kinds of content objects people are aware of: Word documents, Excel Sheets, Powerpoint files, Meeting minutes, Pictures, Videos, Whatever … all these content objects are used to do work in one way or another. Very important day-to-day business ingredients. Loads of this stuff is stored in so called directories, in local C-drives, D-drives or preferrably in shared directories. In some cases content management systems and workflow engines help to push this content around in the company.

Context
Context creates quick insight. The logical grouping of documents, articles, and experts is important to understand what is going on. What are the facts, who are the experts and what is the current situation in the market. Context can help to organise around business themes, innovation areas or any other logical business area.

Conversation
Knowledge is what people can derive from expert content and logical context. Where content used to be king, conversation took over. New social networks, twittersphere and blogosphere are the new conversation highways. And with content and context in place, conversation can fuel creativity in an unmatched manner.

So ‘content’, ‘context’ and ‘conversation’ are the three fundamental ingredients to design new information systems and applications. What information is available, how can it be interpreted and what expert is available for a conversation on the subject.

I’m trying out this approach at a very large customer in the Netherlands. Want to learn from my experiences there please contact me at www.twitter.com/arthurkruisman and I’m glad to inform you.”

“This is a short film about information. Although most of us think we know what we mean when we say ‘information’, we sometimes confuse the medium with the message.”

by MAYA Design, Inc.

‘What is Information Architecture?’ from Mickey McManus on February 14, 2009:

“[...] Although it’s tempting to skip ahead to the look and feel of a design, the importance of first defining an Information Architecture (IA) can’t be overstated. Often we find that an existing system has been built as a monolithic solution that jumbles the raw plumbing of the system with the business process and the user interface. Unfortunately this leads to a brittle solution that can’t evolve with new user interfaces, new underlying systems, or new business realities. In fact we often hear the words “Information Architecture” naively applied to only one aspect of an experience (like “Information Architecture for the Web”) and then disregarded or ignored when an experience bridges interfaces (like when a user has to interact with a mobile application that integrates with related information in physical places). This balkanization of experiences was common when the world was made up of disconnected products and services. However with the proliferation of connected computing into every manufactured thing, space, and experience it represents a significant challenge to the usability, usefulness, scalability, and tractability of our built world.

We think partly this is because many of the current crop of designers and technologists think they’ve invented the idea of information architecture from whole cloth (just last week) and it only applies to their big area of expertise. It also is partly because we as a discipline are not really clear on what information or architecture really means. [...]“

A communications system that includes three or more of the following elements: voice, unified messaging, video, mobility, web/data collaboration, conferencing and presence management.

Moving Unified Communications beyond technology

The following video explains how people in an enterprise can communicate effectively and process-oriented based on state-of-the-art unified communications technologies:

BizSphere from www.enableyoursales.com / www.bizsphere.com is the Sales Enablement application my former employer has been working with since 2006. I have been using what the video describes on a daily basis.

Ever tried to look up who within your company has a given role with regards to a given product in a given country… maybe in a given vertical?

Finding these people in seconds and then starting a call with one click is web 3.0 mashed up with Unified Communications! Way cool. Basically this is Conversation Enablement.

Definition of Conversation Enablement

Building on Michael Gerard’s definition of Sales Enablement, Conversation Enablement can be defined as:

The delivery of the right knowledge(=information provided in context) in the right format
and the right questions to ask (“Conversations are about discovery”)
to the right person at the right time and in the right place
necessary to move a specific conversation forward.

This post is with regards to cutting down the time wasted by your own employees (and your channel partners) researching who to contact or which contact details to pass on to the customer when it comes to a specific kind of expert for a specific offering in a specific country.

Real life example

Don’t you know these email trails of at least 10 emails which started off like this: A sales rep asking his boss who in product marketing to contact for the product BCM50 when it is about a customer in Poland?

Sales writes to marketing and marketing writes to each other and before there is a meaningful answer you easily have had ten people involved and a lot of time wasted. (Business cases for how much time of information workers is worth here.)

Statistic

70% of all attempts to find an expert by email are unsuccessful
according to www.thinkbeforeyousend.com

What can Sales Enablement do about it?

Let me show you how the sales enablement application I used to look after for a corporation with 4,000 sales people world-wide cuts down the time to research this kind of contact information. Actually it works just the same if you searched for documents, tools (like ROI calculators), relationships (like cross-selling opportunities), summary descriptions (like updates when a product will be GA) etc.:

This is what I used to train our marketing and sales employees to do.

1. You drill down from ‘Global’ to ‘Poland’ on the top of the screen or by clicking on a Google Maps like map.
2. In the search form in the upper right hand corner you type in the full name or the acronym of the product/service you are interested in.
3. In the left hand side navigation you pick the kind of information you are looking for.
4. Given that you have now set the context you can pick from the list of experts in the middle of the screen and even call them with one click (UC / Unified Communications that is).

How long does that take? 10 seconds for one person instead of ten emails from different people that everybody is then copied on each time.

Why is it possible to save so much time? The reason is we established an information architecture and lots of people are empowered to keep it up to date by just doing a right click on a piece of information to edit it.

For contact details the following happens: Information that is missing will be filled in the moment the contact from the higher level gets all the requests. He/she will be quick to provide the contact details of who should really be contacted for the specific situation. Basically “forced crowd-sourcing”.

The areas where all this helps you can call sales enablement, conversation enablement, channel enablement or just knowledge management. The application comes from SVA BizSphere (@BizSphere) www.enableyoursales.com:

Here are his answers as published in his blog post “Conversation Enablement” from February 3, 2009: