7 ways to improve your business with Sales and Consulting Enablement

In 2018 we are faced with digital transformation, technological disruption and cultural shifts. Changes is happing fast and it is often a challenge to keep your organizations knowledge up to date. At the same time B2B relations is changing, which increases the required skills from sales, presales and consulting.

Below are 7 ways how to improve your business with Sales and Consulting Enablement.

1. Make it easy to manage best practice 

Sharing of best practice is a key element of any great business. Your companies combined experience is what your customers pay for and it is the key ingredient that ensures that the customers keeps returning. 

But as the changes happens ever faster it is a challenge to keep the best practice updated. A presentation that is just one year old can quickly look outdated. And when the employees are busy, it can be a challenge to keep the best practice content updated. It therefor needs to be very easy to share and manage best practice content.

Sales and Consulting Enablement helps you in the following ways: 

• Pinpoint subject matter experts
• In SalesValue you can assign subject matter experts, e.g. product owner and technical specialists
• This makes it easy for other employees to know who they should contact within different areas. 
• Spot new best practice candidates
• SalesValue automatically scans the content on corporate file shares as well as the files that employees share from their personal file shares.
• Based on algorithms and machine learning SalesValue will help the subject matter experts identify potential new best practice candidates based on parameters like ranking, file type, product relation, etc. 
• Identify content that is getting outdated
• When best practice content is getting outdated, SalesValue will prompt the subject matter experts to either ensure that the content is updated or identify new and more relevant best practice content. 
• Recognize missing content
• SalesValue allows you to identify what is the "must have" content for each product or solution area, e.g. price list, contract template, presentation, etc.
• If the "must have" content is not identified, SalesValue will notify the subject matter experts and give recommendations for possible best practice content
• SalesValue also makes it easy for each employee to notify the subject matter experts of content they would like to have but can not find. 

2. Automate knowledge sharing

Everybody would like to have access to great knowledge. But many of us don't have time to share our own knowledge. 

SalesValue automates the knowledge sharing. 

Our basic philosophy is that it is better to share the content that the employees create for your customers, than waiting for when they have time to create great best practice content. There is a lot of knowledge and experience hidden in the work files of each employee.

SalesValue uses intelligent algorithms and machine learning to automate the knowledge sharing. SalesValue automatically scans the content on your corporate file shares like Microsoft Sharepoint and Google Team Drive as well as the content the employee shares from their personal file shares like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. 

SalesValue then adds relevant tags based on

• Products
• Customers
• Projects
• File type
• File format
• Business processes
• Implementation method
• Author and editor
• etc.

SalesValue also gives each file a rating based on different criteria's like age, views, likes, comments and relevance.   

3. Inspire employees

With all the new things happening and the huge amount of information that we all receive everyday, our attention span is very low. This means that we do not have time to review and study all the relevant material that we get notified about. Instead it is important to inspire the employees in the context of their work. 

SalesValue improves the quality of your deliveries by giving recommendations for relevant content in the right context. E.g. for projects SalesValue will help with recommendations for: 

• Best practice content related to the products or solutions included in the project
• Content relevant for the specific project stage
• Content from the same industry
• Content linked to this customer
• Similar projects in the same industry and with similar products
• Recently finished projects  
• Training related to the project and industry

4. Learn when you need it

Similarly employees needs to learn new skills and technologies constantly, as everything evolves very fast. Often the employees do not have time to go to long courses, and even if they do, it is often not efficient. It is often better to learn in small incremental steps on a more frequent basis.  

SalesValue helps you provide learning content when it is needed by providing learning content in the context of the employees work. E.g. when a consultant works on a project SalesValue will recommend learning content based on:

• The product or solution being implemented
• The implementation method at the given project stage

Additionally there is a lot to learn from the experience from similar projects. SalesValue will identify similar projects and allow the consultant to easily browse the related content and identify the project team to reach out to. 

5. Find what you need when you need it

It is very frustrating to search for something and not being able to find it. E.g. where is the latest workshop presentations that you can use as an inspiration and template for the workshop you are preparing. It can take a long time to browse through all the folders and file shares where the presentation can be stored. 

SalesValue makes it easy for you to find what you need, when you need it. Our algorithms and machine learning automatically tags the content with several relevant tags, and you can easily and quickly configure the tags to your companys specific needs.

When the employee needs to find a specific type of content she can use the search and filtering functionality to find what she needs, e.g. she can use the filter to only show workshop presentations file types, Power Point file format,  that is linked to the relevant implementation step and to the relevant product. 

6. Link content to methods and processes

You can increase the value of your methods and processes significantly by linking content directly to the activities in the methods and processes. 

It is a typical challenge in both sales and consulting departments, that you have really nice methods on paper, but in real life your employees just do as they have always done. The problem that we have often experienced it that the methods and processes are theory and they are not made practical for the employees. 

A great way to make the methods and processes practical and a natural way of working, is by linking the content directly to the activities in the method. This will significantly improve the value of your methods and processes. 

You can configure your sales and consultant methods and connected activities in SalesValue. This allows you to: 

• Find best practice and examples in context of your work 
  • E.g, a consultant can get recommendations of relevant best practice documents as well as examples from other customers for each of his projects based on the involved products and the current stage of the project. 
• Spot activities where you need supportive content
  • E.g. a step in your sales method might be to identify the key contact persons at your customer, which is now 6,8 on average according to CEB / Gartner. We recommend you add a description or presentation of the typically buying groups for each product or solution. 
• Automatically find examples from colleagues
  • E.g. a step in your project method might be to create a Project Initiation Document. You can add a best practice template, and SalesValue will also automatically identify examples of high rated Project Initiation Documents from other customers that can inspire your consultants when creating a new document for a new customer. 
• Allow employees to help improve
  • When an employee creates a new great document they can highlight this themself and link it to the relevant activity

7. Spot areas for improvement

Finally it is important to constantly improve to stay competitive and evolve.

SalesValue helps you spot areas of improvement for your content and learning.  Our analytics gives you insights on which content is being used most often and which content is most valued. This is great information on content that you might want to make even better or more similar content.

It is also a common problem that corporate functions produces some content that is never used. With SalesValue you get insight into how often the content is used and you can adjust the content production to the areas where it delivers most value. 

SalesValue also helps spot areas where there is missing content based on rules you can configure and based on categories like file type, implementation methods, products, etc. SalesValue also allows the employee to give input on what they like and what content they are missing, which is highly valuable input on areas of improvement. 

Value 

The above easy steps will deliver measurable value to your business in areas of: 

• Better quality
• Higher productivity
• Faster enablement
• Greater motivation