Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, recently wrote a post, The Big Reverse of the Web, that has sparked quite the debate in technology communities on the future of mobile apps, online advertising, search engines and more. The money line is:
“Ten years from now we’re going to look back and recognize that search-based content discovery was broken.“
Amen, brother!
He continues with,
“What people really want is to tune into information rather than having to work to get information. It saves them time and effort and in the long run, an improved user experience always wins. In most cases, “Show me what I want” is more useful than “Let me search around and see what I can find“.
He cites great examples of this already happening in the world (thank you Stich Fix, I love my latest fix!), but reading his post just re-energized me and got me super excited for the #BigReverse of Sales. We’ve been seeing this in recent years that sales people are too busy, too overburdened, and too focused on the close to be able to effectively search for any content – no matter how awesome – that might help them do their job more easily.
Pull-based Sales Enablement
Up until recently, organizations would “enable” sales teams through portals where content and tools were stored in a central location, indexed and tagged so sales people can find what they need = a pull-based sales enablement approach. The burden is on the sales person to find the relevant content by knowing exactly what they are looking for or typing in search queries and filtering results to narrow down what might work.
This makes sales have to work for the information they need to do their job. Its time consuming and requires effort that should be focused on understanding buyers needs and having valuable conversations. You pay them for their ability to close deals – not for their advanced search abilities.
What innovative sales operations teams are understanding, is that just doesn’t work.
Push-based Sales Execution
The new paradigm Dries talks about will be the same dramatic shift that will disrupt traditional enablement in sales. Picture this – content and tools will find you, the sales rep, instead of you having to find them. No more searching, more more emails to marketing, or phone calls to product management to get the content you need to have great conversations with your buyers. It’s just pushed to you, served up automatically by leveraging data about the situation so its the right content for the right conversation.
It’s what some of the most progressive companies are doing right now. They’ve realized the problem and anticipated the shift. By adopting technologies like digital sales playbooks, organizations can leverage the data they have in their CRM (like Salesforce.com), as well as knowledge of the sales rep, and proactively push content to the sales rep. And think about content not just as finished documents, but also assets like talking points or coaching.
The #BigReverse is already happening and Qvidian is proud to be partnering with innovative companies that are making the shift.
