In the dark ages of sales, relationships began with a face to face interaction. Buyer and seller met and exchanged business cards. The sales person educated the buyer on how his/her offering could help the buyer. The seller took notes and not much happened until they met again.
Today’s buyers are educated on your offering, are overconfident and overwhelmed with information. Your offering, which was at one time much different is now similar to the competition.
To combat this commoditization, sales reps need to be equipped with relevant information. Within the first 5 minutes of a call a sales person can destroy an opportunity. Preventing this from happening requires access to the right content at the right time. This is why sales enablement has become a role of strategic importance. Sales enablement directly influences the quality of customer interactions. Sales enablement is no longer just a content production and training function. Sales enablement is leading the mobile movement and improving sales interactions.
Why is Mobile Enablement so Important?
Sales people need information at their fingertips when it matters most. That time is the moment of truth when a sales call happens. Lack of sales call preparation, content, and data leads to wasted at bats. Wasted at bats are expensive.
The Cost of a Wasted at Bat
Let’s take an example of a sales rep that costs $200,000 all in. Let’s say he/she does 5 ‘real’ (not counting check in type calls) sales calls a week and has 50 selling weeks a year. The average cost of a sales call is $800. And this is based solely on the labor cost. If you factor in all the other expenses, the number grows quickly. In some complex sales, each call costs in excess of $10,000.
In the example above, I addressed hard costs. The most troubling issue is the opportunity cost of a wasted sales call. Dig into win/loss analysis and you find that many customers do take action. The rep blames a different factor, and the company spends money elsewhere. Failed sales calls cost you massive amounts of revenue that could have been captured. How much additional revenue would you capture if your win rate improved by just 5%?
What Mobile Content Should You Provide?
Technology is an important consideration with mobile enablement. There are many good tools available. However, in this post we are going to focus on a frequently missing component: Content.
Creating, refreshing, and improving content never ends. Here are examples of mobile content that will help sales people be more productive:
- Playbooks – playbooks help sales people execute at the moment of truth. They do so by providing the right content at the right time in a digestible format. Here are some components of a great playbook:
- Key Messaging
- Market problems
- Industry trends
- User persona summary
- Buyer persona summary
- Questions to ask
- Competitive information
- Solution overview
- Past success stories
- Detailed solution components
- References to other research sources
- Buyer Personas – A Buyer Persona is a profile of a particular buyer within your target market. They help sales people understand what their buyers care about and how to connect to them.
- Buyer Process Maps – A Buyer Process Map is a sales tool that maps the decision making process. They help sales people sell more by staying aligned with the buyer.
- Battle Cards – also known as “kill sheets.” They prepare your sales team to differentiate your offering to beat the competition.
- Account/Buyer Data – access to Marketing Automation, CRM, and other data. Allow sales people to get smart fast on buyer behavior and past buying history.
- Training Content – let sales people take trainings while waiting for a sales call or in the airport. Take advantage of the non-selling time to improve skills.
- Best Practice Sharing Tools – Chatter, Jabber. Enable best practice sharing between sales people in real time. This can provide motivation and accelerate the right behaviors.
Another major benefit of mobile content is tracking. You can determine what is valuable based on usage metrics. This allows sales enablement to invest in the right content.
Help sales people execute when it matters most: in the trenches. When in front of the customer in the trenches. In these moments, they need the right content and data at their fingertips. With the rise of mobile content, sales enablement has become a crucial, strategic role.
If you are a sales enablement leader looking for additional best practices, listen to this podcast. It will provide ideas on how to elevate your strategic importance in the organization.
