This is the second part of a post I am pleased to share from Sharon Little, Director, Global Field Communications, VMware, Inc. In our last post, Sharon shared three components relevant to sales enablement. Today, I am happy to share Sharon’s ideas about what she calls “the one sales enablement initiative that most likely to make you wish you’d never heard of sales enablement.”Sharon notes:
It’s called CONTENT.
If you’re Marketing organization is like most, it literally creates content at exponential rates. At VMware, we went from 1,000 pieces of content in our field portal to 5,000 in less than a year. More is not better. The field doesn’t actually want more – they want customer-ready consistent materials that are simple and straightforward. So the content initiative attempts to figure out how to connect the smart, prolific, well-intentioned marketing materials and package them into something the field can use.
This is a multi-phased process, but here are a few guideposts.
Get Outside Help
You can’t do this alone. There are more land mines, opinions and complexities than you can imagine right now. An outsider can bring expertise and help drive consensus from a neutral perspective.
Don’t Boil the Ocean
There are many ways to slice your content. By buyer, industry, field role, product, solution, etc. Identify them all and pick one or two. Pick the ones that are tied to the greatest amount of revenue and will most closely resonate with your target customers..
Create a Framework
A documented framework for content creation and approval will take a lot of drama out of the process. Design a framework separate that everyone can agree to before developing any actual content. This will streamline both the development and the approval cycles.
Drive Adoption
This means a communication plan, training, reinforcement, follow-up and metrics. Don’t skimp on this part – you can create the holy grail of content, but if no one ever uses it, it doesn’t matter.
With a lot of hard work and a little luck, your success in this initial phase of content creation will lead to even more work to do. But it’s worth it as you will be solving a real problem for your company that impacts field productivity, improves customer engagement and takes away a few wins from the competition. Isn’t that what Sales Enablement is all about?
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photo from davidwiley