Who are the critical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) inside your organization? If you’re like most companies, there are far more than you think. Leveraging this army of expert insights can make the difference between success and failure. Identifying and promoting their knowledge isn’t easy – but it is critical to your sales team’s success.In this sixth edition of an eight-part series, we will explore how SAVO’s consulting can help to identify and tap into the SMEs where you work.
Promoting subject matter expertise is key because clients have high expectation and when you provide them leading edge thinking from the experts in your organization, you help them win and therefore increase your opportunity to win.
Today, SMEs are scattered around the globe. The global shipper FedEx asks sellers to record and share videos that promote their products and services. It then makes the videos available to the worldwide sales team. After adding Boeing 777s to their fleet (which offered faster delivery), many sellers began posting videos explaining how they would promote this new offering to customers. One sales leader in China created a video noting that he would explain to tech manufacturers in Shanghai that they gained an extra two hours of production time because the plane would leave later and still meet the original deadline. Soon, the video was a fan favorite, and FedEx had an SME on Shanghai business that was bombarded with questions about selling to tech manufactures.
In this situation, the company connected sellers with the most appropriate subject matter expert based on the selling situation. The key is scaling your subject matter experts effectively across the organization. When an SME becomes a de facto help desk to the sales force, you have an ineffective SME, and probably an unhappy SME.
At Oakwood, many team members in the sales enablement group have past experience working for consulting firms. We promoted that expertise in their profile on SAVO and areas of the site dedicated to the consulting vertical. As a result, my team was flooded with calls asking how to sell to consulting firms.
We turned to SAVO for advice about how to distribute their expertise. After thoroughly investigating what knowledge the potential SMEs had to share that would be most useful for inquirers, they suggested a framework that involved sharing templates. Now, we have tips and tricks for targeted SMEs, and examples of things they can post, including video. In fact, we will buy a Flip camera for any SME who will record and post video – a nice perk!
If you are using a sales process and some form of guided selling, you can also consider offering SME expertise to the seller to help improve their specific situation; regardless of whether they are aware of your SMEs or the expertise they possess.
SAVO provides an experienced Sales Enablement Consultant to guide organizations through activities designed to identify, collect and apply the tools and experts necessary to transform and promote subject matter expertise in a comprehensive and useful manner.
Don’t miss: Guided Selling link to AMP Blog 5
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