Sales Operations People Are My Heroes

Over the past few weeks, I have spent a lot of (high quality) time speaking with our clients to understand how they use Win Loss intelligence to power their Competitive Intelligence programs and enhance their sales efforts.

It turns out that those companies that have the most effective systems that marry up sales, marketing, competitive intelligence and sales intelligence also have a very strong champion or a great team in the Sales Operations or Sales Training department.

In other words, these companies are selling more effectively than their competitors because they know how to collect the right kind of information, interpret it correctly and give the sales team marching orders based on those observations.

We work with many companies that run their Win Loss program out of Marketing, Analyst, or even Sales Leadership positions. However, in most cases, there are obstacles to making the most of the intelligence programs. I’ll describe some of my observations below:

Marketing – The marketing team generally seems interested in brand, value proposition, marketing messages and measuring the results of their other marketing efforts. To them, Win Loss is a part of a voice of the customer program (which isn’t a bad thing at all) or a one-time project to measure. But, I find that most of these marketers don’t pass along information to the sales group. In some cases, they don’t know how to make the information palatable to sales. Surprisingly, many of the marketers don’t think that sales would be interested.

Sales – Sales leaders do a better job of evangelizing their Win Loss programs to the sale reps, but they don’t usually spread the intelligence around to anyone else, which is a shame. There is so much quality information in a Win Loss program for so many departments that pigeon-holing the information in one department for one purpose marginalizes the value significantly.

Analysts – These groups can be proactive about the distribution of the competitive intelligence in Win Loss. However, analysts seem to be too far away from the corporate decision-makers to be able to give the intelligence a strong voice.

While sales operations may be different from company to company, talking to them made me think that they stand the best chance of bridging the sales/marketing gap. These people can think like sales and understands what the reps need. However, they also seem to have a mind for information and can interpret research results in a way that sales will understand.

Even better, the sales operations people are likely to be able to act on this information and take it to the next level of action. They can see where sales may need additional training and prescribe it. They may see that a marketing idea is not working and help to correct that. They can listen to the needs of sales, understand what marketing can do and facilitate the necessary transactions.

So, if you are wondering how to make an intelligence program (Competitive, Sales or Market) work more effectively in sales, make sure you have the Sales Operations people on board. This is likely the best step you can take to ensure success.

Moving Intelligence through the Sales Force

“80% of the CI needed in an organization is resident in the heads of the salesforce at any give time.”

Makes me wonder why systems for moving the tribal wisdom through the organization are so few and far between.

But, if you believe the statement above and you want your entire sales organization to benefit from on-time delivery of the best intelligence and experience possible, you should look at streetsmarts, a product by Involve Technology:

1-The first step in the process is to search for advice in the existing content. Of course, the content library builds over time and the relevance of the information (according to users) becomes more refined.

2-The search results are displayed in a logical layout, just as they would be on the most searchable pages on the web

3-Results are displayed with a link, summary, date and other information that will provide a user with the ability to determine relevance or potential to help

a. Trophy (best practice) – This is given to a piece of advice if the advice has received positive ratings by a majority of users.
b. New – When a piece of advice is newer than the pre-established time limit
c. Fire (hot topic) – if the information has generated a lot of interest and readership, it is designated as a hot topic
d. By – The author can be referenced. The link takes the user to a profile that includes background and contact information
e. Usefulness score – Shows (with stars) how useful the information has been ranked over time. Also, shows the number of reviewers

This is just scratching the surface of their technology. Involve Technology has built in a number of different incentive systems and other knowledge bases to ensure the highest possible usage, both of readers and content generators.

Primary Intelligence thinks this tool is great because it allows us channel through which to put the intelligence generated by live prospects and customers. With streetsmarts, sales reps have nearly every piece of competitive intelligence and advantage at their fingertips. And, news of competitor tactics are spread throughout the organization in minutes.

If you have interest, give me a call. I can help you understand how the combination of technology and intelligence can improve your competitive success rate by up to 20% within a few months. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)