Driving Sales Enablement Excellence with better content, value-focus and content portals
How do you better grow your business with channel /business partners and key prospect accounts?
It’s all about leveraging sales enablement to centralize, promote and share important content, selling with business value and ROI, and improving tracking and intelligence to improve visibility and intelligence. This according to John Ross Director of ServiceNow Solutions for Sakon, a service provider helping enterprises manage their communications infrastructures to reduce telecom, mobile, and network costs while optimizing productivity, and what we learned talking with John at our Evolve 2021 Conference.
Exploring John’s motivation to try something new, he decided to add to the Sakon sales tech stack when he would send out prospecting and engagement e-mails and have great success in getting clients to open and share the compelling messages and content. So why change when these emails were being read?
Unfortunately, John and the team had no idea exactly who was engaging, as the email would be shared among different stakeholders within an organization. The proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” was knowing a single email sent to the CEO of Kohls was opened 100 times, a huge success, but not having a clue who in the organization the CEO shared the email with so proper follow-up and engagement could occur.
So, John engaged with Mediafly and began a journey to improve content trackability to solve some key channel and direct selling engagement challenges.
Better Content and Sales Enablement
Starting as many do with their content, John and his team’s first task was to consolidate the various content repositories and get all the partner and sales content in one location, into a single sales enablement platform. With migrating everything to one location, it was easier for partners and sellers to find and access the information they needed. As well, through this consolidation process, he and the team were able to reconcile the content against the buyer’s journey to determine what content was available to facilitate purchase decisions, and what content was missing. This helped the team identify and invest in key content initiatives to quickly close the gaps.
ROI, Value Selling and Enablement
Second, John wanted to return to a value selling approach that they had successfully leveraged in years past but had unfortunately abandoned over time.
This old process relied on ROI spreadsheets to crunch client numbers and determine how much the prospect could potentially save with Sakon. These spreadsheets worked, but were difficult to use, manage and maintain, and eventually were abandoned as a result.
Working with Mediafly, John and team was able to modernize to a more scalable approach, creating an interactive ValueStory ROI tool that partners and sellers could easily use in every deal to quickly discover opportunities, tally potential savings, and produce professional financial justification proposals.
Better Partner Enablement
Third, John and his team were challenged to get and keep partners engaged, with these partners so critical to Sakon’s go-to-market motion and success.
The partner enablement teams would normally share a deck with a partner once a quarter communicating key updates, initiatives, and content. But that wasn’t enough to get partners initially interested, and keep partners educated, engaged, and motivated. The once a quarter motion was too choppy and relied on the partner having an opportunity at hand for them to really pay attention. A month or two later with opportunity at hand they might remember what was presented and be able to leverage the content, but that was hit or miss.
Worse, it was almost impossible to get consistency and capability in messaging and methodology elevated across 100 partners, and thousands of partner representatives.
John wanted to make the partner enablement more continuous, constant, and consistent, so he leveraged Mediafly’s Sales Enablement platform and Workspaces to do just that.
The Sales Enablement platform placed all the key content into a consistent methodology, while Partner Workspaces let John and other partner managers create customized portals, specifically designed for each key partner relationship. These Partner Workspaces provided each partner with important onboarding, sales content, business review and promotional content, all in one location. Templates were used to make the distribution of standardized components and the individual customizations easy across the multitude of partners.
Leveraging Mediafly, John was able to enable all the partners with the consistent messaging and methodology, customized to reflect the nuances in each partner’s type, stage and business.
Best, the Partner Workspace portals and content are completely trackable to assure engagement. John and his team could see exactly which partners, partner reps and even customers were leveraging the key methods, training, messaging, sales tools and content.
Enabling Direct Sales and Key Strategic Account Reps
A new direct sales team was established and responsible for accelerating the growth of Sakon’s business beyond the successful partner channel. The direct sales team was responsible for targeting and managing certain key prospects and strategic accounts and needed better enablement – to engage and differentiate more effectively.
John and his team worked to leverage the Mediafly Sales Enablement platform and specifically Customer Workspaces, empowering direct sellers to engage each prospect opportunity and key account relationship in a more effective, differentiated, and intelligent way.
Each direct seller was enabled with Customer Workspace templates to create custom engagement portals for each unique prospect or account. This enabled sellers to assure each prospect and customer was armed with what they needed to understand the recommended solutions and facilitate making a great purchase decision.
Every time the key prospect or account engaged or shared content, the seller was notified. With these insights, they could tell who was really engaged, who needed more attention, and who to potentially deprioritize, especially important when each engagement could consume precious services and pursuit bandwidth.
The Bottom-Line
Across these Sales Enablement use cases, John has been able to realize some incredible early partner and direct sales successes:
John and team now know which partners, sellers, prospects and key accounts are engaged or not, so important for a small team with limited bandwidth, where prioritizing and quick remediation is essential for maximum impact.
2. Content has been dramatically improved, helping to close key gaps and gain insight into not just what content is being used or not, but which content is “moving the needle”.
3. Users are excited and adoption is accelerating, as success is shared in different peer groups.
4. Feedback and “wish list” requests are increasing, helping to keep partners and sellers more engaged and in a growth mindset.
Checkout John Ross’s interview and a demo of his partner and customer workspaces here:
- On-demand session: https://assets.mediafly.com/l/JdnE6Z4H6QBe
- Slides: https://assets.mediafly.com/l/RWyU22nvSuA7
#salesenablement #contentenablement #valueenablement
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