mommyjenlin

The magic ingredient for successful channel enablement at scale is data. Imagine having the financial, operational, and behavioral data you need on partners to optimize new product launches, coverage models, and channel programs. Imagine being able to show partners — no matter how new or small or niche their focus — how other partners like them have achieved high return on investment (ROI) on their business with you. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model provides a stage-by-stage guide for advancing the organizational, process, technology, and data infrastructure necessary to transform your channel marketing and sales enablement operations. The journey along IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model is one of evolving from a publishing/transactional framework to a process-driven one. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model - Summary View Stage 1: Ad Hoc Stage 2: Opportunistic Stage 3: Repeatable Stage 4: Managed Stage 5: Optimized for Scale Key ch...

Enablement programs for B2B sales and channel resources tend to focus on activities – trainings, certifications, portal visits, most popular assets, most posts per person, ratings, etc. These are all indicators suggesting enablement resources may have been consumed. But they don’t do a very good job of measuring one of the most important objectives of enablement - changing behavior. New platforms that integrate publishing, process, and social capabilities are making it possible to track behavior patterns in the context of specific business processes. Hidden in this data are the daily habits that differentiate our best direct and indirect sales resources. Sales enablement professionals need to find this data and share it with the rest of their sales audience. This is a particularly crucial for the on-boarding process. Regardless of whether you’re training a new/replacement sales rep or bringing on a new partner and their employees, connectedness is a key metric that you need to capture ...

I was surprised to hear so much talk about the 'buyer's journey' at a recent Sales 2.0 conference. More talk than I often hear at marketing conferences! Having said this, it was clear that many people who talked about buyer's journeys did not know what the term meant. A hesitant raise of hands at one sales enablement panel showed that a little more than half the room thought that their company used a buyer's journey framework. The panelists didn't buy that answer. Sniffed one, "Most companies lift the sales stages right out of their CRM system and call that a buyer's journey." What isn't a buyer's journey? It isn't a sales methodology. It isn't build rapport, uncover needs, identify options, propose solutions, and close the deal. It isn't a product life-cycle. It isn't development, launch, grow, mature, decline. It isn't marketing stages. It isn't build awareness, create interest, engage, and persuade. All of these...

Lead scoring is a well established technique for marketers to translate digital responses into levels of qualification for next stage outreach. For companies with no direct sales or sales cycles of 30 days or less lead scoring methodologies can be rapidly optimized around purchase behavior. For long cycle B2B sales processes, the optimization process goes only as fast as opportunity development which for many high tech companies can be 18 months or more. This is a crucial time for B2B marketers and they need to be just as exacting in how they manage the post-lead qualification journey as they are in getting prospects to the starting line. B2B marketers need to segment, message, time, and target their communications with their direct sales reps just like they do with external prospects and customers. In my previous blog post Six Key Table Stakes for B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment marketers were tasked with three things: Treat the sales force like a market segment Market collateral (...

The IDC CMO and Sales advisory services held their most recent client leadership meeting in Santa Clara on June 5th. One of the key topics of the day was sales enablement. The ensuing dialog between the sales and marketing execs in the room was as impassioned as it was ineffective. Many of the usual themes were expressed (in the nicest possible way): "marketing leads are crap", "sales doesn't follow up", etc. etc. Whenever I hear this conversation it always sounds like the two sides are talking past one another. Neither really understands how to express their frustration in a way that has any meaning to the other. What's missing are some basic table stakes: Sales  1. Train marketing on sales process. It is impossible to effectively contribute to, much less consistently improve, an unknown process. No marketing team should be expected to deliver effective collateral or leads to a sales organization until they have been fully trained on sales process and met...

The old two-step marketing and sales model for customer creation is dead. Today we have a three part model: Socializing, Marketing, and Sales – with socializing taking on increasing importance and marketing being redefined in the process. That’s a good thing for customers but it makes the market more competitive for sellers. Companies have to seek out and engage with both existing and potential customers in radically new ways outside of explicit business contexts with resources previously not thought of as customer facing. This activity is going on today at a furious pace, but it is highly fragmented. With the introduction by Salesforce.com of Data.com and the social ready rebuild of Database.com at Dreamforce, as well their Chatter and CRM capabilities, customer interactions will come together in what is emerging as the Customer Cloud – the first killer app for the social enterprise. The Customer Cloud will evolve into the source of record for all account and contact data because it c...

Market Intelligence on the Move Transformation continues to sweep its way through the marketing function and no "department" within the function is exempt from change. For this month's CMO Advisor newsletter , we are now focused on the market intelligence area. Compared to its peer departments, Market Intelligence (MI) enjoys relative stability, as measured by the steadiness of the job description, job security and tenure, and budgets. But there is a groundswell of change -- or at least an expressed desire for change. In a recent survey of MI professionals, IDC observes that MI executives are seeking to increase the value they deliver to the organizations they support, and to deliver that value with greater efficiency. Indeed, it is the sentiment of executives that IDC interviewed that "The market intelligence organization will change more in the next 3 years than it has changed in the past 10 years". That is a bold statement. To peel it back, here are the top a...

Savo held their annual user group meeting in Chicago on October 26th and 27th. Two hundred people working on Sales Enablement (SE) attended and a number of very interesting keynotes and customer presentations were given. Jill Konrath provided a very entertaining and sobering take on the challenge of marketing and selling to today's harried (understatement of the year) buyers. The centerpiece of her talk was an improvised role playing exercise in which Jill played a sales executive that was a key target for a fictitious company. The point was to show what everyday life is like for our prospects before we ever try to contact them. It was the start of her day and she had to get a presentation ready for the quarterly board meeting that afternoon. The CMO is the first to walk into her office to complain about sales not following up on marketing leads and they have the "marketing leads are crap" argument. "You were in our lead scoring meeting you have no excuse." ...

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel. With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped? Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with ...

The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well. However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles. The Need for Alignment The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule:...

Sales enablement continues to be an area of opportunity for marketers to improve their credibility in the organization and their impact on the bottom line. IDC defines Sales enablement (SE) as: "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place. . . to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward." I'd like to invite Rich Vancil, VP of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, to share with you the sales enablement framework that our team (Rich Vancil, Lee Levitt, Seth Fishbein and me) has developed: "Thanks Michael. Sales people are knowledge workers and their preparation time is all about building their knowledge so that they can have the most effective interactions with their customers. We like to refer to these interactions as 'conversations'. A sales-person's conversations can be actual or virtual; written or oral; one-way or interactive; one-dimensional or multi-media. IDC's...

I've spoken about sales enablement quite a bit in this blog, and I'll continue to do so as marketers improve their ability to better enable the sales process from an internal as well as an external perspective. With this in mind, Clare Gillan, IDC's SVP of Executive and Go To Market Programs, will share some of her insights in the sales enablement area. . . Thanks Michael. At IDC's recent annual Directions event, I gave a presentation titled "The Year of the Sales Rep." In response to The Year of the Sales Rep notion, an SVP of sales asked me, "Why does this year have to be my year?" "Precisely," I responded. Let me explain. . . . never have we more needed our sales reps to be successful and never have they needed us more — those of us in sales, marketing, and executive management. The crisis in sales is driven not by the economy alone but by an evolution in how buyers buy. Sales organizations, in general, have not kept up. The econom...