My mother used to say, “the road to heaven is paved with good intentions.” So true, in the case of sales support and the “everybody sells” mantra, it can have a devastating effect on a bottom line. If you walk into most companies today, client facing individuals are on some level of variable compensation, namely commission. I have seen up to 5-6 people getting compensation on a deal, e.g. demand generation, sales, product marketing, industy lead and the delivery person who was involved in the sales cycle.

Variable comp has been around awhile. Back in the 90′s, I remember walking into meetings with 6-8 people to meet with a client team of one or two. It’s not the fact that I think sales support hurts. The issue I have is that responsibilities and communications plans are not discussed thoroughly and there is no good way for the internal team to create, collaborate and document client-specific content and messaging prior to, or after a meeting.

The purpose of this blog, is not to tout, or lobby for tools, but to talk about “rogues,” which Free Dictionary defines as;

rogue: 1. A person operating outside normal or desirable controls

We all know one, they are the kind of people who go behind closed doors to tell “their side” of the story. Rogues can be detrimental to the sales process. The reason? The number one inhibitor to sales success is the ability to articulate value. If you look at a typical client organization, there is rank, order and process to their decision. The front facing, “buyer” represents a collective of people’s wants and needs who are behind the scene, each tied to org chart and their own set of problems.

In today’s competitive environment, one-off messaging does not help winning the hearts and minds of the people who are working “behind the scenes” in the decision process. One comprehensive, unified “plan” has to be created and submitted covering how you will address the buyers collective “wants and needs” and how your company is uniquely positioned to address them.

One voice: I understand your problem, here is how we going to solve it, and we are uniquely qualified to solve it because _________”

I posed a few questions to a group of top-performing sales people yesterday. Their CEO wanted to get “closer to their customer,” so they started implementing a few sales “process” changes to make that happen. One thing I know is that salespeople who are performing, don’t take process change well, and most don’t like sitting in a class to learn how management intends to enforce and report on progress.

The first question I asked was, “How many people have kids?” a few raised their hands. Out of you, “how many have kids in school?” After a couple of more questions, I got to the crux of my questioning, and had narrowed it down to the preferred nut spread on lunch sandwiches: Skippy or Nutella. After a couple of minutes, I had this on the board:
I let that sit for about an hour.

I then asked them to think about the last time they went to a restaurant for dinner, and bought up after-dinner beverages. Remember this was for salespeople, so for the sake of this blog post, I removed the alcohol related beverages. I narrowed the gap between tea and coffee. After a couple of minutes of chatting and questioning I had this diagram on the board:

With both on the board, I asked about preferred coffee flavors. I was not surprised, but lucky that hazelnut decaf came up, “hazelnet” went on the board, in the middle of the two. It looked something like this:

Discussions ensued; we talked about other examples from “cheddar” cheese to “black” shoes. It’s funny, every time I tie taxonomy and controlled vocabulary(CV) to their own shopping habits, you can see the light bulbs going off, the key is to tie it to how they sell. This approach allows them to walk in their client’s shoes, and gives them an understanding of the value to their buyers. To accomplish that, we talked about commonality of language across their product lines and daily activities, and how CV reduces ambiguity by having common names for functions, process and activities. We agreed on the benefits of common document names, meeting outcomes, status updates and product deliverables. They understood that they could save time with better search, repeatable and reusable content and having more time by eliminating one-off reports, but important to them was reducing ambiguity to clearly differentiate their solution.

Every salesperson I know wants to do two things: sell more and save time. A controlled vocabulary for sales is one way to accomplish both.

Back in 2008, I started a marketing alignment survey. One question I ask is, what are the ”inhibitors to sales success” at your firm. The top two inhibitors have remained the same over the past 3 years.  I believe the number one factor causing these issues to remain at the top of the list is a misalignment between sales and marketing, contributed by a company’s complex portfolio of product and services.

In a 2009 whitepaper on Account Based Marketing, I wrote about the impact of product complexity on sales:

A B2B sale tends to be a complex process for the provider and the client. Often the provider has multiple offerings, hundreds of messages to convey, and varying degrees of insight into specific prospect accounts. Confusion at the point of sale is typical when the salesperson presents too much information or emphasizes the wrong messaging, does not clearly differentiate the strengths of the provider and its solutions, and leaves the prospect puzzled about how a proposed solution will fit his/her unique situation.

The paper was written based on a project deliverable for an IT services company. They had a moderately complex portfolio based on discreet service lines aligned to industry specific business issues. Marketing determined “what their customers needed” through surveys and market research. The way marketing and sales worked together looked something like this:

The sales and marketing process was internally focused. They were hell-bent on articulating the value of their deliverables, their unique pricing models, and their thought leadership. Marketing gave the sales team messaging; value propositions and the price book and sent them on their way. Sales did not do a good job listening to the wants and needs of customers and prospects, and instead went in with mouths blazing with a standard sales pitch.

We moved them to an Account Based Marketing model that coupled the sales, marketing and delivery team together. Account-based marketing worked by providing targeted content relative to an individual account’s business issues. Sales, marketing and solution experts team-up internally to develop separate marketing plans for key accounts. At the heart of each marketing plan is the development and coordination of content that will resonate with the prospect. Account Based Marketing gets the client talking about their unique situation which allows the internal account team to develop a plan and content strategy to articulate business and technology value on how their firm was uniquely qualified to address their business issues.

To see how your sales and marketing teams are aligned take our quick assessment here >

Yesterday I attended my 1^st organized Tweetup with a few social media analysts on #GartnerChat. During that session, the cost of social media came up, and how it can be measured for success.  Later in the day, I caught the beginning of a content strategy meet-up in Minneapolis where @halvorson (Kristina Halvorson) Tweeted the first question posed to @kissane (Erin Kissane),  “How can we measure the success of content strategy?”

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big believer in value-based metrics, and I understand that measurement and metrics are important to any organization.  That said, I believe that asking how to measure social media & content strategy ROI and success is like asking,  “how much do we spend on shipping and what is its value to the organization?”  In today’s world, being social and having findable content that articulates your value is no longer an option.  In 2011, it is the cost of doing business.

Let me tell you an old story, you have all heard it before, but in my version somebody does something.

This is a story about four CEO’s named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and A. Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that they would eventually get to it. Somebody was going to do it, but they had other things on their plate that took precedent.  Anybody could have done it, but they waited to see what Everybody did. While all this was all going on A. Nobody just did it. When market share was lost, profits fell and customer satisfaction was at all time lows, Somebody blamed Anybody and Everybody was red-faced when they realized A. Nobody did and became a somebody.

Bob Dylan put it best, “The Times They Are a-Changin.” Last week, I commented on a blog about friction in the market, it read: “I think in these early days there is bound to be friction as processes become standardized, subject matter experts get asked why, fiefdoms fall and others rise.”

With that in mind, I think “we” need to change the focus from the price of “something” to the cost of not doing “anything.”

Content-centric sales process automation

As you might know, I started in IT in 1980, as a night-shift operator of several IBM mainframes. I made sure that backups and batch jobs ran, and occasionally loaded data via punch cards.

As I stared at whirling tapes, and flashing lights, I had no comprehension  of the applications and business problems I was solving. I yearned, and I mean yearned to be a bit passing through the tag and bus channels of the mainframe, and to this day, I am fascinated to learn how systems work.

In 1986, I joined an apparel ERP vendor called Apparel Computer Systems.  The co-founder was a brilliant chap named Lew Jenkins. I did not get a chance to work with him much, because  he resided at headquarters in Concord, CA. But I did look up to him. It was not the fact that he took a very complicated item master with multiple attributes; style, color, size and dimension and simplified it, but more interesting,  he was able to design and build the first “off the shelf” Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) software product for IBM’s System 38 and AS400.   Eventually, this became the actual product that the IBM direct sales force sold as part of the AS400 solution. The product changed names to Premenos, and was sold to off Sterling Software.  I have since lost track of Lew, but his impact stayed with me.

Lew’s approach to the market and to information looked at commonality across data sets instead of differences. Because of that insight, he developed a product that one company used to ship mops to Wal-Mart, and allowed another, say a couture fashion house to sell and ship their designs to Neiman Marcus. As I think about how Lew was able to see through complexity, and how he could come up with a program that worked across disparate industries, it always left me with a nagging urge to unite, to unify, to to find commonality in a world with so much content that can’t be found.

Where are we now?

When I started my taxonomy quest 3 years ago, I looked no further than a company’s Income Statement, specifically Sales, General and Administration (SG&A) reporting.  Every publicly traded company in the United States reports earnings based on SG&A.  Taxonomy was natural, the problem being that the average Fortune 500 company has twenty plus application vendors proving technology for 1,800 or so activities included under the SG&A umbrella. To exacerbate the problem, every application had their own data silo and language. To this day, information silos and lack of common vocabularies are the biggest inhibitor to productivity and efficiency gains within a company.

So what has changed?

Three years ago, if you asked me what company was going to solve the content complexity problem, I would never of guessed Microsoft. Even back then, when they had won the enterprise desktop battle, they lacked a data repository that enabled the ability for quality search. To this day, there are horror stories of failed initiatives on earlier versions of SharePoint.

What does the future hold?

Done correctly, search and findability has significantly improved with SharePoint 2010. I am not saying SharePoint’s term store is the best solution for ontology,  taxonomy or metadata management (the key to search and findability). But the inroads that SharePoint 2010 has made, and the progress with the 2010 term store’s ability to house metadata, added to the productivity gains inherent in the integration with desktop tools; Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Office, makes Microsoft SharePoint a force to reckon with in the enterprise space including the ability to integrate content-centric processes and transact from disparate information silos.

To see an content-centric process in action, visit the  sales management process site and register for a case study on how a seven hundred person sales force consolidated to SharePoint for sales process automation.

Neither planned nor serendipitous this month I became a consultant with Earley and Associates, my first project is to identify business and technology issues at an Earley client and develop a plan to resettle the team on another master data management initiative. Interestingly enough the members of the team are experts in the field of taxonomy and controlled vocabulary. Seth Earley, founder and CEO defines that as:

A controlled vocabulary is managed in a Term Set and surfaced as part of a document’s properties using the Managed Metadata.

Simply put a controlled vocabulary enables companies to agree on the meaning and scope of words and metadata is as simple as information about that information. This blog for instance segments “business value” into categories of people, process and technology, all of which is metadata that segments and indexes data.

Since 1994, Earley and Associates has been bringing order to content chaos, in October 2010, Seth introduced the term “eTaxonomy”. He defines eTaxonomy (embedded taxonomy) as;

Etaxonomy is the art and science of integrating taxonomy into deployable IT solutions.

Seth goes on to define its secret sauce as “methodologies for enabling smart computing through the use of sophisticated semantic models.”

Seth’s published eTaxonomy model contains 7 components, one component Marketing Campaign Management is a component process identification unit. But does that term go far enough identifying client facing content?  In my position I have been advocating for account content marketing which is content required to introduce your firm and the the value you can bring to a specific prospect. I also introduced a b2b content marketing component that utilizes a keyword specific microsite acting as a shiny lure in Google search results. I do agree component contents cannot be an island and must integrate into other embedded taxonomies such as:

Search
Document and Records Management
Content Management
Digital Asset Management
Ecommerce

As 2011 approaches, it’s time that content be treated as the asset it is and acknowledge that having your content in order is a critical success factor and competitive differentiator in today’s global economy and an eTaxonomy is one to get you there.

It has been over one month since my last post, between school, projects, family, and Vermont’s darkening fall nights time seems to be moving at variable speeds and writing has taken a back seat.

I admit, I think sales is all about getting people to agree on words. Today’s post title, “a common business language” continues my evaluation of my last post. I lost a deal because I did not get to a common language with my client.

Folksonomy protagonist Thomas Vander Wal thinks one way to come to agreement is through the use of a taxonomy, he goes on to define one as “a set of words/term that are commonly used and understood by a population of people that have relevance to help understand information and objects will be found connected to that term.”

According to Mr. Vander Wal taxonomies are “hard work and expensive to build and maintain, ” so in 2004, he offered a folksonomy patch to bridge the gap. Through his own admission folksonomies should not be seen as a replacement to taxonomy, but as a means to augment taxonomies because they lack the efficiency and clarity that taxonomies provide.

As part of any sales process, I evaluate what happened. Last month’s loss was directly tied to lack of a agreement on a common business language. What did I fail to articulate or did they fail to translate?

Coming up to the 60 day mark, I will make the call to see how the project is coming along and I will ask what happened. I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s that pesky, “I did not understand “_______” on your proposal and the vendor selected addressed my issues with clarity” and that is something that we have all heard before.

Check out my work on closing the language gap >

Vermont based deployable solutions >

We all have heard about what @comcastcares has done to become a front-runner in customer service on Twitter.

For the past couple of weeks I have been doing some informal testing on Twitter.  I have been asking brands that I use every day questions, typically handled through phone support.   From there I measure their response time and the direction they sent me to solve my issues . Some responded and some did not.  This leads me to believe there is new baseline for customer service being set right before our eyes.

I am not going to report my findings,  I think Twitter as a means to support customers is too early in the adoption curve for everybody, but certainly if brands are out there “pushing” product on Twitter they better be out there supporting customer service issues.

What do you think?  Is Twitter a viable medium for customer service?

Do you need help with Twitter support?  >

My sales alignment poll, established in 2008, ranks inability to communicate value as the number one inhibitor to sales success. You might say, what does that mean, value to who? Some will say, where are those numbers coming from, and who took the poll? With the data I have from, LinkedIn™, Twitter™ and “aggressive” analytics, one can assume my data is statically correct. I am going to give you my opinions of the data.

I have been trained to break value into two parts. Business value, typically the solving a business issue tied to a initiative that rolls up to the CEO’s fiscal goals. And 2, personal value, what the stakeholder is going to get out of it. i.e promotion, a raise, a notch in the project gun.

Hiring an outside firm to come in and “uncover” value can take time and be expensive, and they only bring a facilitation methodology and an interpretation of the data gathered internally and externally. I am not suggesting, mind you, that is a bad idea, but depending on other factors, there is not a one size fit all approach to solve the issue, but certainly, it’s the number 1 “inhibitor to sales success.” Here are the others: