If "Up to 90% of marketing collateral is never used by sales" (American Marketing Association) is true, what selling tools do sales people really want?
A CSO Insights report among almost 1300 companies shows that the selling information sales people want is intelligence oriented rather than promotional.
SWOTs, Competitive Analysis, Objection Handling insights, User References, Case Studies and Account Planning are considered the most wanted, while most keep being pushed with Brochures and Presentations.
An easy access to the much wanted intelligence documentation is among the added value sales people can get from CRM systems, while increasing its adoption rate.
Add to it the capability of some CRMs of tagging documents, wikis, measuring the number of downloads and "stars" ranking by the users themselves and we are getting closer to a shared knowledge mechanism of enriching our corporate "selling IQ"- a valuable differentiating asset.
Face to face time is probably the most expensive selling asset. How many times we see salespeople coming back to the office only to chase information within the organization? How much of it are repetitive questions?
In several of our CRM consultancy projects we asked international sales channels about their daily pains in selling, to rediscover their desire of cross communicating with other sales people to learn, share and benchmark. Unfortunately some companies still stick to the "star" configuration of communicating between the headquarters and each sales channel individually, while isolating them from sharing and enriching each other. What a waste...!
“The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away” Walter Wriston (1919 – 2005), former chairman of Citicorp.
Isn't that person the sales person and our challenge to facilitate it?
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