Ravish Kamath is VP of Products at Regalix, and Sharedemos is one of his pet products. Ravish also confesses to being a serial entrepreneur. He was instrumental in building MetricStream’s ComplianceOnline.com, the world’s largest online GRC community that bagged the 2009 Forrester Groundswell award for Best Social Marketing Program in the B2B Spreading category. “I am passionate about building winning products, working with kick-ass teams and developing sustainable business models,” says Ravish. Here’s a recent chat with him about Sales Enablement (SE) tools.

Interviewed by S. Sahu

/ / CSO Insights Research Director, Tamara Schenk, has articulated a comprehensive definition of SE:

"[SE is] a strategic, cross functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training and coaching services for salespeople and front-line sales managers along the entire customer’s buying journey, powered by technology.”

/ / So how come there are so few true-blue SE tools in the market?

There are quite a few SE tools/platforms/solutions in the market today. Most of them cater to the technology (hardware/software), healthcare (life sciences) and financial services verticals. There may be a few verticals, such as automotive and manufacturing, that are possibly underserved, as of today.

/ / How critical is it for organizations to adopt an SE solution? Why?

The objective of SE is quite simple – to provide resources to salespeople that enable them to sell effectively. So companies that roll out an SE solution generally see an uptick in selling efficiency, shorter sales cycles and higher closure rates per rep.

Another benefit of rolling out a SE solution is content consolidation, wherein the number of pieces of content is greatly reduced.

And yet another is better alignment between marketing and sales teams, as marketing teams now have a home where they can define and explain the processes and programs used to generate leads.

/ / How critical are playbooks in the B2B sales process?

A sales playbook is the source of truth for all potential customer interactions. It should contain everything your team needs to thrive in the fast-paced world of business: knowledge of your competitors, your own value proposition, best sales practices, and more. Above all, the playbook should be a living document whose contents should never be static. Companies that use playbooks have a far more aligned sales organization and are able to instrument and make changes in a shorter timeframe than others.

/ / How can an SE platform facilitate the authoring of sales playbooks?

As a general rule, an SE platform that allows easy structuring of content and creation of bite-sized content can be an enabler for authoring playbooks.

However, there are a few SE solutions that are emerging, which provide out-of-the-box templates for easy content creation. Such solutions can go a long way in improving authoring time and also help authors think of content topics they may not have thought of earlier, for example, a chapter on objection handling, another on value-prompting conversations, and so on.

/ / Is ease of authoring a key element for an SE tool to be effectively used?

Absolutely. Authoring is not a one-time activity. Content, more often than not, has a life cycle and needs frequent tweaks. This is the nature of agile marketing and sales organizations today. Imagine an experience that requires you to jump through hoops to publish a single update. You might do it once or twice. But would you bother the third time? Considering this, it is of paramount importance that authoring experiences are designed well and are drop-dead simple to use on a daily basis. It doesn’t end there. Being able to collaborate with multiple authors, isolate changes and revert to previous versions of content are all critical in the overall authoring journey.

/ / If a customer already has a CMS, do they still need an SE solution? Why?

Web CMSs today are morphing rapidly. They are attempting to throw off their shackles and become more agile. This is, overall, a big plus for the industry. However, their content architectures are still woven or based on philosophies that treat content more at a page level. Contrast this with SE solutions, where SE content is treated more as first-class objects and not an afterthought. Bite-sized content, the ability to restructure content, re-use content, leverage apps that are native to the platform, rather than custom-built – all of these make an SE solution a much better bet in starting a company’s SE journey. Add to this the ability of SE solutions to provide you with real-time reports on content consumption and visitors – this means you are able to react and make changes in real time.

/ / What is the right way to go for a sales org: implement a CRM platform first, and then look at SE, or vice versa?

CRM first. A good CRM is something that allows sales reps to do work in the least number of steps, has an intuitive UI and does not add cognitive load in a sales person’s daily journey. In many ways, these embody a philosophy of user experience design that has been gaining momentum in the past few years.

The SE solution comes next. Companies that have had some success in SE often dedicate a significant portion of their SE content to CRM workflows, CRM usage, a day in the life of a sales rep and similar CRM use case models.

SE solutions that integrate with a CRM solution and are able to surface relevant content recommendations for a given opportunity have a major competitive advantage.

/ / What are the pitfalls that sales organizations should be aware of when choosing and implementing an SE solution?

To answer this question, I would like to quote some industry facts:

• Sales reps spend, on average, 25 percent of their time every month searching for content.
• 65 percent of reps cannot find relevant content to promote with their prospects.
• While most of the industry agrees that the average ramp-up time for a sales rep is 3 months (90 days), there is a significant representation of companies that take 6-plus months to on-board their sales reps.
• Most companies take about a quarter or two to roll out SE solutions.

Looking at these facts, a few things emerge:

• One of the key criteria in SE solution evaluation needs to be the platform’s ability to surface content via different mechanisms – navigation, search, tagging, Pathfinder, auto-recommendation and more.
• Of the above, search is number 1. It just has to work, instantaneous and relevant.
• Solutions that do not offer insights into content consumption and user behaviour are bad. Insights are critical to drive effective behaviours or changes within sales organizations.
• Solution rollout times are, at times, a function of the company’s processes. But a solution that has pre-built systems/processes, especially around content ingestion, single sign-on readiness, and ready-to-use templates can go a long way in making the rollout a smooth and seamless process.