Buyer Enablement is ready for Primetime

Buyer Enablement has traditionally applied to internal sales teams. Buyer side of Sales Enablement is a newer concept but incredibly effective. Enable your buyers to do more sales with you. This concept is ready for primetime!  One key success driver for sales enablement that we have written about is personalization. We will write more in future blogs on the other sales drivers.

Personalization and the impact it plays on sales and marketing has been discussed at some level for a couple of years.  Yet according to McKinsey’s article in March of 2017, 90% of retailers say personalization is a top priority yet only 15% believe they are doing a good job at it.

With the evolution of customer sales journeys, customers are demanding we meet them where they are. It is critical we rise to the occasion. Fortunately, there are technology tools available to make personalization a reality. In the July 2018 article by McKinsey titled “No customer left behind: How to drive growth by putting personalization at the center of your marketing” key components must be put into place to allow personalization to thrive. The four components of the personalization operating model are the following:

• Data Foundation
• Decisioning
• Design
• Distribution                                                                                                                                           

Data Foundation

We believe that the critical data resides in different places for each organization. While major initiatives are sometimes in order to put this data in optimal order, personalization cannot wait. New sales, continuing the connection to your clients, and wallet share of the customer are at risk. Therefore sales enablement and all components within such a platform must provide a degree of data flexibility and be as agnostic to source as possible.

Decisioning

The signals that customers trigger are critical pieces of intelligence that must be received, interpreted, and responded to at the fastest rate possible. For many organizations, the need for dedicated resources and a “war room” of focused professionals may not be possible. We like to refer to our resource as a ProteusEngage for Buyer Enablement. Tools such as ours should provide leverage to an organization, creating the capabilities to scale without as many resource demands to deploy.

Design

After the signals are interpreted, the creation or deployment of collateral is critical. The proper identification on the front end of the appropriate archetypes of your clients, lines up suspected collateral to fill the need of the customer. There will be the need to develop new material. Your team is best equipped to develop this content. We seek to provide consultative direction and be a resource to help you dial in what is needed and the analytics pre and post deployment to make the best decisions possible. Iteration will be needed but being informed on how that might need to look is incredibly valuable.

Distribution

Consistent and correct messaging across channels and to the correct archetypes is a challenge in and of itself. We talk to organizations who sell through some sort of channel and consistently hear that they believe only about 20-30% of the relevant messaging is getting to the end customer. This is always a challenge when the distribution chain is longer. We aim to erase this challenge by making sure the correct messaging is reaching your intended recipient and leaving nothing to chance.

Buyer side Sales Enablement is here, it’s go time. How your organization rises on this stage and the resources you use will be critical to success now and in the future. To learn more how ProteusEngage is helping organizations win, email us at sales@proteus.co or select a brief time to chat by clicking on the button below.