New strategy aims to improve customer communication

More and more companies are relying on “sales enablement” to counter the “persistent dysfunction” between sales and marketing. This is confirmed by the IDC study “Marketing Investment Planner 2010: Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators, and CMO Priorities”. According to information from SVA-Bizsphere AG, “Biz Sphere Sales Enablement” is one of the first solutions with which the new strategy for sales and marketing optimization can be implemented over the long term.

To this end, the company has combined business process-oriented consulting methods with social (Web 2.0) and semantic (Web 3.0) web technologies. Thus, for the first time, existing company structures could be mapped sustainably and easily maintained in a multi-dimensional information space. The creation of sales-relevant content and the exchange of knowledge between sales and marketing would be simplified and promoted. Although companies now invest up to 25 percent of their marketing budget in the production of sales materials, according to IDC, many materials would miss the point.

Because the documents are usually produced by marketing according to topic, project and department and made available to sales on different, barely connected intranet pages as static documents. In order to prepare a customer appointment, the salesperson would first have to collect and reprocess the required content from various sources and documents. Therefore, there is little leeway for the customized design of the presentations, so that more than half of the customers perceive the salespeople as not at all or little informed at the first contact. More than 30 percent of all failed deals can be traced back to this shortcoming.

With “Bizsphere Sales Enablement” a uniform, semantic information space is being modeled for employees from sales and marketing. This can be broken down according to company-wide, basic categories such as product portfolio, industries, regions, customer problems or information types such as presentations, news or brochures. Marketing produces and classifies all sales-relevant content in the form of reusable information modules along these categories. An intuitive user interface as well as the semantic search should then make it possible to find the required information quickly and easily and to process it individually for the customer.

In addition, Bizsphere Sales Enablement is equipped with social networking functions such as “Unified Communications” (Web 2.0). Sales employees can thus also bring their own comments and evaluations into the corporate context, which noticeably increases the amount and quality of information. “Sales enablement is an important lever with which companies can reduce costs and at the same time increase their sales,” explains Matthias Roebel, who is responsible for product management at SVA Biz Sphere. In addition, the individually tailored communication should increase customer satisfaction.

www.bizsphere.com,
www.enableyoursales.com,
www.slideshare.net/bizsphere,
www.twitter.com/bizsphere