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Tomorrow afternoon, you have to talk to procurement in Bank X. What are their issues? What will they be concerned about? What solutions do you have? How can you differentiate yourself?

As you can see, this can be a knowledge management challenge. Most file document vendors organize and index documents, but salespeople need their information in a more granular fashion.

Sales Knowledge Management

Salespeople tell us that they often have to make as many as 20 calls internally to find the information they need for prospects and clients. A tool that makes this easier is an enormous value that frees salespeople up to sell.

An example of a vendor working to provide that additional level of value to salespeople is Pragmatech. The company’s offerings allow salespeople to quickly personalize communication in the context of “buyer-ready information.” In other words, the communication is personalized and tailored to the buying criteria of each prospect or customer. All Pragmatech applications are driven by a common knowledge base. Content in the knowledge base is parsed into customizable pieces and indexed with appropriate search engines so that salespeople can easily personalize presentations, proposals, statements of work, RFP responses, business letters, and other communications throughout the sales process.

Jennifer Webb of Pragmatech tells us that when the company surveys its clients, it finds that 90 percent of the sales messaging used by its salespeople comes from their own hard drives—not a central message center—and that much of the data is feature-driven rather than pain-driven. When Pragmatech talks to prospects, its people ask, “What if you could capture what your A players are saying and get that into the heads of your B and C players?”

Pragmatech’s success stories demonstrate the value of a centralized knowledge base made accessible to sales organizations. For one enterprise, a leading online global career network, the marketing team aligned closely with sales to capture and refine the best high-value buyerfocused messaging. With use of automated proposals and presentations and a searchable Website, the sales force throughout the enterprise had access to these wellarticulated and accurate messages and could apply them to communications that were personalized to the buyer’s objectives. The results included improvements in sales effectiveness, client interactions, competitive advantages, and productivity.

Salespeople still need the flexibility to tailor messages to individual buyers, but in this way they can at least start from a central repository. Then you can be sure that they are basing their messages on current information that is already arranged into pieces that they can organize and use.

The solution is not just a sales portal, a tool kit, a dashboard, or a marketing encyclopedia. There is no technology “silver bullet” when it comes to sales and CRM.

Messages Focused by Stakeholder

The best practice is to have relevant information, to keep it fresh, and to organize and index it based on what your sales force needs. This should be the point of departure, and it should be driven by the best practices sales cycle, working backwards through marketing to get the right information by industry, stakeholder, organizational chart, solution, product, competitor, customer, prospect, or investor.

The information needs to be segmented, indexed, and linked by a tool that can help salespeople find what they need, when they need it, to win more business. By the time a salesperson gleans all this from brochures or books of binders, well, you can get the idea.

Product Launch or Product Lurch?

And if you are involved in a new product launch, your window of competitive advantage is probably six months before your competitor can bring a new product online. If your salespeople spend half that time creating messages themselves, you’ve already lost half your opportunity.

A typical scenario for many companies is for marketing to give the salespeople information on a new product or solution in a format that is great for a marketing piece but not great for a competitive sales message to be used throughout the sales cycle.

Each salesperson then “translates” this marketing message into the message he or she needs to support the sales process.

Here is the problem: The “A” players may figure this out quickly and lose value for only one or two weeks. But it takes the “B” players a little longer, and they may lose one or two deals before they figure it out. And how long does it take the “C” players? Somewhere between a long time and never. There is a better way to do this.

The best practice that we have found is that when it comes to competitive information, buyers needs, value propositions, and your benefits and differentiators, these

need to be organized in a context-sensitive search engine rather than in a marketing encyclopedia full of brochures. The search engine is the key.

A few years ago, Jon Hauck and I met with the company with which we had just been merged.

The manager asked us, “So, what did you guys do about six months ago? All of a sudden, you started turning on a dime. We used to be able to try a new tactic on you half a dozen times before you would finally have a sales meeting and get wise to it. Suddenly you started having an answer ready the very next day. Not only could you handle the objection, but you had set a trap for us and spun it the other way!”

What we had done was use the then-new technology of voice mail to create a clearinghouse of information so that whenever a salesperson discovered something new, he or she passed it through the product and brand managers immediately, and it was back in the field the next day.

The simple use of this technology made millions of dollars for us, but speed was the real issue. Now, with the Internet, this competitive speed should be even easier and faster.

Speed of Feedback Is Advantage

The best practice is to refresh information every 48 hours and to have somebody in charge of each competitor and each industry to keep that information current. You also need a feedback loop where a salesperson in one part of the world who uncovers a competitive trap can spread the word and have the rest of your salespeople ready for it before your competition can use it on you a dozen times.

Technology Scorecard Best Practices, Technology Importance Execution Degree of Importance (1 = low, 10 = high) Agree, but we never do this We sometimes do this We often do this We do this consistently Individual We have a standard, widely adopted contact management system for our firm. Opportunity Level We have an effective, widely adopted opportunity management planning tool. Our metrics allow sales managers to track lead responsiveness. We regularly conduct win-loss reports through a third party. Our sales process and methodology are imbedded into our forecasting/pipeline system. Our forecast/pipeline system includes early suspects for management visibility. Account Management Our CRM system gives us visibility into opportunities for a given account worldwide. We have a C RM system that is widely adopted by the sales force. Industry/Market We have a tool for gathering and distributing feedback from our reps quickly. Marketing information is organized and indexed by industry, solution set, individual buyer, and competitor. Our sales force is equipped with tactics and messages, by industry, to respond to competitive traps and objections.

SECTION VI: Trust