When was the last time you used “salesperson” and “Internet strategy” in the same sentence? If you did, the sentence probably also included either the phrase “reduce costs by using fewer,” or the verb “avoid.”
Salespeople are much maligned. Customers resent their pressure tactics, executives often question their commission cheques and the Kids in the Hall made them the subject of plunger jokes.
Worst of all, marketing strategists often ignore them, launching expensive campaigns that always factor in the Internet but frequently neglect the sales force. And that leaves the sales team still on the street, representing the company’s product and brand. But doing it badly and with poor information.
Tim Riesterer, in an article for MarketingProfs, describes this space as “no brands land”: the gap that exists between the 30,000-foot ad campaign and the 3.5-foot level, which is where the company’s sales team is persuading prospects to make a decision. Only they might persuade a customer to look elsewhere because their information and positioning is inconsistent with the company’s web site. Which the customer checked a few minutes prior to meeting with the sales person.
As Riesterer points out, many companies—especially those in complex b2b selling environments—have embraced consultative selling methodologies to differentiate themselves in a world of product parity. He quotes Evan Hirsh, author of Channel Champions, who writes that: “From these [sales] channels flow customer satisfaction, market share, revenue gains and profitability.” However, they have not translated the high level positioning on the web site into street-level value propositions and solution-messaging that align with the sales team’s training.
The effectiveness of these solution selling techniques can be boiled down to access to up-to-date information and productive use of sales time. In other words, sales effectiveness screams intranet.
That point has not been lost on CMS vendors or intranet thought leaders. For example, Prescient Digital Media's President, Toby Ward, wrote in a posting called “The intranet bolsters sales” in Prescient's companion blog that: “While there is a certain amount of guesswork involved it is easy to see that the intranet can have a positive effect on the bottom line and impact an organization’s sales.”
Which might explain why too few companies talk about their Internet strategy and their sales force effectiveness in the same conversation. Not only do marketers often create the strategy without considering the sales team, the methodology for developing an effective intranet strategy—which can be ideal for creating an effective sales intranet to complement an on-line presence—is often created by the HR or communications departments, who work in a different silo to sales and marketing.
So the next time you’re developing an Internet strategy intended to boost sales revenue, make sure you think about the sales team that is responsible for delivering those numbers. And if you need any help in determining how to help them manage information effectively, ask Communications how they developed their intranet plan.
