TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT

Accelerate Sales with Accommodating Tech

Kate Worlton-Pulham,
AllenComm Performance Strategist
01 03 04
The Promise of Sales The Pitfalls of Sales The Trajectory of Sales
Enablement Enablement Enablement

06 08 09
Analysis before Training, Technology, and Training
Analytics Assets

13 18 23
Technology Assets Incite a Tailored Strategy
for Sales Enablement

24 25 26
Reverse Engineer to A Needs Analysis to About
Revenue Transform the Whole
Organization

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 Sellers don’t need to walk a lonely road. Sales enable-
ment promises a lifeline to help sellers to survive, but
it doesn’t always provide them with a platform on

THE PROMISE
which to thrive. Even fewer sales enablement sys-
tems cater to the buyer’s success as well. The optimal

OF SALES
solution manages what both buyers and sellers need
to target their business goals. In doing so, no longer
do sales team members need to fend for themselves

ENABLEMENT by creating one-off content from their own research

on the competitive market, hunting down relevant
blog posts, tracking their own collateral, and try-
ing to manage their own asset repositories. Sales
enablement platforms promise not only to ease the
burden of driving a sale through the entire buying
process and ensuring there are more opportunities
in the pipeline, but also to create and curate content
that directly accelerates the exact sale at hand, tying
directly to revenue. Sales enablement can accelerate
this pathway because it allows sales and marketing
teams to ramp up faster, fashion the right content
for the buyers in the supply chain, improve compet-
itive win rates, all on any device. Most importantly,
sales enablement boosts more than sales and mar-
keting. If it’s a solution that is tailored to unique
needs, it can lead to marked success for the entire
organization.

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 The Numbers on Sales Enablement
Sales enablement advancements, the number of practitioners, and depth
of knowledge about the field doubles every year.1 This means that what

CAN YOU DETECT THE COMMON MESSAGE

was an elusive innovation a year ago is now an accepted standard. Or-
ganizations must stay at the forefront to maintain a competitive advan-
tage.

W ITHOUT SALE S E NABLE ME NT

• Sales and marketing misalignment cost $1 trillion per year.

• Opportunity costs of unused marketing content are $2.3 million

annually.

• Sales enablement research reports that 79% of leads sent to

AMONG THESE STATISTICS?

sales never convert to sales, partly due to a lack of nurturing.

• Market standards report that 44% of salespeople give up after

one follow-up, yet 80% of sales require five follow-up phone
calls after the meeting.²

W ITH SALE S E NABLE ME NT

• A noteworthy 75% of companies using sales enablement tools
had sales increases in the last twelve months. Nearly 35% re-
ported sales increases greater than 25%.

• 59% of organizations with a sales enablement solution sur-

passed their targets.

• Organizations that have undertaken a sales enablement initia-

tive have seen a 350% increase in content usage, 275% boost
in conversions, and 65% more revenue generated by new reps.

• Research confirms that 95% of buyers buy from someone who

gave them content at each stage of the buying process.

• Businesses whose sales and marketing are aligned achieve

208% higher marketing revenue.³

The theme we derive from these numbers points toward a marketer-sell-

er-buyer companionship that must be built, energized, and, indeed,
enabled for wins to increase.

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 THE
Many sales enablement platforms exhibit similar
challenges. Gladly, the remedies to these challenges

PITFALLS
do not have to involve a complete overhaul of your
current process. The remedies can fit within and
augment the best parts of your system.

OF SALES In short, the best sales enablement solution address-

ENABLEMENT
es these common challenges by tailoring a strategy
designed for the organization alone. A sales enable-
ment solution should optimize these three things:
the organization’s ability to innovate, scale, and
“A sales enablement solution should optimize
make the impact they want to make.
the organization’s ability to innovate, scale, and
make the impact they want to make.”

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 THE
While the capabilities of sales enablement are con-
stantly changing, one often forgotten point remains:

TRA JECTORY
Sales enablement is always about revenue, not sell-
ers. With boots on the ground, this actually means
that sales enablement is about the buyer.

OF SALES Buyer-focused vs.

ENABLEMENT Product-focused
It’s reported that sellers only spend 18% of their
time with buyers.4 However, once sales teams shift
focus from selling products to serving a buyer, they
will be met with increased revenue. Sales and marketing are far from immune to the surge of business focus on
empathy. In other words, the ace seller considers the buyer’s journey from, first, the buyer’s mindset: the buyer’s
awareness, consideration, interest, preference, and, finally, purchase. Second, the seller considers what activity
the buyer will be taking at each of these stages. As the seller demonstrates this kind of informed empathy for
the buyer, the seller can help escort the buyer through to a completed sale by addressing the buyer’s point-of-
view at each step. Your sales enablement solution is the key to success.

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Analytics, Machine Learning, AI:
In sales enablement and in almost any industry, today’s frontier is tomorrow’s standard. Yesterday, sales en-
ablement analytics was the frontier. Now the norm, analytics can amplify enablement especially by weighing
content. Though content management is at the soul of sales enablement, a large investment in content creation
does not necessarily equal positive ROI. A closer critical eye on content usage through AI, machine learning,
and other analytics is where sales and marketing should be heading to:
• Serve up predicted content

• Understand how content is used, in what geographic location, by which buyers, for how long, etc.

• Report on how content is used at which stage of their buying process and against which sales out-
comes

• Ensure prospects in the supply chain

• Understand how content drives revenue

Analysis-driven
While analytics based on machine learning and AI can accelerate the sales process, the capacities of analytics
can be limited if it’s jumpstarted too soon. In short, analytics can miss some crucial context if a human needs
analysis isn’t done first. Quantitative data and qualitative data must work in symbiosis to create the most re-
sponsible pool of information from which the enablement solution derives. The combination of empirical data
with a nuanced analysis of qualitative factors such as company culture, training states, technology experience,
asset relevance, social patterns, and the subsequent execution of the recommendations will maximize the effec-
tiveness of analytics later in the sales enablement initiation process.

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 The good news is that analysis and analytics are not
mutually exclusive. Like analytics, a needs analy-
sis relies on hard numbers from data tracking, KPI
metrics, consumption rates, asset usage, and so forth
in order to compile recommendations based on em-
pirical research. However, while a needs analysis is
data-driven, it does not dive straight to machine

ANALYSIS learning and AI because sales enablement must

first evaluate the data within the multi-faceted and

BEFORE human context of the organization. The analysis

should serve as the sales enablement launch pad,

ANALYTICS
because analytics has its best chance after the needs
analysis recommendations have been executed.

Needs Analysis
Accelerates Sales
Maximizing sales enablement means accelerating
ramp-up time, enriching buyer engagement, and,
thereby increasing competitive win rates. These are
all performance-based, so the strategy first needs to
map performance. Any other solution—analytics or
otherwise—established before a needs analysis may
be misguided and may miss opportunities that are
unique to the organization. A tailored needs analy-
sis as the first step produces a tailored sales enable-
ment strategy. A needs analysis will tell the story of
why people need what they need, why they use what
they use, and equally why they don’t use or need
certain insights. A needs analysis dissects the or-
ganization’s productivity, metrics, skill development,
asset usage, asset redundancy, training relevance,
competency, and so forth. It then knits that matrix
of performance information together into a solution
calculated to upsurge the organization’s revenue.

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Consider the benefits of an early sales enablement needs analysis versus jumping straight into a ready-made
sales enablement platform.

1 Customer value-based vs. product-based. The needs analysis strategy studies the needed cus-
tomer impact in terms of the customer’s challenges, strengths, potential, projections, sightlines,
and culture. This solidifies existing value and reveals many otherwise unseen opportunities. Con-
versely, the gates shut early for a solution focused only on a product.

2 Highest-impact, tailored content vs. the best of what’s available. A needs analysis will recom-
mend and produce only purposeful, made-to-measure assets, tech, and training. Otherwise, sell-
ers have to make do with generic content that doesn’t meet their individualized needs.

3 Recommendations vs. undirected searching. The needs analysis recommends to sellers how
and when to use directed content, rather than providing the sellers with a pool of content through
which to wade in search of an asset they hope might benefit the buyer.

4 Conversations vs. speculations. An organizational performance strategist can design the sales
win pathway based on live conversations with focus groups, stakeholders, and team members re-
garding on-the-job experiences, actions, reactions, thoughts, patterns, and affiliations. The shades
of information gleaned from a needs analysis conversation become the shades of information in
the strategy. The conversations then can become fruitful, value-based interactions to design the
right sales enablement KPI strategy. Otherwise, the solution would rely only on guesswork.

5 Specificity vs. assumption. With an analysis, sellers can meet the specific needs of a particular
client in the present and anticipate the client’s needs in the future. Without this analysis, orga-
nizations can only align with past experience in the wider industry, risking not only generic and
non-competitive strategies but also the hidden dangers of assuming that past solutions for others
are the right solution for them.

6 Desired behavior change content vs. all-purpose content. Fueled by research and analysis, con-
tent is designed for real-time, desired behavior change and performance improvement, rather
than content that is potentially outdated, all-purpose, and/or speculative.

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Competitive Advantage
Unbridled
In sum, a needs analysis for your organization alone
is meant to prevent off-the-shelf content, be it
training, technology, or assets. It’s meant to tailor
content for you to use to your strategic advantage
because it is unique to your needs, whereas off-the-
shelf assets unify the playing field and nullify your
strengths. Having a needs analysis to tailor your
sales enablement strategy will increase your com-
petitive advantage because it teases out hidden op-
portunities, diagnoses your drawbacks, and shifts
both toward enhancing your strengths.
It should be stressed that a sales enablement needs
analysis is not intended to create a new sales pro-
cess or change an existing sales process, but rather is
intended to augment what works for you. In short,
this kind of needs analysis works with you. It doesn’t
force an external system with external expectations
on you.
“Having a needs analysis to tailor your sales
enablement strategy will increase your
competitive advantage because it teases
out hidden opportunities, diagnoses your
drawbacks, and shifts both toward enhancing
your strengths.”
TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT
TRAINING,
TECHNOLOGY,
AND ASS ETS
In our plan for growth and development of how to
become a better sales enabler, AllenComm has re-
searched the approaches to sales enablement in a
variety of industries. Through our data-gathering—
governed by how to add impact, scale-up, and inno-
vate—a trifecta of approaches to sales enablement
has consistently surfaced: training, technology,
and assets. Each requires that for air-tight sales
enablement, an organization begins with a needs
analysis of how to reach the end goal of the buyer’s
journey: the purchase that meets a need.
A full sales enablement needs analysis should eval-
uate training, technology, and assets in terms of
their pathway from the analysis, to recommenda-
tion report, to design, to development, to execution,
to the revenue increase. While training, technolo-
gy, and assets naturally overlap, the execution of a
needs analysis reveals how their different abilities
to enable sales to complement each other enough to
enhance revenue.
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 A needs analysis for sales enablement training
shouldn’t necessarily recommend a new training
model. It should instead tailor to your training
model, whether that means leveraging your training
strengths, turning your training challenges into op-
portunities, or both.

Performance Mapping
TRAINING Performance mapping is the first step in sales en-
ablement needs analysis and leads to learner train-
ing aimed at the organization’s desired business im-
pact. The training is based on changing behaviors
to a state that will accomplish the desired business
goal and ensure increased revenue. The analysis will
consider questions like:
• Where does your sales process bottle-
neck?

• Where are the hotspots for improvement?

• How will we troubleshoot those areas?

• What should learners be thinking/feeling/

saying/doing?

Training could include seller onboarding, seller con-

tinuous learning, buyer-facing strategy, approach,
and best practices, cross-departmental training
among those in HR, L&D, R&D, and execs to en-
able sales. In our experience with sales enablement
training, the needs analysis has usually recommend-
ed one or more of the following training compo-
nents, each with a targeted case study and on-the-
job behavior scenario.

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Components of Sales Enablement Training
COACHING
Sales coaching is born out of the widely accepted notion that all team members need established men-
tors who walk them through on-the-job scenarios with consistent, constructive, real-time feedback.
Coaching training is born out of the widely accepted fact that sales leaders have not necessarily been
taught how to do this.

While sales coaching training commonly involves mentor and communication development skills,
AllenComm has learned from experience with firms in the finance, retail, IT, and food industries that all
have unique needs and pressures with which to negotiate. For instance, one client in the retail industry
needed coaching training for sales managers with a spectrum of backgrounds and contexts that would
factor into the desired behavior change. Accordingly, the web-based design provided a variety of real-life
sales coaching scenarios aimed at various competency states with instructive feedback.

JUST-IN-TIME
In just-in-time training, the immediate context of the specific learner governs the training design,
whether that is for specific buying scenarios, seller training profiles, stakeholder personas, product up-
dates, and, as a rule, for mobile (79% of sales field learners are using mobile training). Sellers can waste
a disheartening amount of time hunting for the right training, therefore the sales enablement needs
analysis would advise which training should be served up to sellers at which specific stage of the buying
process. While technology allows learners to pull training at will based on their self-identified needs,
technology also allows training to be pushed to them, based on their preferences and searches. Because
the training is tailored to their context, sellers also ramp up much faster. Accordingly, the training can
be served up in micro bits, micromodules, with other microlearning features, as needed.

For a global electronics manufacturing leader, AllenComm assessed that their sellers needed to be en-
abled to diagnose complex technological problems and guide buyers through nuanced purchasing deci-
sions and quickly all within a limited time frame. The best training for their sellers would be just-in-time
web-based training micromodules, toolkits, motion graphics, and job aids that the sellers could consume
on their mobile devices at a moment’s notice to use in the real world.

With a different client in the retail industry, our analysis taught us that they needed microbursts of
training to enable retail managers and associates to build better relationships with customers. Together,
we created a mobile-friendly micromodule platform with multiple simulated customer interactions.

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 Gamification also played to the sellers’ strengths in a game where sellers practice asking questions that
will match the customer to the right product.

GAMIFICATION
Gamification can resonate particularly with sellers, who are likely wired to thrive in a competitive en-
vironment. As an added bonus, gamification often necessitates score-keeping and recording, so it yields
useful data which can feed into the organization’s performance reports.

With a client in the information technology industry, performance mapping told us that the organi-
zation’s 300,000+ employees needed to communicate one brand story. The gamification provided in-
teractive decision points with immediate results, cognitive tasks that built results, and score pages with
flexible performance results searches. The organization now benefits from the deeper alignment between
sales and marketing and the ensuing uptick in win rates.

THIRD-PARTY EXTERNAL TRAINING

Companies that provide sales training for other companies require the needs analysis to pay particular
attention to how to cater to various audiences. While working with a global cloud delivery services
company, AllenComm determined that in order to train their external network of partner sellers—a
significant portion of this client’s revenue—the training needed to ensure that the learners could quickly
deliver a joint value proposition and could cross-sell and up-sell the entire portfolio. The client chal-
lenged AllenComm to develop training that would make complex material user-friendly and relevant
for multiple external partners. The design included digital “cheat sheets” with product features and
benefits, web-based training for five different sales roles, and interactive virtual sales simulations. The
result is a conglomerate of partner sellers who are counting the benefits of now being able to expand the
portfolio they can sell.

BRAND
Brand training should be defined by identifying the buyer: whom the supplier serves and with what
offering. When two or more organizations merge, the result can be a confluence of ideas, traditions,
standards, practices, and interpretations of know-how. Subsequently, a new brand and messaging train-
ing can quickly become necessary. In one such case with a client in the IT sector, a needs analysis by
AllenComm revealed that when three organizations merged, the best method for brand training was to

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 take the simplest route and offer a catalog of training options on the newly amalgamated brand. The cat-
alog has categorized and scrollable brand training and tools menus with completion states. The outcome
was a unified company with refreshed attitudes, adoptive of the new messaging and ready to innovate.

Brand training also enables sales by allowing sellers to build their own brand story then practice how to
share it in various buyer scenarios. For a client in the health foods organization, the training pathway
gradually built sellers’ confidence and ownership over the value they personally offer.

Other Recommended
Features of Sales
Enablement Training
Existing platforms can be maintained, added to,
evolved, or revolutionized, as needed. AllenComm
has worked with several clients in various indus-
tries who have had their own learner platform. We
worked with their platform without compromising
the functionality, brand, or learner experience.
Likewise, existing curricula should be able to be
updated and curated in terms of launching the sell-
ers toward meeting the buyers’ changing business
needs.
Automated assessments and certification speed
the ramping process because sellers can be more
readily aware of their aptitude and where im-
provements can be made. Because training should
meet a specific business goal, assessments, while
non-threatening and feedback-instructive, should
be designed for competency, not just completion.
“Designed for competency, not just completion.”
A needs analysis accepts the mandate to preserve
the organization’s and the training’s scalability. In
the case of a client who was a global auto manufac-
turer with tens of thousands of learners and several
autonomously managed plants, each with its unique
set of needs, the enablement design needed to al-
low for as few or as many plants chose to partici-
pate. Likewise, the design needed to allow for many
learner groups or just one learner group. The rec-
ommendation can scale to fit the client’s demand,
scope, schedule, and specific context. It can scale
big and involve the entire organization in a cultur-
al shift initiative, or scale small and train just one
group at one plant.
In sum, with these training methods and features,
buyers will see your sales team members as trust-
ed advisors and adjuncts to their goals, rather than
just sales reps. If designed for impact, the training
should move both the seller and buyer forward in
tandem toward sale completion.

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 In the sales enablement technosphere, newest tech
is not necessarily the best. Technology must serve
the organization’s business goals, otherwise, it’s tech
just for the sake of tech. Technology must, there-
fore, serve the desired change in behaviors. A stra-
tegic needs analysis surfaces, recommends, and then
designs tech that will drive these behavior changes.

TECHNOLOGY “Technology must serve the organization’s

business goals, otherwise it’s tech just for the
sake of tech.”

A technology needs analysis will work within an

open and tailored “either/or/mix” approach. That
is, the recommendation might reveal that the sales
enablement provider should use the client’s exist-
ing technology, new technology, or a blend of the
two, dependent on the client’s needs. The solution
should be fueled by how to improve performance.
A decision is then made to accommodate the situ-
ation: whether that requires integrating with or le-
veraging strengths of existing technology, augment-
ing it, or offering more flexible tech. The rules that
govern the tech: It must be intuitive, efficient, and
business-driven to result in improved revenue.

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Sales Enablement Management Tool
SPEED AND ACCESS
With a sales enablement management tool, the mandate is to maximize the seller’s productivity. It
does this by providing two things: speed and access. The user should be able to find the most relevant
information in two clicks or ten seconds. Assets are readily available, up-to-date, and organized into
meaningful categories such as use case, industry, business cases, etc. The sales enablement management
tool allows for a robust, faceted search, and can incorporate machine learning to recommended content.
The user can access content on any device and while offline.

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BUYER-PERSONALIZED
In the example sales enablement management tool, note that the dashboard is configured for the seller,
and the content is personalized for his or her buyer. The tech environment is optimized for the sell-
er’s experience with the buyer, in this case, mobile-friendly with a variety of just-in-time training and
bundled assets. The user can personalize assets using a library of templates and web pages that can be
edited. The user can also organize content for specific use cases by creating toolkits.

RELEVANCE
The platform provides up-to-date, relevant, and effective assets. The community of sellers and client
users can rate and input comments from sales and client users and can benefit from asset consumption
analytics.

ONE PLACE WITH MANY ACCESS POINTS

Sellers expand a lot of time by needing to be in many places at once—whether those places are physical
or virtual. A needs analysis of the technology a sales team is currently using can reveal if they have all the
information they need in one place, reducing time wasted by switching between platforms. For example,
are sellers able to access the latest industry news, competitive intelligence, product updates, and market
insights from several devices, but all in one place? This likely means that they should be able to integrate
with several platforms in which they spend much of their time. You can see from the management tool
example that these resources are housed in one place to maximize resource efficiency for sellers.

COLLABORATION
No next-level needs analysis is required to determine that seller collaboration forums are a good idea.
The methods by which they function, however, can yield different results. In this sales enablement man-
agement tool example, the collaboration forum can be tailored to what the analysis suggests will produce
the greatest innovation and efficiency. For example, collaboration regarding asset use, training, resource
sharing, best practices, tools, performance supports, and so forth can be among sellers, among teams,
and/or among departments. In addition, even broadly distributed sales teams can benefit from feeling
connected. Because the collaboration forum can exist in real time, it is also a useful hub for real-time
coaching and mentoring so sales leaders can increase their visibility with sellers.

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INTEGRATIONS
A tech needs analysis can reveal
which integrations will boost
sales performance the most. The
analysis would emphasize how
to make the integrations seam-
less and maintain all functions
of the sales enablement solution
and any existing systems. Re-
member, one mandate defines
the design: Keep sales teams as
productive as possible. As a best
practice, the solution should in-
tegrate with these systems:

• LMS (Learning Management System). The analysis would suggest tech that augments the current
LMS, not necessarily provide a new LMS. With an integrated LMS, sales managers can track the us-
age of content and each step of training.

• DAM (Digital Asset Management). Again, technology can integrate with or enhance existing DAM plat-
forms. The integration should support as many systems and devices (desktop and mobile) to allow for
any seller situation—bundling assets as she prepares for a meeting at her desk, or grabbing an asset
on her phone as she’s walking into a meeting.

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) (like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics). The integration
should allow for smooth content interactions.

• MAPs (Marketing Automation Platform) (like Marketo and Eloqua). This can manage not only content
but also persona building, list segmentation, lead scoring, campaign reporting by capturing content
engagement analytics for each lead who is using the content.

• Email to record activities automatically. About 80% of sellers spend over two hours a day communi-
cating via email (Salesforce.com).

• Other data sources and content repositories to retrieve external data and content (Google Drive,
Dropbox, Sharepoint, etc.) so the repository can land in one place for ease of use.

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ANALYTICS
The admin view of the sample
sales enablement management
platform demonstrates a few uses
of content analytics, including
rated content, usage rates by mo-
dality, buyer engagement rates,
and tracking training against
sales outcomes.

SCALABILITY
Whatever the asset management
tool, the technology solution
should tailor itself to the scale of
the organization. Maybe it’s fo-
cused, as with one AllenComm
client who needed a small-scale
portal for a job-aid repository. Or
maybe it’s broad, as with a recent
sales skills training client who
needed us to develop tech that
would support the whole buyer’s
journey. Whatever the scale, the
needs analyzed technology solu-
tion will accelerate the seller and
the buyer through the purchase
pathway and return the best rev-
enue.

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 Up to 70% of product information is found online,
not through sales reps. Marketing and sales teams
work diligently to create content for many types
of selling interactions, but a recent report revealed
that two-thirds of the content goes unused.5 Ob-
viously, the enablement drive needs to deliver de-
liberate assets from the seller’s hands to the buyer’s
hands more resourcefully. A needs analysis increases

ASSETS revenue by solving common challenges with asset

management. A needs analysis ensures effective
content usage as it:
• Recommends a centralized content man-
agement that is tailored to your organiza-
tion

• Incorporates scalability

• Establishes robust content findability

• Decreases one-off requests

• Recommends content measurement and

reporting intended for your audience

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What the Needs Analysis for Your Assets Will Consider
In order to avoid the common points of friction in asset management, an asset needs analysis will evaluate an
organization’s context in order to ensure that the assets:
• Are curated for a specific business goal.

• Reflect competitor intel and current industry, company, training, market news, and insights.

• Are proactive and not reactive. For example, a needs analysis of your assets can help manage them
so that they anticipate the buyer’s next step in the buying journey and deliver the asset to the buyer
before critical decision points, not after it’s too late.

• Are fit for purpose, either existing or newly created. For example, the analysis will consider if the proj-
ect will be an evolution of their existing assets in the form of an update, or a creation of new assets
after identification of gaps in the content inventory.

• Strictly preserve messaging/brand/compliance factors, as necessary.

• Have a support system tailored to the business needs of the buyer that will maximize revenue.

Content Creation and Curation: Sales Enablement

Asset Actions and Their Business Impacts
The following asset management actions will accelerate sales by reducing seller inefficiency and increasing buyer
win rates. Note their unique business impacts.

BUNDLE: Maximize efficiency and scalability

While each buyer journey will be distinct, sellers will encounter similar combinations of assets for re-
peated buyer personas. By bundling assets to meet predictable buyer use cases, this feature allows sellers
to curate what assets complement each other to benefit different buyer scenarios. Curating reusable asset
packages also decreases one-off asset package creation and search time.

For example, an AllenComm client in the manufacturing industry needed the organization of their
assets according to buyer persona, especially to help promote the latest offerings to sellers using the
platform. According to usage recommendations from the needs analysis, assets were bundled into what
they call “briefcases” corresponding with that buyer use case.

Bundles serve the buyer best when the search can be dynamic, intuitive, and in-content. When sellers
can also buyer-personalize their assets by filtering them by industry, market, buyer stage, stakeholder

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 type, and so forth, the seller discriminates and circulates assets more quickly and ultimately decreases
the amount of time to completion of a sale.

MAKE IT MEDIA-RICH: Engage potential buyers with gripping

content
The more formats a solution supports, the easier it is to engage with buyers. The same is true for media
variety. Media-rich assets not only incite curiosity in both the seller and the buyer and keep intended
topics hard to resist, they, because of their immediacy and digestibility, are also assets that are exponen-
tially sharable.

This specialty food provider challenged AllenComm to create assets for sellers who had lackluster value
propositions and, hence, low buyer engagement rates. The solution needed to:
• Increase sellers’ confidence in the value they were offering and how to communicate that with
magnetic energy.

• Motivate (especially younger) sellers with memorable assets that made it easier to sell.

• Empower the sellers to want to consult with buyers to achieve buyers’ best interests.

Therefore, the solution included informative videos, motion graphics, image-rich job aids, audio inter-
actions, scenario videos, and interactive infographics.

STREAMLINE: Decrease search time by avoiding sifting through

superfluous assets
More than any other action, streamlining assets can accelerate the buyer’s journey by drawing strict
priorities among the assets. A needs analysis will target ways to streamline in two ways: 1) excise unnec-
essary and/or redundant assets; and 2) distill information only to what sellers need most for particular
buyers.

When we performed an extensive needs analysis for a global auto manufacturer, we found from our
focus group interviews, surveys, discussions, and asset investigations that the company had no stream-
lined asset creation process and no asset management system. Different divisions, different departments,
different teams, were all creating masses of their own assets (unsystematic videos, podcasts, PDFs, in-
fographics, training, slide decks) and we found the assets were largely redundant, off-brand, and not
housed in one central location. Different departments were even using different learning management
systems for training, something we see often. Clearly, the action was to streamline the assets into a sin-

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 20 www.allencomm.com

 gle repository with assets either removed or restructured into categories by modality, company pillars,
training topics, audience, and access recommendations.

UPDATE: Optimize the assets’ relevance and, thereby, the

organization’s competitive advantage
Many organizations need content updated constantly, so the solution should support continually chang-
ing data while preserving brand integrity. The needs analysis could identify needed updates in tech,
product assets, and asset versions. In the case of one of AllenComm’s global finance clients, it was all
three. In addition, because their asset management system had key assets deeply buried inside many
misdirected layers of navigation, the project needed to include an update to the design of the repository
itself. Their repository could support the sellers much more efficiently if we made the following changes:

The client and its teams now enjoy an accessible repository that they trust is serving up current content,
with the brand, messaging, accuracy, footnotes, disclosures, and any other aspects updated and intact.

Sellers would benefit from other update features, such as a change log, easy-to-find insights, shareability
to reach the intended audience, notifications on updates to assets, products, language, and strategy.

FILL GAPS: Provide the potential buyer with the content

they need most
Many companies have a combination of asset curation needs. In the case of a direct retail client, sellers
were barraged with multiple versions of assets that lived in several places. To facilitate a more accurate
brand message, we partnered to consolidate the assets to the most updated existing assets in an asset

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 21 www.allencomm.com

 management catalog. After the needs analysis also exposed some performance gaps among their sellers,
we identified and helped create needed assets that would bridge these gaps. These new assets were col-
lected in a seller Action Planner that included the sellers’ most frequently used job aids, one-sheets, and
reference tools, accessible on mobile devices or as printable PDFs. Some of the assets were designed to
be individualized to each seller, populated in the Action Planner from the seller’s responses through-
out their training. Creating assets jointly with the learner/seller, directly populated from the training,
means that the information is unique to her different clients, products, and schedules, and strategically
designed to grow her business.

Collaborate to Amplify Joint Seller and Buyer

Experience
Sales and marketing team members amplify their business if they don’t work in a vacuum. The solution should
encourage team members to discuss the assets there in the context of their ongoing projects. Foremost, this
interaction should be easy to do. Collaboration should:
1. Define and capture best practices.

2. Allow teams and coaches to share use cases and insights.

3. Give feedback to content creators as to which asset is most useful and when.

Eventually, organizations will be able to identify trends by teams, documents, geographical locations, and stages
in the buyer’s process.

Sharing Assets
A needs analysis can reveal the best methods for sharing the assets efficiently, securely, and with optimal benefit.
For example, the analysis would consider if sellers have a number of options for sharing content—from email,
from the CRM, or from the platform itself, all with an embedded secure content link—to allow for flexibility
and to ensure that only the intended audience can view the shared content.

These asset management actions are all to ensure the optimal impact on revenue.

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 22 www.allencomm.com

 INCITE A A sales enablement strategy needs to allow for a

TAILORED flexible combination of requirements. This is why

it must be tailored. Maybe a client needs diagnose

STRATEGY
their tech and training; perhaps another client needs
training and assets, but is happy with their tech; an-

FOR SALES
other possibly needs curation with assets and tech,
with a redesign of their training. Our experiences
confirm that the design that yields the greatest sales

ENABLEMENT acceleration is a combination of all three. No matter

what a client’s current sales enablement situation,
the step toward greater revenue begins with a needs
analysis, then a personalized execution of training,
incorporated with the client’s optimal method for
asset management and technology.

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 23 www.allencomm.com

 To gain executive buy-in for a needs analysis sales
enablement strategy, reverse engineer from the needs
analysis to increased revenue for your organization.

REVERSE First, articulate your organization’s needed business

impact and KPIs, then the strategy that will filter

ENGINEER TO
to that impact. Next, articulate the capabilities that
will facilitate that strategy. Finally, articulate that a
needs analysis will define the capabilities that are

REVENUE right for you, your stakeholders, your buyers, and

their stakeholders.

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 A NEED S
A sales enablement solution is not a patch job or a
quick fix on a broken piece or two. It’s an adjunct

AN ALYSIS TO
partnership between a needs analysis provider and
the sales organization who have a shared desire to

T RANSF OR M
accelerate a sales machine already in motion. The
process of a needs analysis establishes a twin invest-

T HE WHOLE
ment in a successful strategy that will transform the
organization, not just mend some of its sales and

O R GANIZATIO N
marketing parts.

“Sales enablement is an adjunct partnership

between a needs analysis provider and the sales
organization.”

Doing a sales enablement needs analysis first sets the organization up for previously unanticipated revenue
opportunities because it delves into the heart of what the people of the organization can accomplish, leverages
their talents, trains according to talent differentials, secures only those assets that drive revenue, accommodates
them with the right technology, and, ultimately, predicts unforeseen buyer wins.

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 25 www.allencomm.com

 ABOUT
AllenComm is a leading custom training solutions provider. AllenComm partners
with the nation’s top brands to create unique and innovative learning solutions. A
combination of deep instructional design experience, innovative learning technol-
ogies, and agency-level creative teams, coupled with a design and development
system enables AllenComm to understand clients and their learners needs and
objectives. Go to www.allencomm.com to learn more.

Ready to accelerate your revenue?

CLI CK H E R E TO SC HEDU LE A N EEDS AN ALYS IS

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 26 www.allencomm.com

References
1 https://www.millerheimangroup.com/blog/2018/03/most-sales-enablement-platforms-fail-to-answer-
the-most-important-question-what-should-a-salesperson-do-next/

2 https://www.saleshub.ca/blog/20-sales-enablement-statistics-you-cant-ignore

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-marketing-alignment-increases-revenue-infograph
ic#sm.0000gtoskgaohev9zyj1pf0875rk4

https://accent-technologies.com/blog/2016/02/03/10-surprising-statistics-on-sales-enablement-roi/

3 https://www.saleshub.ca/blog/20-sales-enablement-statistics-you-cant-ignore

https://accent-technologies.com/blog/2016/02/03/10-surprising-statistics-on-sales-enablement-roi

https://www.brainshark.com/resources

https://seismic.com/knowledge-center/what-is-sales-enablement/

4 https://accent-technologies.com/blog/2015/11/18/need-increase-sales-rep-selling-time/

5 https://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/summit-2013-highlights-inciting-a-btob-content-revolution

TAILORING SALES ENABLEMENT 27 www.allencomm.com