Recently I posted the second New Rule of Sales Enablement: Experience BEATS Expertise. I want to tell you why it works, and give an example.
There’s a treasure trove of knowledge in the heads and on the laptops of your salespeople. In a sales 2.0 world, it’s critical that your sales and marketing teams collaborate in a process to unlock this treasure and apply it. This is a process of discovering what messages, tools, and tactics are most effective, and getting that knowledge into a framework where everyone can find and use it. It’s capturing feedback on what works and doesn’t work, and using that feedback to continuously improve the base of knowledge.
Let me give you an example of how I’ve applied this new rule. I was working for a company that had a best-of-breed product in a market where big companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft had acquired lighter-weight products and released them under their own brands. Our product had a huge differentiator, and we’d never lose when this capability was important to the buyer.
That is, until one of our competitors introduced a new module that claimed to do everything our product did. I knew our sales reps would encounter this competitor in more deals, and I wanted to arm them with knowledge to combat the evil empire.
If I had applied the old rules, I would have talked to a few industry experts, inspected the competitor’s product, written up a great competitive brief, and posted it in my sales portal. And the sales team would have ignored it.
Instead, I still did all that research and wrote up my notes. But before releasing anything to the field, I got on the weekly sales call and asked who’s been encountering this competitor.
The folks in the field gave me some valuable insight into what the competitor’s reps had been saying to our prospects. They validated a few of my data points. One of my more experienced salespeople had written an email to a buyer that had been effective in getting him to realize the competitor’s approach to solving this problem had too many shortcomings compared to ours. I had the rep send me that email, I merged it with the competitive intelligence I had gathered, and sent him back a draft.
After including more of his feedback, we jointly rolled it out to the field the following week.
Guess what happened? The team ate it up.
What a difference. I had worked with salespeople to discover information that was already being used effectively in competitive selling situations, so the sales team had more trust in it. Does that surprise you?
