Elated to report that we have more than 150 registrants signed up for SAVO’s upcoming webinar Where Do You Stand In The Sales Enablement Arms Race?  One of the most common questions we’ve received is whether or not it’ll help participants determine which sales enablement strategies to focus their financial and staff resources.

Getting Down to Business with Social

"By year-end 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 percent of all projects worldwide, which is an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2011."

@Adam Sarner of @Gartner contributed a piece to @Forbes about the growing social CRM market, noting the predicted 15% increase in usage, with deployments representing 25% of all projects worldwide. Sarner shares that the outcome and success of social CRM will rely greatly upon the tools being tied with very clear business objectives.

To help bridge the revenue gap between your corporate strategies and execution, one of the first crucial steps is to identify your primary strategic growth initiatives. Formulating a sales enablement strategy is much more effective when it’s focused around a specific initiative.

Did Your Momma Tell You About Muda?
@TomSearcy of @CNBC’s Sales Machine blog delved into the topic of email being a sales productivity killer. He cites Mike Valentine and Lynn Koffman’s book, Slay the E-mail Monster, which offers helpful ways to avoid getting sucked the black hole of emails. Valentine shares:

"In our productivity coaching at Toyota, we were asked to apply the principles of lean manufacturing to the automaker's office workers, including the concept of waste reduction as a means of increasing profitability. We learned the Japanese have a word for an activity that is wasteful and doesn't add value or is unproductive: muda."

In a previous blog post, I shared thoughts regarding how to begin and the importance of measuring your sales enablement maturity. In it, I began to outline the critical elements of a sales enablement strategy to help optimize your chance of driving increased revenue.

Since then, we’ve collected some extremely compelling stats that back-up our claim of having a strategic sales enablement strategy will help you increase your revenue.

American Banker has an interesting slide show on the "best and worst" bank mergers of 2011. While the slideshow looks at the mergers from a policy and shareholder perspective, I thought it would be interesting to discuss why this type of activity seems so prevalent in the financial services market and what they key sales enablement challenges are as a result.

Getting Social

Over the next couple of weeks, @Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDnet will be covering the business of getting social, based on Enterprise 2.0 success stories. In his introductory piece, Hinchcliffe cites a survey from McKinsey’s fifth annual Web 2.0 survey of enterprises, noting "social media not only had staying power, but was steadily growing in all aspects of the enterprise."

"More than 60% of firms who did invest in collaborative frameworks achieved big gains in knowledge sharing and communication accuracy between marketing and sales."

The tablets are coming, the tablets are coming! Tab News covered a recent VentureBeat infographic, which showed that tablets are being coupled with desktops and laptops, helping to increase sales, boost customer support and enhance overall productivity. A few stats worth noting:

A quick look at the Sales Enablement news from the week that was...

Across most organizations, the Customer Business Review (CBR) represents the single best selling opportunity sales teams will ever have with their customers.  Unfortunately, a lot of companies (and sales professionals) are missing out on fully capitalizing on CBR opportunities.  SAVO's Joellen Sorenson takes a look at the hidden opportunities of CBRs and how you can take advantage of it.

Happy New Year, all! The New Year brings fresh new perspectives and news stories relative to all-things sales enablement.

Each year, we take a step back and look across our customer base to determine which customers are pushing sales enablement innovation, vision and leadership.  We reflect on the customers that have challenged us and have taken the journey with us to further innovate our products and services.  This year, we recognized IBM and Staples Advantage as the two customers that have done that best – and awarded them with the SAVO Pioneer Award.

As we close out on a busy, festive week, we wanted to share what we’ve seen in the news over the past few days.

Worldwide CRM Applications Market Forecast to Reach $18.2 Billion in 2011, Up 11% from 2010. It’s that time of year! IDC has released its latest results from the Worldwide Semiannual Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications Tracker. It’s worth noting that marketing, sales and customer service categories all had double-digit growth.

Below you will find highlights we’ve taken note of this week… what we’re seeing: mobile, mobile, mobile!  According to an article in CNN Money, Merrill Lynch has predicted its 2012 winners and losers in the tablet market. Topping the list of winners is Amazon’s Kindle Fire. 　 “We expect strong sales of the Kindle Fire (4-5mn [...]

Below you will find highlights we’ve taken note of this week…  Jim Ninivaggi of SiriusDecisions posted an interesting blog about certifying sales professionals in sales enablement. He recommended splicing it into the following levels of certification: Level one: content mastery. At this level, we’re looking to answer the question: “Did they get it?”  Level two: application. [...]

Gratuitous plug warning!  The Chicago Tribune recently conducted an exhaustive survey for the annual Best Places to Work feature – we’re proud to say that SAVO was prominently featured on the list once again!  Despite having hundreds more local companies to compete against, SAVO moved up a position and was ranked as the 14th best [...]

The Kindle Fire is the latest mobile device to impact the enterprise.  The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend has dominated media headlines during the past six months as enterprise IT seeks to balance greater productivity afforded by using personal mobile devices and the security concerns of introducing foreign devices into existing IT security protocols.

Welcome to the first post in our Sales Enablement Week in Review series, where we highlight select industry updates and perspectives from the past week. If there’s something significant that we missed and you think we should note, or if you simply have a different take, please let us know about it!   Are you sending yourself [...]

Earlier this week, the Business Marketing Association hosted a luncheon on the topic of “Executing Sales Enablement” which included a panel with execs at ADP, Corporate Visions and SAVO Group.    Sales Enablement has become a hot topic among the executive suite of Fortune 1000 organizations.  More than ever, it’s become critical to build a bridge [...]

One of the questions I like to ask prospects or current customers is “How mature is your sales enablement practice?” I usually get quizzical looks, as most people aren’t even sure if they’re doing sales enablement.

If there’s one common struggle that all of our customers face – across all industry segments and sizes – its sales rep turnover. Every customer I talk with wishes that they could reduce turnover, and when they do need to add or replace reps, get them up to quota faster (or show them the door [...]

During SAVO’s recent 2011 Executive Summit, I gave a presentation on the practical side of SAVO Mobile (Watch the video below). I used SAVO as the case study, showing how we rolled out our own mobility initiative, supplementing the smartphones that our sellers currently have, with brand new iPads. While I didn’t cover everything our [...]

Julianne Janey, VP sales effectiveness for Deluxe Corp, just gave a compelling presentation on increasing control of your operating rhythm. The full presentation is posted on getupright.com. In her presentation, Janey makes the point that the success of any organization depends on the ability of the sales team to execute on strategic campaigns. Deluxe has [...]

Jim Stengel’s keynote is now posted on getupright.com. Click on Jim’s picture in the top-left side of the page to play.

The Jim Stengel keynote is currently streaming. To play, click on Jim Stengel’s picture on the top left side of getupright.com. If you miss the streamed keynote, you can view the video later today. Jim Stengel is a visionary leader who knows that when it comes down to it, “Up and to the Right” is [...]

SAVO CEO Mark O’Connell was recently featured in BtoB Magazine, providing some of insights into how businesses can close the gap between strategic initiatives and execution. The article can be found here: http://www.btobonline.com As Mark discussed this morning in his keynote address, the sales enablement market has undergone a shift – its evolving from a [...]

Forrester analyst Scott Santucci just delivered a powerful presentation that challenged the way people think about the term sales enablement and its strategic importance as a revenue driver for businesses. Sales enablement has evolved beyond simply providing information to individual sellers. It’s a strategic process to empower an entire organization. This is a radical departure [...]

The video of Mark O’Connell’s keynote is now available for on-demand viewing at getupright.com. To play the video, click on Mark’s picture in the top-left side of the page.

Please join us for Mark O’Connell’s keynote live stream. To launch, click on his picture in the top left hand corner of http://getupright.com between 8:45 and 9:30 on Oct 11. Missed the live stream? The video will be available for playback later today.

Remember that “paperless office” we were all promised decades ago?  It’s finally happening. Many industries – maybe yours? – are finally leaving the familiar world of print-based communications behind. Moving from a print-centric to an online and mobile-based business model is a huge cultural shift.  With the move away from paper and fewer in-person meetings, [...]

Sales is the engine driving your corporate revenues.  Are you holding it together with duct tape and paper clips?  How can you assess the impact of sales enablement initiatives?  And what can you do to lever-up performance?  Learn how you can achieve results that boost sales performance and keep going… to strengthen customer loyalty and [...]

If I showed you two groups of potential customers that fit your ideal client profile –one nearly twice as large as the other – which group would you target?  Believe it or not, most marketing and sales organizations are chasing the smaller opportunity. To win the bigger prize, you need to talk less about your [...]

This is going to be an amazing year for you and your company.  This is your time to transform sales enablement – far beyond traditional expectations – into a powerful driver of corporate change.  That’s what Summit 2011 is all about, and we can hardly wait to get started. At earlier summits, we’ve looked at [...]