Technology Solutions-Sales Enablement 

PharmaVOICE

May 2, 2006
by Elisabeth Pena Villarroel

Excerpts:

Marketing organizations are becoming increasingly focused on driving message consistency across the channels that interact most directly with their customers and prospects - namely, the sales organization. The process of driving this consistency, as well as providing relevant, customizable content that sales people will leverage in face-to-face selling situations is an emerging discipline referred as Sales Enablement.

“We have really seen during in the last 18 months to two years a real shift in the focus of a lot of marketing organizations away from a big branding and advertising mindset and becoming much more tactically focused on what are their salespeople saying about them in the marketplace and how are they representing the brand,” says Jeff Summers, Senior VP, marketing, The SAVO Group.
The SAVO Group’s Sales Asset Manager (SAM) application allows sales people to quickly identify the most effective sales assets — presentations, documents, coaching aids, internal resources — based on the selling situation — customer profile, solution, sales stage, methodology, and competitive landscape.

“In addition to identifying the best sales asset, information regarding the selling situation also can be leveraged to make immediate cross-sell recommendations — a key requirement of solution selling,” Mr. Summers says. “Once a sales asset is identified, sales people may then rapidly customize the content further while adhering to corporate standards for quality and consistency.”

What separates the SAM application from other technology-based selling solutions is that the application is hosted by SAVO, but can be completely maintained by nontechnical administrators with the marketing, sales ops, or product management organizations.

For Suzanne Ross, Chief Marketing Officer for CorSolutions, the customization of the SAM tool allows is a key selling point for her.

“Before working with the SAVO Group, our sales and marketing teams were constantly challenged to deliver a consistent message and positioning for our products and the company,” she says. “Maintaining the most up-to-date assets was the greatest issue. We needed a solution that provided an easy-to-use, dynamic, searchable, central location for all sales and marketing materials. This was something our Intranet just couldn’t do but the SAVO product did. SAM supports our marketing efforts by providing our sales and client management teams with easy access to materials that are current, relevant, and audience-specific.”