Sales Enablement: Realize the Potential of Social Media to Enable Your Sales Channels
Craig Nelson, CEO, iCentera

Today’s best-in-class organizations are coming to understand that their Sales Enablement Platform must incorporate mainstream social media tools and controls to monetize, track, control, and promote best-selling practices to their targeted audiences, including sales, partners, and current customers.  For marketing, this is one more way to “build your bench” of content providers in a controlled way.  Hey, who isn’t looking to do more with less these days and for those that have worked in enablement roles we know all too well that content must evolve to be of value in an ever changing market.   

Here’s what a social-media empowered Sales Enablement Platform can provide for you:

• A single point of entry to aggregate content from many social media tools, while delivering content that adapts to each user’s profile
• A controlled and collaborative environment to harness the power of the organic social media content created by field sales, subject matter experts, partners, and customers, without losing the company’s core value proposition
• A wizard-driven method for creating targeted communities to collaborate across workgroups and organizations
• Built-in authentication and role-based content management to filter and govern access to sanctioned content, while reducing the concern of unsanctioned information in the hands of sales, partners, and customers
• A controlled way to capture and publish best practices and their associated tags to aid in locating the content in the context of a sales scenario

A key by-product of introducing social media to sales enablement is the improved collaboration between marketing, sales and ultimately your customer.    Many organizations foster interaction and communication via community portals, discussion forums, embedded chat, content rating, and other disciplines.  But many are now demanding that they expand beyond simple content dissemination to better align marketing and sales using collaborative social media capabilities.  The payoff?  Research shows that sales metrics such as Bid-to-Win Ratio, Revenue per Account, Time-to-Quota, Market Share, and Sales Margins all improve when you effectively embrace social media as part of your marketing and sales efforts. 

What’s your take? Are you seeing the benefits of social media yet within your company? I’d love to engage with you to discuss the topic further.  Please post your comment here.