Sales Coaching Systems represent a major new category of sales and marketing automation software. These systems make sales and marketing professionals more effective by capturing, reinforcing, and encouraging best practices that improve sales results from all channels and drive increased revenue at all stages of a product's life cycle.

Sales Coaching systems provide the following key benefits:

Business / Financial Benefits

• Reduced ramp-up periods for new salespeople and resellers
• Faster and greater revenue from new product roll-outs
• Increased revenue from existing products and channels
• Reduced sales and channel support costs

Cultural / Strategic Benefits

• Tighter alignment between marketing and sales
• Reduced information overload in the channels
• A continuously improving and highly leveraged knowledge asset
• Sustainable competitive advantage

Traditional sales and marketing systems focus on increasing management control and improving the efficiency of a few repetitive tasks and activities. For example: contact managers help organize a salesperson's day and opportunity managers improve sales processes and forecasting. These are task-centric systems designed to perform a specific function. They do not make sales and marketing professionals more knowledgeable and/or effective.

A Sales Coaching System, on the other hand, is a comprehensive best practice application for sales and marketing organizations. It enables marketing professionals to continually improve product positioning and messages throughout a product's life cycle. It "coaches" salespeople and resellers on how to make more effective solution-centric sales calls that result in more business. Sales Coaching Systems can increase the sales results from field sales, telesales, and resellers from both new and existing products (See Diagram 1).

The unique functions provided by this next generation of Sales & Marketing Automation systems are:

Why Are Sales Coaching Systems Needed?

Why is the best product not always the market leader? Because in today's hyper-competitive marketplace it is the company with the best marketing and sales __ product positioning, marketing communications, and front-line sales execution __ that out-distances its competition. The ever-changing market dynamics and competitive landscapes, combined with shorter product life cycles, demand that companies constantly refine their product positioning and key messages. Understanding the customer's business issues, delivering crisp value propositions and differentiators, and effectively and consistently handling competitive situations across all forms of communications can be enormously difficult. As soon as a sales message or positioning statement begins to work, the competition puts a new spin on their message, and you need to adjust.

Market leaders view their product positioning, marketing messages and best sales practices as some of their most important assets. Yet even in the most progressive companies there are often no established processes to ensure that this "Sales Critical Knowledge" is effectively captured, shared, and leveraged. Most companies don't even have formal processes for keeping marketing messages up-to-date and constantly in front of sales channels. This results in the misalignment of marketing and sales. The two functions become un-synchronized and less co-ordinated in the way they operate and interact. Sales are actually lost because salespeople and resellers do not have the latest competitive knowledge, or marketing is not aware of a new competitive tactic that sales encountered.

Product Positioning and Message Life Cycles

The concept of the product life cycle is universal, in which revenues follow a traditional bell curve from the release of the product through its acceptance by the market and finally to a phase of declining revenue as the product matures. Throughout this life cycle however, there are multiple product positioning and message life cycles.

This is true for the following reasons:

• Great positioning and messages don't just happen. They are the result of a lot of thought, give-and-take, and sometimes, great moments of insight. Processes and best marketing practices that support ongoing product positioning and message development don't just happen. They need to evolve and align with changing prospect needs and business issues thus improving sales results.

• The rate at which positioning and market messages need to be refined has accelerated exponentially. This is due in part to shorter product development cycles, advances in information and communication technology, increased competition and greater and more rapidly changing customer demands.

• Multiple levels of distribution combined with multiple marketing communication vehicles aimed at multiple buyers tend to diffuse and dilute key market messages. Getting your sales channels and communication vehicles coordinated with the most current messages for each type of buyer and industry sector is challenging, if not impossible, without a well-disciplined product positioning, message management and deployment process.

Best Sales Practice Life Cycles

Similarly, there are many best sales practice life cycles throughout the product life cycle that every sales channel should leverage. Examples include:

• The rebuttal that countered a customer objection this week may not work next week.

• A competitor changed its strategy or tactics and you need a new way to respond and lay competitive traps.

• A new piece of collateral, if used in a specific way, allows you to more successfully sell into a different industry sector.

By understanding, capturing, improving, and distributing your best sales practices to all sales channels you can:

• Benefit from lessons learned. You avoid sales traps. Salespeople are more credible with prospects and customers. They make better and fewer calls per sale, they close more sales, and make more money.

• Encourage solution-centric selling. You increase sales revenues and overall market share by solving customer problems, not by selling product features.

• Give feedback to the product experts. This results in improved product positioning and messages and, over the longer-term, results in development of new products and product enhancements that more closely match what prospects and customers want and need.

Sales Coaching Systems provide a unique opportunity to manage "Sales Critical Knowledge" and deal with these short life cycles. They allow you to improve product positioning and capture and leverage the "know how" and "street smarts" of your best salespeople to drive increased revenue through out a product's life cycle. (See Diagram 2)

What About Intranets and Marketing Encyclopedia Systems?

Sales Coaching Systems are a critical part of a total sales and marketing support strategy. They integrate with, and leverage document-centric libraries like intranets and Marketing Encyclopedia Systems (MES).

Over the past three years WisdomWare has interviewed more than three hundred sales and marketing organizations in companies of all sizes that are actively building online MES, intranets and Lotus Notes systems. The hope is that their salespeople will sign on and become more self-sufficient. Systems range in size from a few hundred documents to huge corporate repositories that contain more than 100,000 documents or web pages.

While most of the implementations are initially considered technical successes, we've yet to find a system that has survived the test of time and has been universally embraced by the sales organization. What we found instead, are three disconcerting trends: (See Diagram 3).

1. The systems become large and cumbersome over time.
2. The cost of maintaining currency grows at an even faster rate.
3. The value to the sales force diminishes over time.

Obviously, any business system that becomes more and more expensive to maintain and at the same time, less and less valuable needs to be re-thought. The main complaints heard from salespeople regarding intranets and MES include:

1. The systems are not portable; users must be connected.
2. It's difficult to find answers.
3. There is too much information.
4. Information is out of date.
5. Information is not organized in a way that reflects what sales needs.
6. The amount of e-mail received on products and competitors is still too much.

This correlates closely to research done by The Aberdeen Group. They concluded the high failure rate for sales automation systems is due primarily to the fact that the systems provided little valuable information for salespeople.

These complaints stem from what we believe is a fundamental flaw in both the process and implementation strategy most companies adopt when they begin to put sales support information online. The flaw is falling into a technology-centric or "inside-out" view of the problem, which tends to drive the project from the perspective of the IT department. IT's main objective is usually focused on efficiently managing large volumes of information rather than providing a true learning environment for the user. The user's need to learn represents a people-centric, or "outside-in" perspective which can radically alter the way a system is designed, and improve usability and salesforce acceptance. By inappropriately taking a technology-centric approach many companies foster an environment where:

1. Anybody can create and distribute content. This leads to different styles, formats, and various versions of the same information.



2. More online information is assumed to be better.



3. The medium starts to become more important than the message, as product marketing managers spend time competing for sales channel mind-share with gimmicks like animated web pages instead of with better positioning and messages.

Single-Tier Library Architectures

The technologies used to build today's intranets and MES make it relatively easy to put existing paper-based content online in a single repository in which each document is managed the same way. Technologies like the Web, intranets, and Lotus Notes use this single-tier architecture to organize large numbers of documents and other information objects and link them together in a homogenous library that is accessible via an index or sophisticated search engine. This is a good approach for research purposes, but it doesn't lend itself to finding the quick specific answers that salespeople need. There are three reasons for this.

1. While sophisticated search engines can help a salesperson locate the right documents, they can just as easily send them on a fruitless search that causes frustration and wastes time.



2. Not only are the documents stored in a homogenous single tier, individual documents also tend to be homogenous. A document may contain a combination of both good (current and accurate) and bad (out-of-date or erroneous) information. However there is no way to tell before scrolling through the entire document.



3. Hypertext and other inter-document links can help a person navigate, but they are also very hard to maintain in a rapidly changing environment like sales and marketing. In addition, these links can easily cause a salesperson to get lost as they move from document to document.

Should We Stop Building Intranets and Marketing Encyclopedia Systems?

Do the problems mentioned above mean that companies should stop putting documents online? The answer is an emphatic no! In fact, online document-based information libraries will continue to grow at an almost unmanageable rate over the next decade making information overload even more debilitating. With this continual explosion of document-based content, is there any way to improve these systems so they drive increased sales and marketing performance?

Try A Two-Tier Approach

WisdomWare believes the key to making an intranet, Marketing Encyclopedia or Lotus Notes system a true learning environment that helps marketing do its job better and is embraced by salespeople is to implement a two-tier architecture (See Diagram 4). This architecture should follow the 80/20 (or even the 97/3) principle.

The foundation or "document tier" of this two-tier architecture contains the actual documents and other large objects just as they are managed today. This document tier however, is integrated with a Sales Coaching System that functions as a "best practice and knowledge tier." This second tier contains a relational database of "small objects" like product positioning statements and key marketing messages along with answers to questions, advice, best sales practices, and other short "sound bites" of text that are highly cross-referenced for rapid access and retrieval. The Sales Coaching System contains this sales critical knowledge in a consistent format so it can be easily accessed and maintained.

This two-tier approach allows a company to reduce the size of its Intranet or MES thereby reducing its maintenance effort and cost. There is less need for many of the documents including sales kits, other internally focused content, and even e-mails.

This two-tier approach has been used in print for decades. A good example is the Cliffs Notes that many remember from high school and college days. Cliffs Notes are analogous to a Sales Coaching System as they focus on the important information in order to save the reader time. Cliffs Notes often provide a better learning environment than the actual book because the information is organized in a consistent format containing short blocks of text that are concise, to the point and easily remembered. With today's technology, you can put the Cliffs Notes-equivalent online and link each key point to the right document or web site so users can instantaneously get more detailed information.

How Do Sales Coaching Systems Work?

A Sales Coaching system employs relational database technology to create and manage a central product positioning, messaging and best sales practice knowledge base. A workflow system with a closed-loop methodology is wrapped around this knowledge base. It reinforces the development, delivery and continuous refinement of key product positioning, marketing messages, and best sales call practices. This creates a common framework for building, consistently refining, and dramatically improving key marketing messages like elevator speeches, value propositions, key product differentiators, and competitive positioning and knock-offs.

The central knowledge base that is created as a by-product becomes a highly leveraged marketing and sales asset (See Diagram 5). It can be effectively used as the foundation for all marketing, sales and support collateral, and training materials to ensure consistency and maximum market impact. In addition, this knowledge base can be used as an interactive knowledge transfer vehicle to inform and "coach" the sales channels on message delivery and best sales practices. Finally, since the knowledge base contains a company's most current messages and proven best sales practices, it becomes the ideal foundation for all of the company's interactive selling, and other "customer-facing" systems that are delivered over the Internet.

The Critical Elements

To be most effective, a Sales Coaching system must include the following key functionality:

A central framework built on a relational database used to manage product positioning, messaging, best sales practices, and other "Sales Critical Knowledge." It should be customized to reflect a company's marketing philosophy and strategies, its sales processes and its communication style. This three-dimensional knowledge base must reflect the unique positioning, value propositions and differentiators of specific products. These attributes should be linked to customer needs and requirements, competitive capabilities, and the best sales practices that reinforce the most current product positioning.

An authoring workflow system for building and maintaining messages and positioning that simplifies the message creation process and improves overall message quality. The authoring system must be easy to use to ensure that product managers and product marketing professionals actually save time that is now spent on tactical activities like writing sales kits and sales training materials and providing basic sales support.

A user interface for information access and navigation that is simple, fast, and improves a salesperson's comprehension and retention.

A ubiquitous delivery mechanism that can be accessed through multiple user interfaces (i.e. Web, Lotus Notes, client/server and in the future, hand-held PDA devices). This will allow the deployment of positioning, messages, and best sales practices to a variety of audiences, including the direct sales organization, indirect sales channels, other employees, and the marketplace in general.

A closed-loop feedback system from the sales channels that allows for continuous message and best sales practice improvement and refinement. Sometimes the best wisdom and insight on positioning come from salespeople and resellers.

A simple integration facility to leverage existing information resources, including intranets, MES, Notes databases, and other document repositories.

An open architecture with programming interfaces that allow other sales and marketing applications, like an opportunity management system or interactive selling system, to leverage the positioning, and message knowledge base.

The Benefits for Marketing

Sales Coaching Systems create a tighter alignment between marketing and sales organizations. This is because, for the first time, both organizations agree on a common communication framework for positioning statements, key messages, and best sales practices. This framework becomes an explicit definition of marketing's deliverables and creates a clear set of requirements for measuring success. The marketing organization that implements and embraces a Sales Coaching System will realize many benefits including the ability to:

1. Roll out new products and marketing programs faster and with better results
2. Improve message value and delivery consistency
3. Significantly reduce their over all sales support load
4. Free up time for more strategic marketing activities
5. Get faster and better feedback from Sales
6. Have a better understanding of the competition

The Benefits for Sales

An effective Sales Coaching System delivers several benefits to the sales organization including:

1. Reduced new salesperson and reseller ramp-up times
2. Faster revenue from new product launches
3. Reduced sales cycles
4. Increased competitive readiness and sales credibility
5. More consistent application of a solution-based selling methodology
6. Improved ability to recruit as candidates perceive the value in the system

Is a Sales Coaching System Right for Your Company?

Sales Coaching Systems are about quality and effective sharing of best practices and other "Sales Critical Knowledge." They are geared toward companies that believe their messages, positioning and best sales practices are a critical corporate asset. These companies firmly believe that their messages need to be crisp, current, and consistently and effectively delivered by Sales. Any company that is in a competitive, rapidly changing marketplace can benefit from a Sales Coaching System. Large companies whose market share is slowly whittled away by niche vendors are great candidates for these systems. This is because niche vendors can easily get the large organization's sales people to play a "features game," straying from the "value proposition game" where their broad product line and stability may be a distinct competitive advantage.

Sales Coaching Checklist

Over the next several years, more and more software vendors will jump on the Sales Coaching bandwagon and begin to offer various levels of coaching functionality. It is important to remember that making people more knowledgeable and effective requires a much different technological and cultural approach than traditional sales and marketing software systems. The workflow aspects, data model and user interface of an effective Sales Coaching System are the keys to its success and adoption by marketing and sales. Gaining lasting competitive advantage with a Sales Coaching System requires a vendor to have concrete answers to the following questions:

1. How much training does it take for salespeople to use the software effectively?



2. Does the system help salespeople better understand the customer's business issues and make better prospecting and sales calls?



3. How does the system reinforce consultative selling skills and encourage salespeople to sell solutions?



4. How specific is the advice that the system can provide?



5. Is the knowledge model flexible enough to reflect our business, our terminology and our culture?



6. Does the system provide incentives to promote the sharing of best sales practices?



7. How does the system leverage existing SFA systems and information resources?



8. How does the system help our marketing professionals improve positioning and manage messages on a continual basis?



9. How difficult is the system to maintain?



10. How easy is it to change the system, as our business needs change?



11. Does the system require a DBA to change the content or can product managers and marketing administrators change it?



12. How easy is it to give resellers and other people who are not in the direct sales organization access to the knowledge base? Can this access be controlled through different views?



13. Does the system provide metrics and other functionality that facilitate continuous improvement of the knowledge base?



14. Is there a methodology for implementation that reduces our risk and improves the success?



15. Can the company provide services that help us in any sales and marketing re-engineering process?

Summary

The move toward quality product positioning, message management and sharing best sales practices is analogous to the Total Quality Manufacturing movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Today, best practice applications for marketing and sales organizations are being deployed at progressive companies that want to maintain a competitive edge. Over the next few years companies who don't invest in an organized process and system for managing positioning and messages and best sales practices may well find themselves lagging behind the competition.

This is déjà vu and creates a situation similar to the American automobile industry when Japan adopted Demming's principles on quality as a fundamental management discipline. The lesson is not new. Organizations who learn it and start focusing on quality and effectiveness in their sales and marketing organizations ahead of their competition will gain sustainable market advantage, and be in the driver's seat leading to the 21st century.

About the Author

Bob Schmonsees, founder and CEO of WisdomWare, Inc., has over 27 years of experience running successful sales and marketing organizations. Bob has led sales and marketing teams in several successful start-ups as well as publicly traded software and services firms with revenues of $500 million.

A few years ago, Bob concluded that traditional sales training and sales tools were not delivering the improvements in sales and marketing effectiveness that were needed in today's knowledge-based markets. He formed WisdomWare in 1996 to develop the next generation of knowledge-based sales software that actually "coached" salespeople to higher levels of performance. Today, WisdomWare is the leading provider of Best Practice and Sales Coaching Solutions for business-to-business sales and marketing organizations.