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As the distributed workforce moves to mobile devices, it's time for an app that can help businesses achieve alignment at every level. This app needs to enable communication that’s targeted, timely, relevant, dynamic, and accessible, and provide a way to measure results.
That’s a lot of enabling for one app to handle, but it can be done. With apologies to Neil Armstrong: One small app for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Here are the main content elements of an effective sales enablement app:
This is time-sensitive content everyone in the organization should have right away. The venue for the holiday party aside, an obvious example is a new product launch and all the materials associated with the roll-out. Press releases, product updates, and quarterly training also fall into this category.
These are elements that tend not to change too much over time such as product datasheets, product videos, sales presentations, brochures and other collateral. In other words, the stuff that everyone in the field is constantly looking for and no one can ever find. Putting it at their fingertips via a mobile app saves time and boosts productivity.
The list of “for internal use only” assets can be a long one. You can ensure everyone stays on the same page by pushing out content like pricing announcements, sales manager-to-team communications, such as selling tips and quotas, competitive profiles, training, and employee recognition.
Anything you want in the field to put in front of a customer goes in this bucket: customer presentations, leave-behinds, product sheets, and white papers are some examples. Updates to any of these can also be easily deployed, putting your sales team on the same page, even if they’re on different continents.
No one likes to first get wind of a big corporate announcement via Twitter. You can use the app to send the latest on what’s going on with your company, products and services, new partnerships, and the like. It’s timely, it’s from a trusted source, and you won’t be limited to 140 characters.
This is a great way to keep a distributed workforce feeling connected to each other, shoulder pads and helmets not required. Basically, it’s a digestible serving of what you want everyone to know at the start of their day: recognize team excellence, introduce incentives, offers, and contests, share recent customer feedback, review KPIs, or just send out a quick morale-builder.
One of the best reasons to implement a sales enablement app is how easy it is to see concise reports on viewership and engagement. Management can measure accountability of the field and make tweaks as necessary.
Regardless of which combination of elements lets you best deliver the right information at the right time to the right person, it's critical to keep disciplined about what you push so you maintain a clear signal and don't become part of the corporate noise.
About the author
Rick Barsotti is the principal of Mahalo Digital, a B2B marketing agency that specializes in authenticity.
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