Sales channel enablement is the process of training the members of the channel to sell and support a set of products and/or solutions. It’s an essential component of success for businesses, regardless of vertical, to cultivate and support a viable channel for the purposes of driving revenue.

The departments responsible for supporting the channel, spend a tremendous amount of time and energy assembling the right content and smartly organizing it. Too bad the neat and orderly organization of content is almost a complete waste of time.

The typical sales enablement experience progresses like this, a sales person, or customer, enters a portal and is presented a menu of all the available educational material. Often there’s an RSS capability that enables them to receive an alert when content is added or changed. Largely, this mechanism of consuming content is cumbersome, time consuming and most importantly it lacks personal context.

Personal context is the key to providing a rich learning experience. Succinctly, it’s the presentation of supplemental educational content to an audience member based on their previous actions. This includes, but is not limited to, the frequency with which they’ve consumed content, the recency of this consumption, and the basic clickstream data of website visits. Taken as a whole, their digital actions form their digital body language.

The ability to analyze behavior and deliver pertinent content that corresponds with the audience’s implicit or explicit interests moves content delivery away from a pull-action model to a push-action delivery model.

The pull-action delivery model of learning is highly ineffective. It forces the audience—in this case the sales person—to be self-aware of what they don’t know. This is analogous to a shopping experience where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’ll know it when you find it. In this mode, you could be browsing for hours and from store to store. If you have the time, I suppose this might not be an issue, but who has that kind of time? We have an economy to support and deadlines to meet. Conversely, if you’re pressed for time, this ‘browsing process’ can be a nerve-wracking, highly inefficient experience that will probably end fruitlessly.

To apply this example to the behavior of sales professionals: if they are spending time browsing through your mountain of educational content, regardless of whether the content is readily available in easy to consume formats, or if it is neatly organization, they aren’t selling. To minimize their time spent toiling away in your content library, present to them content that is most relevant to their immediate needs. Be their personal shopper.

An effective personal shopper knows their customer’s purchase history and preferences, and is able to translate the subtle cues of what catches their customer’s eye into what they are most likely looking for. Effective personal shoppers thin-slice.

To truly enable sales people and technical people alike, it’s imperative to minimize their time spent searching for the right content and maximize their time spent consuming and applying it.

Posted by Amin on 04.29.2010 at 3:15pm   Tags: Blink, clickstream, enablement, Malcom Gladwell, sales-training, thin-slice, training
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