Scott Santucci

During the first week of June, we had one of our quarterly Sales Enablement Leadership Council meetings in Barcelona, Spain. (A leadership council is comprised of executives from leading companies who work with us to set the direction for the near-term and long-term role of sales enablement.) For an entire day, we discussed the application of Forrester’s SIMPLE framework, which is a model designed to help combat the random acts of sales support that persist within most B2B companies, to common sales enablement leadership challenges.

The sheer volume of insight, ideas, new research topics, and techniques shared during that session was tremendous – far too much to share in one blog post. So, I am going to pick two issues that came up.

First off, Tamara, I hear you. I was told point blank that I need to participate in the social community more. I’m going to make a more dedicated effort to do this moving forward, but I need your help. Please tell me what you’d like me to...

On August 27th, Forrester hosted the first Sales Enablement roundtable in the industry focused on addressing challenges related to profitable growth objectices for large enterprise technology companies.

Assembling a balanced group of sales and marketing executives, through one lens the session could have been viewed as an economic summit. Added together, the total revues of the participants exceeded $350 Billion. To put that into perspective, that would make our panel the 27th largest economy in the world right behind Greece, but ahead of Denmark. In attendance were representatives from the following global organizations: Accenture, Allen Systems Group, BearingPoint, BMC Software, CA, CSC, Dimension Data, Dun & Bradstreet, IBM, Kronos, Orange Business Services, Siemens, SunGard, Unisys, and Xerox.

During our session we talked about best practices, a cross functional framework to help galvanize product, marketing, and sales teams around customers, and how to...

The industrial revolution happened over a period of about 200 years starting in the mid-1700’s and lasting to the mid-1900’s. The core pattern of this period was the application of mechanical methods to meet the needs of the many in a more scalable, cost-effective way. For example, the first industry to kick off the industrial revolution was textiles. In the early 1700’s all garments were made by hand. The wealthy could afford extremely high quality, comfortable, tailored, and expensive handmade garments. However, most people could not afford these clothes and had to make their own. The idea was to apply machines and water (later steam) power to produce many garments at much higher quality than home-made ones with an extremely high degree of consistency, but less quality than those created by the high-end, skilled tailors of the time. The result was a complete transformation of business and society.

Today’s Problem – Providing Your Customers with Valuable...

When your CEO asks, "Why haven't we realized the sales performance boosts we expected when we (insert investment of your choice)

...implemented our SFA system?
...trained our sales organization?
...launched our sales portal?"

How will you respond?

If you (and the CEO) thought that investment was "the answer" to improving sales performance, we have some bad news. There is no such thing as a sales effectiveness silver bullet.

While, there are many different types of organizations that claim they can help you improve your sales productivity, few of these solutions can offer measurable gains in productivity on their own. For example:

• CRM vendors argue that implementing their software will help you drive more business by providing better structure to the sales process and improving the accuracy of your forecasting.
• Sales training firms suggest that you can improve your sales fundamentals by teaching a common sales...