Telemarketing Software Featured Article

In decades past, anyone engaging in the selling process had two choices: they could reach out to prospects unprepared and hope to “wing it” with their selling skills alone, or they embarked on hours of research to pull together all the relevant background information and history before they even picked up the phone. While it was generally the latter type of salesperson who got the better results, the effort of finding and aggregating the information took away from selling time.

Modern sales tools have helped a lot. From customer relationship management (CRM) to lead management, sales professionals today are able to find all, or at least most, of the information they need in one or two places. Sales enablement technology is a term used to describe any solution that helps sales personnel collect and analyze information that will make the sales process easier and more focused. Sales enablement solutions have found ready homes in financial services companies that are striving to differentiate themselves from one another in an increasingly commoditized selling environment.

A study done in January by Profitable Channels, a sales enablement consultancy, found that an increasing number of financial services organizations are onboarding sales enablement technologies – in particular, predictive analytics, solution selling tools, mobile applications and presentation automation solutions – in order to see significant improvements in sales performance. The mobile component is key for these organizations: it helps companies harness the unique attributes of selling via mobile devices to boost results.

A sales-enablement solution, however, will only be as good as the data it controls. Stephen Diorio, the founder of Profitable Channels, recently authored an article for Business2Community in which he stresses the need for high quality data in these sales-enablement solutions.

“The ‘garbage in-garbage out’ data problem that plagued early database marketing efforts still applies,” noted Diorio in the article. “Only now, that garbage is being plugged into the highly targeted sales playbooks, presentations and solutions content that fuel sales enablement programs.”

This, of course, renders the solutions largely useless. According to Diorio, the only real answer is to create cross-functional project teams to set up a centralized content “hub” with the goal of repackaging, reorganizing and systemizing the delivery of sales and marketing content and ensuring that the information is fresh, factual and relevant.