New Sales Enablement Ideas – SAVO’s AMPs, Part 7 – Customer Focused Content

Your brand is the key to your success; it’s what differentiates your organization from your competitors. It’s critical for all customer-facing employees to project the brand your organization has worked so hard to establish; everyone must consistently deliver the same message. Yet, it is crucial for your sellers to be able to customize and target messages based on specific selling situations. This is our topic for this seventh post in an eight-part series about what SAVO calls AMPs – Achieving Maximum Potential. (Don’t miss the last installment, which covered SME promotion.)

John DeBord now Director of Sales at Grainger, explained his take on the subject, explaining that, as a seller, when he first got a laptop loaded with a word-processing program, he believed he had earned the equivalent of an undergrad in marketing. Then, the Internet came along and allowed him to capture images from anywhere; he got his masters. When IT loaded PowerPoint on his laptop, he had his Ph.D. in marketing. He could now create any message he wanted for the customer!

John followed up by explaining that he would rather not have to create these presentations, but would rather have engaging communications tools that only required minor customizations to resonate with the customer.

This was nearly eight years ago, but I am sure SAVO remembers spending a lot of time with John DeBord following that meeting. This was well before SAVO had something called an AMP, but I knew they had the expertise to help us develop dynamic content and to bring marketing and sales together. That is exactly what they did! SAVO helped us build a quarterly business review that allowed the sales person to customize certain parts, but also ensured the required components of the message were included and brand compliant. With a few clicks, the seller was accessing Data-Driven Assets (DDA) that populated graphs and charts with customer information to drive a metrics-based discussion with the client.

The result: in the pilot program, we used these business review documents with our top 50 clients. Within the first three quarters, revenue had grown by nearly 40%. The clients raved about the information we provided to help them understand the past relationship and plan for the future. We expanded the program to all account types and customers began requesting industry specific versions of the data. This was not a problem for SAVO. After 18 months, this customer-focused content was driving a two-hour planning session with clients four times a year.

Since then, I have partnered with SAVO many times to help establish a structure for delivering effective content, including RFP responses, presentations, proposals and personalized product overviews. They can also help you develop a system for measuring the quality and the impact of customer conversations resulting from that content. Effective systems stay in rotation and continue to improve. Ineffective ones get replaced.

SAVO provides an experienced Sales Enablement Consultant to guide organizations through a number of activities. These activities are specifically designed to identify, collect and apply the tools necessary for executing key content and connecting the right experts to deliver effective and useful customer-focused messages.

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