Sales Enablement is a hot topic in enterprise software right now. The term, which essentially encompasses any software designed to facilitate and improve an organization's sales activities and processes, applies directly to a number of emergent products in the Software-as-a-Service industry.
For today's blog post, we brought in Docurated Vice-President Fergal Glynn to participate in a short discussion on several key areas impacted by Sales Enablement: productivity, sales & marketing alignment, prospect triggers, technology, and the SaaS industry.
An Ireland native with a unique background in both Engineering and Marketing, Mr. Glynn has presided over the engineering and marketing efforts at numerous successful enterprise software companies, creating the Archive feature in Chatter and leading the Marketing team at Veracode.
5 Questions for Docurated's VP of Marketing
We asked Fergal for his thoughts on these five topics relating to Sales Enablement, which he was kind enough to share below.
1. What are some of the biggest impediments you see in sales productivity here in 2014?
Sales productivity being measured in the absence of quality/effectiveness is really wrong - there is an opportunity cost to Sales and just because you're able to crank through more deals doesn't mean that your close rate per deal is going up or that as a sales person you're able to up the price for each deal, etc. It's just a number of sales calls. [Ambition: We agree!]
That, on the whole, is detrimental to long term success of a company, as Sales can burn leads vs. manage each lead effectively.
2. What are some of the best ways to immediately impact marketing & sales alignment?
Marketing controls a ton of budget that is directed towards making sales better and more productive. And yet, most marketers are still not tying their work directly towards productivity or effectiveness and still have no way of measuring their impact.
Secondly, the things that are used to measure sales productivity require so much manual labor from Marketing and even Sales that any productivity gains from the system get swallowed up with the extra labor when looking across the organization.
3. How important is quick response time to a prospect “trigger” during the sales process?
A common trait in my world is that time kills everything.This applies to ‘suspects’ visiting our website all the way down to late stage opportunities.
4. You mentor at the Harvard Business School -- how attuned are the students there to using technology to get ahead in business?
I’m humbled by the students I’ve been exposed to. These students are working on technology oriented projects that could change the world.
I’ve been exposed to students researching and implementing projects that span from alternative forms of currency to making marriages work better.
5. As an emerging SaaS company, how has Docurated succeeded in gaining traction in such a hyper-competitive market, and what advice do you have for others looking to follow in your success?
We are very targeted with everything we do. Time is our biggest enemy, and we start each day by making sure that every single person in our organization is focused on the most important things they can be doing over the next 24 hours.
About Docurated
Docurated is a Productivity Solution that enables Sales Organizations in companies such as Rocket Fuel, DigitasLBi and Havas surface and leverage the best Marketing content for higher quality pitches and faster go-to-market.
Beyond Sales, Docurated supports other critical functions, such as IT, Finance and Legal, across leading organizations such as Netflix and Goldwater, Dube, drastically reducing time spent retrieving critical information from legacy content repositories.
Docurated enables IT to maintain its existing infrastructure while transforming a hierarchical and disparate content system into a powerful and simple knowledge store, where content can be instantly surfaced without having to remember where it lives. For more information on how Docurated helps enterprise sales teams accelerate pipeline with the best content, visit www.docurated.com.
Ambition: The 360° Sales Management Platform
Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs business teams, data sources, and performance metrics on one system.
Sales leaders use Ambition to enhance sales performance insights and build sales reports, scorecards, contests, and TVs that supercharge focus, effort and accountability.
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