CRM for the salesperson 2022

By Cédric Müller

The ever-increasing complexity of sales presents salespeople with a challenge. Complexity makes decisions harder to make. Economic processes are becoming less and less manageable and predictable. The main drivers of complexity are technological developments, home offices, the globalization of competition, volatile markets and, last but not least, increasingly demanding customers. Complexity in sales results in sales overload and leads to lost opportunities. Those companies that can combine sales and marketing more effectively and bring the company’s performance to the interaction with the customer create sustainable competitive advantages.

One tool for this is Sales Enablement. Sales enablement is described as a strategic, continuous process that empowers customer-facing employees to consistently and systematically engage in relevant conversations with the right stakeholders at every stage of the customer journey. This is a strategic process aimed at equipping salespeople with integrated content, training and coaching to sell efficiently and effectively. This creates the best possible customer experience.

Study offers of the HWZ on this topic

As for CRM, a software solution can be used for a more professional sales enablement and content management implementation. This is also referred to as “sales enablement automation”.

Especially such an “automation” by means of modern IT tools is desirable, because many documents provided by marketing are not used efficiently enough by the sales department and the sales staff cannot find available services in form of content, papers, newsletters, product catalogs etc. Sales Enablement Automation ensures that sales staff with customer contact always have the best services quickly available by means of an IT solution. These sales enablement platforms function cloud-based. Marketing services are obtained from only one, always up-to-date source. CRM data plays an important role here. Sales enablement should be integrated directly with the CRM system. In this way, services are generated automatically and individually on the basis of the customer data available in the CRM system. The effectiveness of the services can thus also be directly evaluated and adjusted.

So, in summary, sales enablement can be summarized as follows.

Complexity in sales is constantly increasing and sales employees are overwhelmed with the flood of information and requirements
Competitive advantages are enjoyed by those companies that manage to pass on the right information to the right customers at the right time.
This is where automated sales enablement platforms such as Seismic, which are fully integrated within existing CRM systems such as Salesforce, come in handy.
A sales and marketing enablement platform promotes collaboration between sales and marketing. This makes it easier to create tailored and personalized content and use it to deepen relationships with customers.
An intelligent sales and marketing enablement platform provides a complete and comprehensive view of how your content is being used, who is using it the most, at what stages of the sales cycle the content is being used, and what types of content are contributing the most to sales.

A variety of different SaaS solutions with different strengths and orientations are available for implementing sales enablement automation. For the right selection, the Forrester Wave Report provides a good overview of the current leaders in the industry. The 2020 report identified two vendors, Seismic and Highspot, as leaders.

In the course of this, Trinova AG took a closer look at Seismic’s offering in order to evaluate whether a sales enablement platform would be an option for Trinova AG. Currently, 20 employees work for Trinova AG, of which 10 are sales employees and 2 are marketing employees in 2 departments. Trinova AG has established itself well in the market and is growing steadily. The number of sales employees is expected to double in the next few years. Trinova AG currently works with the Proffix business software for retail companies. This software has only very rudimentary CRM functions and integration with Seismic is not possible. If Trinova AG wants to link Seismic to a CRM platform, it would have to switch to a CRM platform such as Salesforce or use Seismic without integration. At Trinova AG, the services generated by Marketing are communicated to Sales via e-mail or teams and made available in a drive via a dedicated server. Typically, these services are primarily newsletters, product brochures, product catalogs, LinkedIn content, and company presentations. This procedure does not always ensure that the entire company receives all relevant news, as such information is simply overlooked in the flood of e-mails.

With Seismic, this could be cloud-based via the web browser. On the landing page, every employee could see what the latest company news is. Such news can take the form of market activity, competitor analysis, product updates, etc. Seismic’s generic search function allows the platform to be filtered more quickly for relevant news and content. Marketing can customize what content is seen and by whom. In this way, sales staff only see the content that is relevant and up-to-date for them. Frequently used content can be saved as a favorite for faster access. Seismic continuously analyzes how the provided content is used. This happens on the side of the sales staff as well as the customers. This makes it possible to see, in the form of statistics, which content is used most by sales colleagues and how customers react to it. It measures how long a viewer watches the content and whether they share or download it. This is made possible by making content available via links and not as PDFs. The statistical evaluation is thus web-based. In addition, content can be rated directly by employees, which leads to an overall rating of the content. This rating is visible to every employee. Based on these statistics and the ratings, marketing can constantly improve content. Data is composited from across the platform into a single data model for complete, custom dashboarding and reporting across all data in the environment. Seismic Enables data to be filtered, split and disaggregated to make better business decisions. The analytics tools can then identify at which point in the sales cycle a customer has engaged with the content. This data can be used to continuously improve the customer journey by enabling marketing to generate customized content for the customer, also thanks to Seismic’s artificial intelligence. The link to the CRM system enables activities, sent mails and customer feedback to be connected directly to the CRM system so that this data is also available on the CRM platform.

Of course, Trinova AG would also benefit from all these advantages. However, due to the small size of the company, the cost-benefit factor for Trinova AG is not positive. The costs of such a platform with 15EUR per user and month are out of proportion to the benefit. Due to the small size of the company, the employees are very well networked. The amount of content provided by marketing is manageable and would not justify the use of a sales enablement platform.