About Fergal Glynn
Fergal Glynn leads Docurated’s Marketing team. Docurated is a Productivity Solution that enables Sales Organizations in companies such as DigitasLBi and Havas surface and leverage the best Marketing content for higher quality pitches and faster Go To Market. Prior to Docurated, Veracode was an early employee at Veracode. At Veracode Fergal was responsible for lead generation activities including content marketing, blogging, search engine optimization, social media, and sales operations. Earlier in his career Fergal was a technical founder of BlueNote Networks and a developer at Fidelity Investments and Oracle.
One of the biggest issues that sales and marketing face today is the inability to efficiently surface and re-use the most effective content to close more business. Only 20-30% of sales time is spent in front of customers while 70-80% is spent on discovery, looking for information, and other administrative tasks. If companies can reduce this time spent away from customers the potential rewards can be quite significant.
Sales Enablement
By focusing on sales enablement, companies can create meaningful efficiencies across their sales organization meaning more time can be spent in front of customers. Sales enablement is a relatively new business function that is primarily concerned with equipping sales teams with the most relevant content whenever and wherever they need it.
Improved sales enablement can reduce time spent away from the customer by reducing time spent searching for documents and other administrative tasks. By arming sales reps with winning content when they most need it, improved sales enablement can also lead to better meetings which in turn lead to increased efficiency and effectiveness as well as lower cost of sales and higher revenue per rep.
Improve Sales Enablement across the Company
The instigation of successful sales enablement at a company can not be achieved purely through software adoption. Sales enablement is a function of business that is comprised of activities, systems, processes, and information. These elements must be aligned cohesively into an overarching process that maximizes the organization’s selling potential.
Companies must follow a number of steps to sales enablement success:
- Evaluate current sales enablement processes
- Make sales enablement a priority
- Carefully introduce sales enablement software
- Align the entire company behind the sales organization
- Establish a set of shared sales enablement metrics
Effective sales enablement will not merely see an increase in revenue but can act as the framework on which future revenue growth can be built.
Sales Enablement for Better Meetings
With an effective structure provided by improved sales enablement, companies can make the most out of their meetings with customers. The best sales enablement software ensures sales reps are always equipped with the best content. At present, many sales reps have difficulty locating the best sales collateral.
Companies are storing content in shared drives, cloud storage services, CRM systems, and even email inboxes. Retrieving content has become a nightmare. Sales reps are spending up to 6.5 hours searching for content each week. Worse still, many reps are settling for the sales content that is most easily accessed instead of the most suitable to present at a customer meeting. Effective sales enablement software eliminates this inefficiency creating more time for meetings as well as improved sales rep performance.
Sales Rep Mobility
Sales reps are becoming increasingly mobilized and now require 24/7 access to the most relevant company content. Each customer meeting will be different. What worked at the last meeting may not work next time around. As a result, sales reps have to be more flexible than ever before. Reps might even have to mesh up different pieces of sales content to create a specifically tailored piece of content on the move to their next meeting.
Customers needs have evolved significantly over the past number of years. To get the most out of customer meetings sales reps need to be better prepared than ever. Companies with effective sales enablement functions are best prepared to meet the challenges posed by customer meetings.
