Organizational Transformation -

Leverage the collective knowledge of the organization to sell more with fewer resources faster

The Challenges:

How do we plan for and develop a strategy to meet the challenge of brain drain from worker turnover and an onslaught of "baby-boomers" reaching retirement?

How do we break down the silos, connect and align all revenue generating functional areas, sales, marketing, product development and engineering to make information and knowledge easily accessible and knowledge sharing a by-product of the way people work today?

How can we ramp-up cross-functional team members, new channel partners and internal sales reps faster?

How can we engineer and continuously refine best sales and operational practices to win more, more predictably with less organizational and sales resources?

How can we improve collaboration and coordination of our integrated engineering design and production teams to compress time-to-market for new product and services?

The Solution:

Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Automation and Collaboration Platform

Case Study: A Global Leader in Enterprise Software

Despite their success driving more than $1 billion in annual revenues, a global leader in enterprise software had difficulties providing their channel partners and direct sales force access to the wealth of organizational information they had to offer.

They needed a way for their 2,000 + channel and alliance partners to have the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to sell their entire product line more effectively.

Their problem was to find a way to categorize an enormous amount of information and get it into a single repository so their partners could easily find what they needed when they needed it.

Moreover, they needed a knowledge repository that could capture on going Q&A for reuse. While they had a CRM application and a rich partner internet portal, these tools could not keep up with the dynamic nature of organizational and sales knowledge requirements. They also required a system that would take advantage and leverage existing content and email systems while adding dynamic Q&A exchange and automated content management.

The internal sale support system was manual and inefficient with no tools available to capture and store requests for later reference so that they could stop wasting time and money responding to the same questions repeatedly from their internal sales force and their channel partners, especially during the on boarding process and in response to new product rollouts.

The solution has given their partners a single place to go for immediate answers 24 hours a day. Partners rate the accuracy and utility of information helping the organization flag content for updating, highlighting, or retirement.

By commenting and leaving feedback, partners can build an overarching community that allows them to share best operational and sales practices and eliminates the need to know who the Subject Matter Experts are to get questions answered that are not currently covered in the organization’s knowledge base.

Channel partners without specific questions can choose to browse the knowledge base, using it as a training tool to ramp up new team members faster and share "tribal knowledge" across the enterprise.

Research has found that companies with poor shared organizational and sales knowledge achieve a lower percentage of sales quotas, take 25% longer to ramp new reps and experience 30% more sale rep turnover.

The on-demand, organizational and sales knowledge automation and collaboration tool is dramatically accelerating product development cycles, provides the infrastructure to support continuous improvements to best practices and helps to fully harnesses the collective intelligence of the organization.

Sales 2.0 Executive Demand Generation

The Challenge:

Customers’ buying processes have evolved in our world of ubiquitous, instant, global communication, but companies’ selling processes have for the most part stayed the same

-Thomas Stewart, Editor Harvard Business Review, August 2006

Working harder for less return, losing to "no decision" more often than in the past, taking longer to ramp-up new sales team members, finding that your competition is increasing their use of you and your company as "column" aka "cannon" fodder so that the buyer can validate their "due diligence" in selecting your most despised competitor?

Systemic re-engineering of Sales 1.0, legacy sales processes, strategies and tactics to new market realities have now become mission critical for organizations to sustain and prevail in today's unpredictable economy.

Nothing in the world happens until someone sells something, no other business process is more important. Billions are invested each year in programs and technologies to improve sales effectiveness, yet according to the latest research findings from CSO Insights, Gartner and others, there has not been much improvement as evidenced by the following key findings:

• Only 61% Reps Making or Exceeding Quota (up from 2007 by 4.2%)
• Ramp-up time to for new sales reps is increasing with 40% of the organization reporting 10 to over 12 months An increase of 32% during the past four years
• Outcome of forecasted opportunities has been 50% won - 30% lost and 20% lost to no decision. In 2007 the numbers are worse declining to 48% while no decision rates have increased by 22%

Source: CSO Insights 2008 Sales Performance Optimization Survey Results and Analysis

The Solution:

SKS Sales 2.0 Consulting and Executive Demand Generation

To meet the challenges sales organizations are facing today, SKS provides a single source for world-class sales and marketing consulting and Executive Demand Generation services - helping both SMBs (Small-Mid-range Businesses) and large global organizations focus on deploying new sales 2.0 strategies and technologies to address the key challenges of selling in the 21^st Century.

Leveraging our proven process and methodology for building solid opportunity pipelines for clients in enterprise software and high technology we are helping our clients move the sales needle to accelerate top-line growth while holding the line on cost of sales.

Highly configurable and prescriptively targeted on your "sweet spot" vertical markets we have proven experience helping companies know who to call and what to say to get traction, compress the sales cycle, establish and build credibility.

SKS works with you to fine tune and align your sales process with our proven methodology for incubating opportunities and building solid pipelines. We do the time consuming task of finding and incubating sales opportunities so you and your sales force can focus on winning more opportunities faster.