Buyers spend less than 10% of their time interacting with suppliers. Let that sink in.
This makes it essential for organizations to engage smartly, adding pressure on sales teams. Sales enablement solutions came into play to equip sellers with the resources and content they need to grab buyers’ attention and interact with them meaningfully.
However, adopting new technology brings challenges.
Introducing Alicia Orear
Alicia Orear, Senior Marketing Content Engagement Manager at Moen, knows the challenges of implementing a sales enablement platform firsthand. She joined Mediafly Chief Sales Officer Tony Kavadas and Grant Smith at SAP to discuss what she’s learned and share best practices.
Highlights are below, and you can watch the full conversation here.
Moen’s Journey to Transformation
With over 75 years of leadership in kitchen and bath faucets, Moen embarked on a sales enablement transformation in 2021, inspired by a new product launch. Realizing their outdated technology’s limitations, they looked for a more advanced solution to centralize internal and external product training materials.
Alicia Orear’s team at Moen oversees content creation, distribution, and brand compliance. Without a centralized repository, sellers relied on disparate sources for collateral, from paper copies to digital files. This lack of visibility meant sellers struggled to find the right content for buyer engagement, often resorting to creating their own materials—resulting in inconsistency.
She and her team set out to find a solution that would provide easy access to:
- Approved presentations
- Logos and other creative assets
- Consistent, compliant messaging
They chose the combination of Mediafly and SAP Sales Cloud technologies, which served as a centralized hub for sales content and integrated well with Moen’s existing tech stack.
Contracts were signed and it was go time. But as Alicia discovered, implementing a new sales enablement platform meant overcoming two major challenges:
#1: Getting Buy-in: Making sure everyone — from marketing, product, sales ops, IT, etc. — is on board .
#2: Change Management: Adapting to a new platform requires altering familiar routines, which can be met with skepticism and reluctance, especially among veteran sellers.
Jumping the Hurdles
Alicia’s experience may sound familiar, but there’s good news! With the right strategy, these challenges can be mitigated.
Here’s how you can navigate sales enablement implementation, using Moen’s experience as a blueprint.
Starting Small & Incentivizing
Before creating an implementation plan, Alicia’s team consulted with leaders and representatives from different departments. This ensured their strategy addressed the varied needs across business units.
Instead of launching the platform to everyone at once, they started with a small group of sellers. This phased approach allowed for gradual feature introductions, issue resolution, and early user proficiency.
Testing and feedback were critical. A feedback loop allowed Moen to adjust based on real-world usage, ensuring the platform met sellers’ needs. Positive user experiences built trust and encouraged wider adoption.
To further incentivize adoption, Moen implemented a contest using Media Copilot, where sellers were encouraged to present content from Mediafly while recording their sessions. Participants could win cash prizes for their submissions, which were judged by a panel. This contest had mutual benefits, motivating sellers to explore the new platform and providing additional feedback and insights into its usage.
Centralized Content Management
Another effective strategy for enhancing sales enablement is to centralize content management, which means all approved content lives in a single, easily accessible system.
Moen’s approach did just that, ensuring sellers had immediate access to the resources they needed without wasting time searching across multiple platforms. Alicia’s team tagged every piece of content with relevant keywords, making it easy for reps to locate the right content efficiently. This repository also guarantees that all materials are brand-compliant, up-to-date, and consistent in their messaging.
Integrating this system with other essential technologies further streamlines workflows. Consolidate your tech stack with integrated tools like:
- CRM
- Learning management systems
- Digital asset management tools
For Moen, this integration allows sales enablement tools to fit seamlessly into sellers’ existing processes, reducing friction and enhancing productivity.
Recognizing that each salesperson works differently, Moen allowed flexibility for reps to experiment with the enablement platform. This approach minimized resistance and encouraged organic adoption and continued use.
Partnerships Across Business Units
At Moen, continuous collaboration between marketing, enablement, product, and IT teams was essential to ensure the new enablement tool addressed the needs of all users. Marketing also worked closely with sales operations and enablement teams, who acted as vital channels to the sales force and encouraged user engagement.
To facilitate this, Moen holds periodic training sessions tailored to user needs, keeping the sales team informed and comfortable with new tools, fostering continuous learning and adaptation. Identifying key stakeholders helps build a strong support network for successful implementation.
Effective communication is critical in bridging the gaps that often exist in large businesses. Open lines of communication across departments allows for knowledge sharing and collaborative problem-solving. For Moen, enablement didn’t just empower the sales team; it also strengthened inter-departmental relationships. Encouraging champions within the organization to share their success stories further boosted morale and showcased the tangible benefits of the new system, driving broader acceptance and use.
Making Data Your Friend
Data is every revenue team’s best frenemy — it’s essential for driving insights, but often overwhelming to manage. In your enablement journey, using data wisely will help to unlock its full potential. While the sheer volume can be daunting, Moen demonstrated how to extract meaningful and actionable insights from both quantitative and qualitative data to enhance platform adoption and usage.
By analyzing who is looking at and using various assets, Moen can gauge the enablement platform’s effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. They used search history reports to understand what sellers were looking for, ensuring that assets were tagged correctly and easily accessible. This process also helped in identifying content gaps — areas where sellers needed information but couldn’t find it — allowing them to continuously refine and expand their content library to meet user needs.
Collaboration with operations and enablement teams was key in collecting user feedback and maintaining an open line of communication with the sales team. Establishing a dedicated inbox for users to submit feedback about the platform and its content, Moen facilitated a responsive and adaptive approach to platform management.
Comments are closed.