For years, high-tech companies have struggled to

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1 Reprinted from the Spring 2010 issue of the Journal of the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit SALES ENABLEMENT Establishing Best Practices in the Sales Process Once again, high-tech companies are trying to codify and systematize sales processes. AMD and NetApp report success as pioneers in making science from art. By Howard Baldwin For years, high-tech companies have struggled to provide technology to their salespeople to make them more efficient and fruitful in their endeavors. Contact management tools, salesforce automation tools, and all kinds of relationship management tools have been deployed and met with varying degrees of success. The problem with formalizing sales processes, however, may be that like other organizational processes sales is not a silo. Sales relies on collaboration with other departments, including marketing and engineering, in addition to insight gained from previous sales efforts. The topic of so-called sales enablement (also referred to as field enablement ) tries to accommodate insight from multiple departments to improve the process. Sales enablement is gaining greater traction in the technology field because its basic tenets include two key areas: It strives to increase revenues by making salespeople aware of where products fit Lessons Learned To get the most out of their sales campaigns, companies like AMD and NetApp found that they needed to: Establish repeatable processes. Train salespeople and partners extensively. Use collaboration technology extensively. Codify best practices. Leverage the workflow to streamline the process, help ensure consistency, and provide visibility into process status. into an ongoing corporate strategy (highly important in an industry dependent on iterative improvements and product roadmaps). And it strives to improve the sharing and transfer of knowledge across multiple teams: sales, marketing, operations, and management. At the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit 2010, two executives experienced with enabling their sales channels sat down to share their highly successful efforts at codifying what can sometimes be a moving target, not only from product to product but between divisions. This session at the Summit, held on February 11 in Santa Clara, Calif., focused on the topic of codifying the sales process to compare results and inculcate best practices. Along with moderator Bill Levesque, High Tech Industry Market Development Manager at Microsoft, the panel included Ashley Eikenberry, Director of the Go To Market Program Office at NetApp and Gregg Hansen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Technology at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Sales and marketing has really been the last frontier for automation, said Julie Fraser, Principal Industry Analyst at research and consulting firm Cambashi Inc., who attended the session. Sales departments have resisted technology that couldn t prove value. The challenge to reverse that attitude, then, is a big one. Go Your Own Way If nothing else, though, the challenge is a familiar one. When you look at any company, there are lots of business units, and each one has its own way to bring products to market, said Eikenberry of NetApp. The company focuses on storage products and was named as one of the 10 best places to work in America by Fortune last year. I was brought in to look at how we could create a repeatable process. Fraser added that repeatability, and understanding that you are involved in an 12 J O U R N A L O F T H E M I C R O S O F T G L O B A L H I G H T E C H S U M M I T

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3 From left to right: Ashley Eikenberry, Director of the Go To Market Program Office, NetApp; Gregg Hansen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Technology, Advanced Micro Devices; and moderator Bill Levesque, High Tech Industry Market Development Manager, Microsoft. iterative process, is key. We ve been engaged in a lot of projects to help companies figure out where their sweet spots are in field enablement, she said. It s a little frustrating when they train the salesforce but don t apply the consistency. Companies need to identify where the new sweet spots are. Undertaking such an effort is multifaceted not only because of the initial questions involved, but because companies want to derive useful intelligence from the answers to those questions. The questions include: Who is responsible for which phases of the process? How is information shared between teams? How is information disseminated to prospects? How is information disseminated to different markets through different channels? In many cases, the responses to these questions are simple and granular but no less important in creating that all-important structure. Most important, Eikenberry said, is the process of analyzing the information to focus a company s efforts toward deriving the best results. How do you tier a product launch model to look at different categories, content development, and salesenablement training to determine the biggest opportunities for the company? she asked. How many announcements can you make each quarter and not overload the capacity of the sales team? How do you make sure that your sales process is getting a good return on its investment? One of NetApp s most successful activities involved setting up a more integrated planning process, one with a more structured feedback loop and a higher level of collaboration. The pre-sales process began with a team of engineers responsible for delivering briefings, conference presentations, and other public-facing events designed to raise the overall awareness of the brand. That team is judged by the amount and the quality of the events and briefings they deliver. But it was difficult to track and report those metrics. At the same time, Eikenberry said, We wanted to engage the sales leads in different geographies. But before they localized the materials, we set up a process to have the content reviewed by subject-matter experts on the selling side. That field review process helped us make sure we were getting the most appropriate content out to the sales representatives in different markets. But it was not just a question of content; it was also a question of presentation. We ended up packaging and presenting material in such a way that it was easy for the sales representatives to digest, Eikenberry added. That meant giving them one-page presentations and datasheets. At the same time, NetApp realized that content without context is useless. Eikenberry instituted an extensive global training program for both the direct and the channel sales teams. This peer-led program involved exercises and role-playing to improve sales efforts and included discussions of the best questions to ask to elicit insight into what prospects need. NetApp is relying on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a collaboration tool to support the sales and engineering teams in their collaborative effort and as a way to track results across departments. The company ended up creating a customized workflow application. It also uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to ensure information flows efficiently as it is routed through different functional areas for approval and review. 14 J O U R N A L O F T H E M I C R O S O F T G L O B A L H I G H T E C H S U M M I T

4 The program was more successful than Eikenberry expected. It sounds like a lot of process. But now that people have experienced the results, we have more people seeking out the program. We wondered if we would be able to get partners to sit through eight hours of training; now we re seeing that they have a lot of interest. We re seeing an increase in sales opportunities because the sales teams are more confident in their efforts. The Importance of Consistent Data Semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices faced similar challenges, according to Gregg Hansen, its Vice President of Sales and Marketing Technology. Like NetApp, AMD embarked on its own initiative to improve its sales process. And like many technology companies, AMD has an extensive product list, with CPUs designed for notebooks, desktops, and servers, in addition to graphics processors for discrete, 3D, and gaming situations. But AMD also had other challenges. It sells both directly to OEM manufacturers and through a distribution channel; each channel has different needs. AMD faced its own technological challenges when its salesforce automation tool and its pricing system reached the end of either its usefulness or its vendor s support. AMD, like NetApp, realized that it needed a high level of collaboration built into its sales-enablement process. Our sales process is similar to others in the semiconductor industry, in that it tends to be different at the design-win end than it is from the dealmanagement end, Hansen said. When you get to deal management, Sales and marketing has really been the last frontier for automation. Sales departments have resisted technology that couldn t prove value. Julie Fraser, Principal Industry Analyst, Cambashi Inc. it s very data-driven and metrics-driven. Furthermore, there are lots of moving parts, with representatives of sales teams, marketing teams, and product engineering teams (not to mention customers) making different levels of contributions at different times in the process. Handoffs of information are heavily people-dependent. The handoffs are only as effective as the people who are transferring the knowledge that the next team needs, Hansen added. Sometimes the definition of sales enablement changes as you move through the process. Given that AMD is in a highly commoditized business with strong competition, it is important for the company to have not only reliable data but consistent data. As session moderator Bill Levesque noted, You want to protect your margins and not leave money on the table. Hansen s goal in solving the collaboration problem was to make sure that all the teams had access to the best information possible. To achieve that goal, the legacy software had to go. AMD deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications. That spanned all the processes and gave us a foundation to work with, he said. Once the teams had the baseline capability to track data and collaborate, we had to think about sales enablement, including giving the salesforce as many analytics as they needed. You don t want to make the wrong pricing decision because of a lack of data. Boosting Collaboration Even consistent data was not enough, though. AMD is going a step further toward increasing and improving collaboration between the various teams involved in the overall sales process as it moves from design-win to dealmanagement. Hansen is working with a couple of Microsoft partners to not only deploy collaboration through SharePoint Server 2007 but also ensure integration with social networking, social media, and other Web 2.0 applications within the CRM framework. We want to enable not only a rich collaboration between the teams, but give them pricing, positioning, product, and profitability data in a way that s comfortable for them to use, Hansen said. His ambitions do not stop there, however. Hansen wants to incorporate all types of ancillary information to arm his sales teams. Such information could include everything from the fact that there was just another big designwin for the platform or that the prospect s stock price has just J O U R N A L O F T H E M I C R O S O F T G L O B A L H I G H T E C H S U M M I T

5 dropped. If you re on an onsite visit, wouldn t it be nice to know if everyone s going to be in a bad mood when you get there? he asked. Even without that capability, Hansen is gratified by the strong, positive reaction his deployment is already getting from users. Given their frustration with the two faltering applications, he noted, We couldn t screw up too bad. But I just ran into the head of sales, and he told me he not only loved what we were doing, but he wished we could get it out faster. Most IT projects don t have that level of excitement. If anything, though, NetApp had the bigger cultural challenge. Even though the company was founded in 1992, it still has a start-up mentality, Eikenberry noted, the kind that occasionally balks at the imposition of processes when speed, rather than deliberateness, seems to be the priority. But the logic of having a reliable, repeatable process won out. It was a cultural change to look at business value rather than product features. But we were able to start putting together better campaigns because of that transition, she noted. Solution Spotlight Sales Effectiveness Microsoft solutions for sales leadership include: > Full visibility of customer information. Microsoft and its partners provide a variety of solutions for understanding your customer. Customer information can be stored where it can be accessed by people at all levels of an organization, helping everyone make more informed decisions. Because it is aggregated and presented through familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office suite applications, customer information is available in the right format, helping leaders and sales personnel make the very best decisions to increase sales. > Connection of sales teams. Microsoft and its partners offer a variety of tools to enable the collaboration of a worldwide high-tech and electronics (HTE) salesforce. Real-time measurement of performance, activity, and call tracking can be presented in charts and graphs for instantaneous analysis. Portals and workspaces can be provided for the collection and sharing of information about campaigns, competition, new products, and customer solutions. And Microsoft Unified Communications solutions provide an always connected experience for the field staff and its management. > Tools for the mobile salesperson. Microsoft Windows Mobile, integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, helps sales professionals stay connected with each other and their organizations. The combination of tools also can improve their response time with anywhere access to customer information. > Opportunity management. Microsoft and its partners provide technology solutions that can improve lead tracking and qualification, in addition to increasing conversion rates. Opportunity management and deal tracking are simplified via real-time monitoring, predictive analysis, and dashboards. Integrated with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions can provide a single, familiar, and easy-to-use environment for managing leads and opportunities. > Pricing optimization solutions. The solutions from Microsoft and its partners can ensure that sales teams use consistent and optimal pricing strategies globally. For more information about the Sales Effectiveness solutions available from Microsoft and its partners, visit this Web site: Promise and Payoff Thanks to the assiduous application of changes in technology, training, and processes, both AMD and NetApp are well on their way to successful salesenablement programs. But the hardest part may be ahead, simply because after a successful sale or launch, the most human tendency is to rest upon one s laurels. Instead, Cambashi s Fraser notes, companies have to make time to capture what they learned what went right, what went wrong, and what should be done differently next time. In fact, she believes that the most important aspect of sales-enablement programs involves creating an iterative process so that companies apply what they have learned and keep improving. Fraser recommends keeping in mind the original cycle behind Six Sigma: recognize, define, measure, analyze, improve, control, standardize, and integrate. It is a way to not only identify processes but improve them going forward. The first and last two points are frequently passed over, resulting in the commonly used DMAIC acronym, Fraser said. The tricky part is making sales enablement part of the fabric by standardizing and integrating processes, which helps recognize what needs to change in the next improvement cycle. The fact that these two companies are making it part of their culture is the most exciting part of their stories. Howard Baldwin is a senior editor at Triangle Publishing Services. 16 J O U R N A L O F T H E M I C R O S O F T G L O B A L H I G H T E C H S U M M I T