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Best Practices for Successful Sales Enablement: #6 - Keep It Simple

6/12/2009:: Categories: sales enablement

Posted by: Tim Lambert, SVP, Sales Enablement Solutions

We're continuing our conversation about Sales Enablement execution from the previous post on Best Practice #4 "Be wary of the matrix" and #5 "You have to start somewhere, but you can’t be everywhere"  In this post we'll discuss #6.  This topic is one that is conceptually obvious and intuitive, but not so easy to accomplish.   

#6 Keep it simple, but memorable

Eliminate information overload for sales and the customer by organizing content based on customer issues and roles not the portfolio.  Use visual business and functional level representation of how your capabilities can be configured to build a solution based on issues and challenges of the role.

Simplicity is so often desired yet so rarely delivered.  Keeping it simple is not easy and does not mean dumbing it down nor cutting corners to move fast.  It actually takes more time, thought and preparation to ensure simplicity that communicates the right message, achieves the desired impact and is memorable.  As Mark Twain said in a letter to a colleague "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."  

There are some excellent books that cover the megatrends driving the need for simplicity and offer ideas for how to achieve it. 

- Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind describes the 6 aptitudes that are required in the emerging conceptual age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. 

- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath sets the stage for what it takes for messages to be effective and memorable by defining the 6 key principles for stickiness: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. 

- Garr Reynolds takes these seminal books a step further with Presentation Zen which draws from examples of the teachings of Zen to emphasize the power of simplicity in business presentations to get to the essence of an issue.  The process he describes is based on an intelligent desire for clarity as opposed to a misguided mission for oversimplification.  In other words it is within the complexity of the planning, design and preparation of the presentation that allows simplicity to appear and flourish. 

As it relates to sales enablement this guidance is extremely valuable and leads to approaches to consider when striving to keep it simple, but memorable in a sales environment.   The points in time when your sales teams are engaged in conversations with clients represent the greatest opportunity, but also the pinnacle of complexity.  These are the moments of truth when the stakes are highest, the mistakes are costliest and the payoff - if the conversation goes well - is the clearest. 

During these interaction points during the sales cycle your sales team must be able to draw from their best conversational, storytelling and empathy skills combined with the collective wisdom of the organization to establish a joint vision for success with the client.  However the greatest relationship skills applied to selling the best portfolio of offerings in your industry may not be enough if complexity gets in the way of understanding, believing and remembering your vision for success.  Unfortunately this complexity often begins when the presentation itself starts with confusing, bullet heavy slides and is exacerbated by poorly designed or over engineered visual representation of concepts. 

The digital age and interactive web communications have taught us a great deal about how to engage clients using the best digital marketing techniques.  Why is it then that we arm the sales teams with sales presentation that are at best poorly animated PowerPoint and at worst run of the mill bulleted templates that are customized beyond recognition and understanding?  There is no reason why we can’t use those same digital interactive direct marketing techniques to effectively engage in sales conversations that fortify rather than negate all of our hard work to create positive messages and brand impressions. 

There are two elements of the n-tara company heritage that I have grown to appreciate as I've looked at this challenge.  One is the background of the founders of the company that is based in advanced visualization and the other is the proximity of our Northeastern Tennessee headquarters in Johnson City to the International Storytelling Center and annual festival in nearby Jonesborough, TN.  It is the combination of visualization and storytelling applied to conversations that are the most effective at keeping it simple, but memorable.  These ingredients have proven successful in education and gaming and are equally effective for business. 

To illustrate the point I'll leave you with a best practice example for sales enablement that draws from the following research: 

• Presentations where the spoken words follow on screen bullet points actually make it harder to learn and retain the information since it creates a load on the working memory part of the brain that stores and manipulates information.  A visual does not create the same kind of load on the brain and therefore is a better way for people to process information. 
• Adults learn more effectively when they are active participants in getting to the right answer.
• Advanced search techniques show that people understand and retain the information better by not merely being presented with the answer from a search, but by following the search clickstream that represents the journey to the answer.

This starts to paint a picture for our simple, but memorable sales enablement solution that is:

We describe these conversations as enlightened conversations.  Enlightened because it's not only about what you sell, but how you sell that can make the difference.  How you sell and how you engage clients is emerging as the key differentiator in the emerging conceptual age with its abundance of easily accessible sources of information, overwhelming number of competing messages and increasingly complex information.  This changing dynamic has created a business imperative to optimize client conversations by rising above the competition, breaking through the clutter, and reducing complexity to drive results. 

An important step to meeting this imperative is best practice #6:  Keep it simple, but memorable.  

What to Look For In a Web Design Agency

6/12/2009:: Categories: design, website development

Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing

In a May 2009 Report titled: Where To Find Help For Web Design Projects, 2009, Forrester Research surveyed 41 web design firms (including n-tara interactive) to help site owners understand Web design market trends and identify agency demographics and experience.

Increasingly, it is difficult to narrow down and select a web design partner amongst a burgeoning landscape of design agencies, large and small. The report offers an offerings profile of 41 agencies, and a decision set that helps site owners kick-start the vendor selection process. 

Vidya Drego from Forrester has created an excellent reference for anyone seeking outside web design help. This report led me to think about some additional criteria we recommend you consider when selecting a web design agency:

Does the agency's process include a discovery phase?  If you aren't aligning internal stakeholder goals and gaining deep insight into audience attributes, you're bound to be left with a solution that misses the mark, within your organization and with your customers.  A discovery endeavor should, at the minimum, include stakeholder interviews, website current state analysis, competitive analysis, an audience research study, website business requirements, website functional requirements and a detailed statement of work (with budget range) for completion of the website.

Is the agency well-rounded in its capabilities?  This expands upon Forrester's recommendations, and a word I would use here is integrated.  Does the agency have an integrated, holistic approach to the online user experience, or is it dabbling in one-off solutions that don’t work together?  Sure, we all have our strengths, but look for a firm whose portfolio reflects a wide range of applications and channels – and certainly don’t get jaded by any firm that is declaring an upfront, single focus, a la "Social Media Agency" or "SEO Specialist".

Does the agency have expertise in content management?  A good web design agency will empower you to manage your own website.  An agency with a solid track record of web content management integration is critical.  Choose an agency with a short list of WCM options that fit your need and budget– from open source to enterprise solutions.  And if you're a Forrester client, conduct an inquiry to better understand the WCM landscape.

Does the agency have good references?  This is a no-brainer, but references are often overlooked if a web design partner is selected outside of a formal RFP process.  Standard questions prevail, (ease of doing business, access to a portfolio of work, process, time to produce, etc.) but you should also consider inquiring about change order processes, licensing fees, the quality of project management, and especially, on-time delivery.  There's no greater risk or frustration than an out-of-scope, overdue web design project.

Selecting an agency partner for a web design project is daunting, but by following a few simple ideas, you can make it easier to identify the wheat from the chaff.

We just completed an application of our web design approach, in this case, for The Coleman Company.  We launched an all-inclusive discovery process to determine business goals, user goals, and the behaviors of Coleman's customers online. The process resulted in the conclusion that a phased approach was in the best interest of our client, with the first phase goal of putting a fresh coat of paint on a decade old platform.  The results are below.  Additional phases include a complete redesign and build, on a new commerce platform with a new web content management system.  We'll apply a best practices approach to further enhance the site with interactive tools, rich media and rich internet applications.

If you're seeking help for your web design project, let us know.  See more of our web design work in our project gallery. 

A Decade of Thanks

6/5/2009:: Categories: news, fun stuff

Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP Marketing

May was a special month for all of us at n-tara.  Our little company turned 10 on May 11th.



No big celebration, no hoopla, not really any pause to reflect on a decade in business.  I guess we're all too busy to look back - we're only looking ahead at possibilities.   The fact that I'm just now writing about an event almost a month ago is telling:  we're all doing what we always do - head down, moving forward, strategizing, creating, and designing the next solution for our incredible customers.  Not much time to think about our story while we're imagining your story.

A BRIEF LOOK BACK

It all started in 1994, when Neil Owen and Jeff Morris, two professors at Purdue University, settled in Johnson City, Tennessee to help create a visualization program at East Tennessee State University which would quickly become one of the top programs of its kind not only in the US, but in the world.

With $4.6M in software funding from Alias-Wavefront, Neil and Jeff built a program and curriculum that quickly got the attention of West Coast game design firms and movie studios, hungry for animation design talent.  Entire classes of students were suddenly being recruited by these firms, creating a noticeable 'brain drain' in the region.  

Jeff and Neil realized that many of their students wanted to stay in the area to practice their craft, but not surprisingly, jobs for animators and interactive designers were few and scarce.  They also took note that these animation technologies would have unlimited application for business and industry, which was woefully underserved by new and burgeoning rich media technologies.   If movie companies and game makers could create alternate worlds and animated escapism, it seemed logical that B2B and B2C brands could bring their products and services to life using animated storytelling.

So in 1999, with some angel investment and 3 business partners, Jeff and Neil founded n-tara, with a mission to utilize local talent and an unwavering focus to leverage animation and interactive technologies for the business community.  The company's mantra:  'high-tech visual storytelling.'

A DECADE OF THANKS

We wouldn't be here 10 years later if it weren't for our customers, present and past.  To you, we owe a heartfelt THANK YOU. 

Thanks for trusting in the little digital agency in the Appalachian Mountains to create marketing and sales solutions for your businesses.  Thank you for realizing that your agency partner doesn't have to be in a major market or owned by a giant holding company to have world-class talent on its payroll.  And thank you for helping us grow by allowing us to learn from you, some of the most brilliant marketing minds anywhere.

n-tara started with a vision:  to bring uncompromising design and advanced visualization to the corporate community.  Though our positioning has changed, our offerings have expanded, and our stage has become much more crowded, we've never wavered from delivering on that vision - on time, on budget, and exceeding expectations.

FUN STUFF

The Wayback Machine doesn't have our earliest website indexed, but for fun, you can still take a look at what we were saying on our site back in 2001. 

Interesting happenings, circa 1999:

--Y2K was on everyone's mind
--Intel released the Pentium III processor
--Dot com's spent $1 billion in advertising....on radio, print, and TV
--Internet Explorer 5 released
--Apple Computer releases the first iBook
--The first version of MSN Messenger released by Microsoft
--Windows 98 (SE) released
--Gas hits $1.22

For another look back at what's changed (at least in the past 7 years), read an interview with VP of Business Development David Siepert.