Industry Information Packaged for Salespeople

When I worked at NCR, I was working with the Computer Systems Group (CSG) which later was spun off and now is Teradata, named after it's core software product. Like many companies this group was making the transition from selling hardware to selling software and services. Key to this sale, also like many sales today, was to sell to the business user. Teradata was and still is great product. Key to it's sale was getting to the key executives within the key industries where it had been or could be effectively used (Transportation, Communications, Health care, Insurance, Utilities and Retail).

In the course of the sale, the salesperson could introduce the internal industry consultants, who were well known and respected in their industries and they could speak to the very specific industry challenges that Teradata solved. The problem was there were 5 or 6 industry consultants and over 200 salespeople. The consultants needed the salespeople to get to the right person in a company and qualify that there was an opportunity and THEN bring in the industry consultant. That was the learning challenge. In short, give the salesperson enough industry information to identify the opportunity. We did this in a very unique way. I spent time with each industry consultant and we created, for their industry, organization charts with key target individuals identified. So we developed hot linked organization charts for each industry. When you clicked on a target individual it would open up the business challenges faced by this individual. You could then drill into each challenge and a series of questions would appear that the salesperson could use to probe for pain and then opportunity. The result became what was known as the Industree tool (tree for the branching ability of the tool to go to different people within the organization and identify their challenges and then provide probing questions) and on-demand, on-line, web available resource.

From my perspective this tool was unique in that it took the industry information and put it in a sales friendly format. It was delivered to sales by an organization chart. The content was delivered in a people framework. Salespeople sell to people so this was a key connection. This was vastly different than the typical industry presentation of business challenges by industry, it ties the challenges to specific roles within a company and then delivers the role unique content

It is the sales trainers job to deliver the marketing material, industry (without changing them in message or content) and otherwise in a sales friendly format. This is not easy but essential to help the content stick.

This was a performance support tool example. In our next entry we will talk about a performance support approach for managing and delivering all sales information/content.