The Sales Accelerator- Lessons Learned

As I mentioned in my last post, while with Sterling Commerce, we created a sales performance support tool called The Sales Accelerator.  The tool organized information for salespeople.  The problem, today, with sales information is not the lack of it (we have tons) but rather, finding the right information when you need to know it. We chose to organize the information into the following categories, which became tabs in the tool: People, Process, Product, Industry, Tools and Training.  All of the information was placed under one of these tabs.  The product was successful and used effectively by the sales force for five years.


Over time a number of challenges emerged.  The first was, since we built the tool, people believed we were responsible for the information.  What we did was organize the information to be effectively consumed by the salespeople.  Once we placed the information in the Accelerator people assumed we were responsible for keeping it updated.  We could not do this effectively for the massive amount of information we were organizing and placing in the tool.  Information became out of date.  So over time the effectiveness of the tool diminished.  We should have clearly stated to the people supplying the information that they were responsible for its accuracy and timeliness.

A second and related challenge was that we assumed responsibility for the physical updating the information.  At first this was a manageable task, but as the tool grew, it quickly became a more than full time job (which we already had without the added responsibility of managing the tool).  We should have provided the owners of the information access to and an easy way to update the tool.

The strength of the tool was it's intuitive organization and how this matched the complete flow of actual work done by the sales force.  Now I work in training and coaching salespeople, worldwide, who are new to IBM B2B & Commerce products.  We have a wealth of good information for these people to consume.  However, this information is scattered among media library sites, wiki's and various web pages.  So I'm going to create another sales performance tool called the B2B & Commerce Virtual Water Cooler.  This time the tool will actually just be a community site using the Accelerator structure to house links to the information.  It will contain little or no information itself but rather use its organization to link to the actual information.  I will let you know how this works out.  Good bye for now. Next time I will speak of the three key ingredients for sales effectiveness and more: Belief , Practice and Execution.