Building Highly Responsive Sales Teams

Building Highly Responsive Sales Teams

BUILDING
HIGHLY

RESPONSIVE

SALES TEAMS
Published by

MARK GIBSON I RAJESH SETTY
www.wittyparrot.com

1


What is

WittyParrot
Witty Parrot is an intelligent content
delivery platform that helps companies
and individuals to “achieve speed
and consistency in all of their
communication”
WittyParrot helps to amplify the three
influencing factors (speed, consistency
and relevance) that accelerate sales.
More about WittyParrot at
http://www.wittyparrot.com
www.wittyparrot.com

2


ABO UT
THE

AUTHORS

Mark Gibson

Rajesh Setty

Mark Gibson is an experienced
sales and marketing
professional and entrepreneur,
with 30 years of international
sales, marketing and business
development success at
companies including Prime
Computer, Sun MicroSystems,
Informix and MicroStrategy.

Rajesh “Raj” Setty is a serial
entrepreneur and a business
alchemist based in Silicon
Valley. He currently serves as
the president of WittyParrot
and he also serves on the
boards of Jifflenow and
Compassites Software. He
has been instrumental in
founding several technology
and publishing companies
in US and India. Raj has been
a member of the Band of
Angels since 2007 and is also
an award-winning teacher at
the Founders Institute.

Since founding Advanced
Marketing Concepts, a sales
and marketing consultancy and
training company in the UK in
2004, Mark has consulted to
B2B companies selling novel
technology products and
services to the early market,
as well as helping established
companies to overcome the
weak pipeline, no lead-flow
and weak sales engagement
problems caused by weak
messaging. Mark is a certified
Hubspot partner and the
author of the forthcoming
book, “Facilitating
the Buying
Process –
The New
Role for B2B
salespeople”

Raj is also a published author
with 14 books to his credit so
far with his first book published
when he was thirteen. Raj has
been blogging since 2005 and
as of today, has more than
1875 posts on his blog. You
can follow him on Facebook at
facebook.com/
rajesh301 or
on Twitter
at twitter.
com/rajsetty

www.wittyparrot.com

3


WHO IS THIS
FOR?

eBOOK

Anyone in your organization that has part or full
responsibility to advance the sales cycles in some
way will benefit from this eBook. These include but
not limited to:
• Sales and Marketing Leaders
• Sales Enablement professionals
• Sales Executives, Inside Sales Executives,
Channel Sales
• Executives
• Business Development Professionals
• CXOs
• Startup Entrepreneurs

www.wittyparrot.com

4


TABLE OF

CONTENTS
1

The Old Sales Model is Broken.

06

2

Responsiveness Matters!

10

3

A Framework for Responsive
Buyer Engagement

20

4

Responsive Sales Enablement
Using WittyParrot

27

5

Summary and Takeaways

32

6

Talk to Us

34
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5


1
THE OLD WAY OF
B2B SELLING IS

BROKEN
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6


In the old days, B2B selling was different.
For starters:
• You could get away
with an interruptdriven model: The
number of signals a
buyer was exposed
to was limited so
interrupts would
work most of the
time.

• Sellers had
• Information
more control: In
asymmetry was
general, it was the
the name of the
salesperson that
game: Salespeople
was shepherding
could capitalize
the buyer through
on the advantage
their journey
that they had more
information than the
buyers

Not anymore.
Today, interrupt-driven models are shunned like they are spam. The
Internet has literally eliminated the information asymmetry problem and
the buyer has unprecedented control on their journey from awareness to
purchase decision.
What is new is the permission-based opt-in model where the seller has
generated enough trust to earn the permission of the potential buyer to
communicate with him or her.
The battle is ON for the mind-share of buyers.
Sales and marketing organizations globally are seeing the consequences
of this transition in the buyer-seller relationship. Average sales quota
achievement in 2012 was 63%* and salespeople Worldwide are struggling
to adapt to new buyer behavior using systems and methods developed last
century.
In the past 5-10 years, Internet savvy buyers have taken control of the
buying process and have disengaged from interacting with salespeople
until all but the final stages of a buying cycle - and then only if and when
they need advice or consulting to make determination, decision, or require
a concession in price.
*Source: CSO Insights
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7


The Emergence of Inbound Marketing as a Driving
Force
The permission-based opt-in model requires a series of “trust building”
touch-points with potential buyers to build trust. The marketplace has
moved to embrace that approach with a new model called Inbound
Marketing.
[Note: This particular eBook is an example of an asset that is being used
in our Inbound Marketing initiative. Mark and Raj have spent weeks on
this project to
How WittyParrot Works
ensure that it
Assemble
Drag & Drop into any App
has valuable
information. Our
hope is that it is
one step towards
Find
Share
building trust with Relevant Content
Teams, Partners, Customers
the reader – YOU.
We are big
Granular
Content Chunks
believers in
the Inbound
Track
Marketing
Usage, Relevance, Productivity
movement. The
alternate choice
(easily) would have been to invest the same amount of time and money on
advertising. We KNOW that this is a far better option and will eagerly look
forward to what’s in store for us]
In the past 5 years, Inbound Marketing has emerged as an effective model
for engaging prospective buyers. Early adopters of Inbound Marketing
techniques understand that self-directed buyers initiate Google search
queries to find ideas, applications and insights to help in solving problems
or achieving business goals.
The foundation for Inbound Marketing success is compelling content that
is given away for free (sometimes in exchange for the buyer’s permission
for future communications)
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The same companies create thought leading content, publish it on
Websites in blogs and place it in social media forums where it can be
found by interested buyers.
Compelling content that gets shared tends to rank highly in Google search
algorithms and by placing a call to action and a compelling offer within the
content piece, Inbound Marketers are able to convert Website visitors into
opted-in contacts, or leads.

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9


2
RESPONSIVENESS

MATTERS!

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10


Being responsive is not a LUXURY anymore. It is REQUIRED if you want to
survive and thrive.
You don’t have to believe our word
for it. The data on responsive
engagement of leads indicates that
fast response dramatically improves
contact rates and this translates into
qualification rate.

The odds of the lead entering
the sales process, or
becoming qualified, are 21
times greater when contacted
within 5 minutes versus 30
minutes after the lead was
submitted (Olroyd 2007)

Contact rate is defined as a
meaningful conversation with the
prospective customer that initiates
a conversation leading to the
qualification of an opportunity.

Improved qualification rate translates into dramatically improved sales
results.

FAST RESPONSE IMPROVES CONTACT RATES
RESPONSE TIME FROM CREATION BY 5 MIN:
CONTACTED LEADS THAT BECOME CONTACTED / QUALIFIED (

/

)

Contact rates
significantly
drop off after
5 minutes

Contact Rate
100x decrease from 5 min to 30 min

Qualification Rate
21x decrease from 5 min to 30 min

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

90

Contacted Leads
Qualified Leads

©2010 inside I sales

Source: 2007 Original Kellogg/MIT Study, Dr. James Oldroyd

Of course, fast response is only half the battle.
What if you do get the buyer on the phone? What your sales representative
says and does when they connect with the buyer will set the tone for the
ongoing buyer-seller engagement.
This paper will investigate how sales management, sales enablement,
marketing and sales operations teams can prepare your sales teams to be
responsive in the right way.
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It’s the right kind of responsiveness
Responsiveness at the outset “seems” like it is the same as doing things
fast. That is part of it but just speed alone without consistency and
relevance becomes useless. You need the right kind of responsiveness to
succeed in the long run.
Early inbound leads are looking for insight
Contrary to popular thinking, when
a prospective buyer downloads
your whitepaper, EBook, or attends
a Webinar, they are NOT looking
for a conversation with your sales
representative .

In a recent Sirius Decisions
Survey, executives told them
that they value industry and
business expertise 4X more
than product knowledge or
relationships.

Prospective buyers engage with top
of funnel thought-leading website
content because they are looking for ideas, insights and approaches to
solving problems and are actively exploring possibilities. What they seek
early in their buying process is help and insight, not a sales call from a
sales closer trying to make their number this month.

When you engage with inbound lead contacts in the early stages of the
buying process, you should seek to create understanding around how
products/services can be used to create value. One of the best ways to
influence thinking at the outset is to tell stories of how other customers
have solved similar problems using your products and services. This will
serve two purposes a) provide social proof by showing that others are
already taking advantage of what you have to offer and b) raise awareness
about the kind of problems they can solve or the kind of opportunities they
can pursue using your products and services.
Your salespeople should be equipped with stories and sound-bytes outside
of your product collateral and related information so that they can engage
the buyers in the way buyers are expecting to be engaged i.e., with insight
and industry knowledge.
Remember that at this stage, people are not ready to be sold – they want
to be sold “about your ability to help them.”

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Responsiveness without relevance is wasted effort

EMAILS PORTALS

LOCAL FILES
CLOUD STORAGE
CMS
PORTALS

If your company has only one product offering, your sales team can
become experts in the product usage very quickly. All you may require to
do is to conduct a series of product
training sessions.
CMS

DRIVES

CRM

FTP

EMAILS
DATABASES
EMAILS

CMS

INTRANET

EMAILS PORTALS

CONTENT REP
FTP CMS CRM

WIKIS
CMS

EMAILS

PORTALS

FTP

CMS

DATABASES

EMAILS
DRIVES PORTALSDATABASES

CLOUD STORAGE

DATABASES
EMAILS
CMS

EMAILS
PORTALS
DATABASES

CMS

DRIVES

EMAILS
CONTENT REP EMAILS

DATABASES

CDs & DRIVES

LOCAL FILES

EMAILS CRM FTP

INTRANET

INTRANET

WIKIS

EMAILS

PORTALS

INTRANET

DATABASES

PORTALS

CLOUD CRM EMAILS
STORAGE
INTRANET DRIVES

FTP

CONTENT REP
DATABASES

WIKIS

CMS

LOCAL FILES

EMAILS

CMS

If your company has a portfolio of
offerings or has a complex product,
sales ramp time with new products
can take 6-9 months or longer from
on boarding. Things can get messy
when new salespeople join the team.

The irony in all of this effort in
product sales training is that buyers
don’t want to limit their conversations
with your salespeople to product features and benefits. They want sales
people to offer insights and industry knowledge. They want to “learn”
something that they don’t know. If it were just about features and benefits
of your offerings, buyers today
should and can learn about those
According to Forrester
right on your website.
CONTENT REP

CRM

FTP

LOCAL FILES

FTP

CMS

CRM

DATABASES

Remember that every buyer
is different and hence no two
conversations (with buyers) will be
the same. What varies from one
conversation to the next is the
nature of the buyer’s interest, their
role in their organization and their
perception of the landscape of
options to achieve their goal.
Luckily, there is a lot of help for your
salespeople. Just like buyers can
research a lot about your company
and your offerings online, your
salespeople can research a lot

Research, 89 percent of
meetings are considered
failures by executive
prospects.
In nine out of 10 meetings,
salespeople fail to
demonstrate that they
understand the problems
executives are facing and are
unable to connect the dots
between those challenges
and your solution.

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13


about the buyers way before they get deep in the conversations with them.
Buyer interests are easily established in the Inbound Marketing realm.
Integrated inbound marketing and CRM tools enable salespeople to view
the Website pages the buyer has viewed, the offer they downloaded and if
role information is not provided, with a LinkedIn query can quickly establish
their role and likely interests.

Relevance, as you can see, is golden.
Your salespeople need several more chunks of information in order to be
responsive and relevant; they need buyer-persona insight to align their
conversation with buyer interest and they need relevant success stories
from customers in the same industry and similar role.
Having the information in a sales portal is NOT enough
The amount of content available to salespeople in a mature enterprise
is overwhelming. To make content easier to access, marketing and
operations teams have invested
billions of dollars in equipping
A KnowledgeTree survey
salespeople with tablet computers
this spring showed that the
and sales portals to index, store
vast majority of marketing
and access relevant sales support
respondents – 84 percent –
materials.

believe they’ve done a good
job in making it easy for
salespeople to find collateral
they need. However, just
barely half (51 percent) of
salespeople feel that the right
content is readily accessible.

Prior to Portals, salespeople lived on
a drip feed of marketing email with
product and pricing updates arriving
infrequently, to be stored in folders
on their Laptops or CRM system.
Sales presentations were sent
periodically and multiple versions
proliferated on sales laptops. It was
real circus to find the latest version of anything.
Then, sales portals arrived.

The problem of accessing the freshest and most relevant information
moved from the salesperson’s desktop to the sales portal with attendant
Intranet and security overheads placed on every user.
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Another issue with sales portals is that information in these portals
is document based. This means that an entire document must be
downloaded to find and reuse a relevant piece of information.
Given all the issues of finding and accessing information, it is clear that
sales portals on their own cannot be used to contribute to responsive and
relevant sales communication in the context described above. Rather,
salespeople have reverted to storing scripts, relevant buyer insights and
documents on their laptops or in templates in their CRM tool.
In essence, your salespeople today are creating their own mini-salesportals right on their desktops so that they can have information that
they frequently send out available to them at their fingertips. You can only
imagine the chaos, confusion and brand atrophy that this might lead to.
Responsiveness is REQUIRED throughout the sales cycle.
Let’s assume you had a successful introductory or exploratory call with
a buyer. The buyer requested specific information around integration,
services and links to relevant case studies of successful customer
references. You agree to create a follow-up email including the above
content and to outline agreed next steps and any call to action.
If you are like most sales representatives, you will wait till the end of the day
when you have made your quota of calls to send a follow up email. As far as
you are concerned, you are efficient. But you may not be effective enough.
Why?
Because, unfortunately, the chances of your email getting opened and
acted on are very low at the end of the day.
Buyers are not checking their
inbox after 6 PM to look for vendor
email, which means that your email
will probably not be read until the
morning.
In the morning, the buyer will
have another 20, 50 or more than
100 emails to start their day and
the email you sent is no longer

One in five commercial emails
sent in the first half of 2013
never made it to subscribers’
inboxes. Return Path 2013

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15


occupying the immediate focus of the buyer… other priorities have their
attention.
Now your email will sit in a to-do list and may never reach the top, which
necessitates the sales rep calling and sending follow-up email to try to
regain the buyer’s attention and follow-up on the agreed next steps…
Sounds familiar?
While we have no data to support this assertion other than the knowledge
that 20% of email fails to make into the buyer’s inbox, even when the
buyer is opted-in, we theorize that rate of email opens decays with time,
dropping precipitously outside 30 minutes after the call.
What if you could send that email to follow up the call and have the buyer
read and act on it within 5 minutes of completing your sales call? “Ms.
Prospect, I’m going to send you a quick summary of our meeting with
relevant information and links as well as our agreed next steps in the next
10 minutes. Please check your SPAM filters if you have not received it
within 15 minutes.”
That would change the game completely. That is precisely the kind of
responsiveness we are talking about.
The Quick and the Dead
Preparing your sales representatives to engage buyers within minutes of
receiving an inbound sales lead and to respond in writing within minutes
after closing the call is a non-trivial task requiring infrastructure, expertise,
investment, training and time.
This is an investment that firms must make if they are going to survive,
grow and thrive profitably in a world where B2B salespeople are becoming
marginalized to be merely facilitators of a buying process.
Imagine this scenario with two fictional companies – Company A and
Company B:
Company A has invested in the above infrastructure and their sales team
engages and follows up in near real-time.
Company B has chosen NOT to invest in the above-mentioned
infrastructure.
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16


Both Company A and Company B
have some of the best sales training
programs in the world.
Lets assume that both companies
are selling comparable products and
they have marketing programs in
place to generate the same number
of leads.
Company A will beat Company B
hands down because salespeople in
company have the ability to quickly
follow-up engage with the potential
buyers in a meaningful conversation
throughout the sales cycle.
Now let’s look at this from the
buyer’s perspective. They download
an EBook from company A and
an EBook from company B a few
minutes apart as they research a
new idea.

“Firms that tried to contact
potential customers within
an hour of receiving a query
were nearly seven times
as likely to qualify the lead
(which we defined as having
a meaningful conversation
with a key decision maker)
as those that tried to contact
the customer even an hour
later—and more than 60 times
as likely as companies that
waited 24 hours or longer.”
Olroyd 07

They get a call from a company A sales representative within 5 minutes of
being on the Website thanking them for visiting and asking if they need any
help, offering more resources and sending written follow up with next steps
and a call to action and it arrives in their inbox within 10 minutes of the call.
Company B on the other hand,
delivers the lead into the salesperson’s new leads queue and the next day
the rep begins to try and contact the buyer. It pays to make 7 attempts
to get a buyer on the phone even when they opted in and it may take 7 or
more attempts by Rep B to contact the lead.
Company B Sales Representative will send email while trying to get the
buyer on the phone. Unfortunately the buyer does not take phone calls
from vendors, so the rep leaves voicemail that gets deleted after the buyer
listens to the first 5 words.

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17


The buyer either does not receive
the email either as it SPAM’s out,
or if it does make it into their inbox,
it will likely be deleted along with
dozens of other sales solicitations in
their inbox each morning.

Forrester reports the spoils
for the vendor in a buy-sell
relationship are going to
those who can engage earlier,
with 76% of all deals going
to those vendors that can
help the buyer establish the
need and define the buying
agenda, while only 24% of
deals went to those winning
the “bake-off”.

Meanwhile prospective buyers
advance at their own pace
through their buying process
and receive a relevant stream of
supportive content and insight
from Company A with whom
they’ve had a conversation and
who understand their goals, issues,
priorities and where they are in
their buying process. They receive
a programmed set of canned emails from company B without context or
relevance.

When the buyer reaches the point where they are nearly ready to buy, they
will reach out to both vendor A and vendor B. They will even find a vendor
C to make up the numbers. At this stage of proceedings, vendor A has 3
times more influence, mindshare and hopefully trust and is likely to win the
deal 75% of the time. If vendor B does a miracle job in the last mile of the
sales process, they will win in only 25% of opportunities.
The above scenario may be extreme, but even if its half right, then survival
is at stake and late adopters and laggards of responsive sales enablement
will struggle to remain viable and profitable if they fail to make the
investments to transform sales and marketing.
Is it time to re-imagine selling as a means of facilitating a buying process
and to unify and retool sales and marketing to achieve that end, or should
we stick to tried and true methods? It won’t be easy either way.
By sticking to what you know, it will get increasingly difficult to engage,
qualify and win new business. By rebooting your sales and marketing
efforts you will be faced with the change, uncertainty and the stress of

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18


having to learn new methods, tools and implement technologies. With
change comes growth, learning and renewed competitive muscle.
If you have come this far, it is clear that you are very interested in building
highly responsive sales teams. Let’s look at the elements of a framework to
build highly responsive sales teams.

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19


3
A FRAMEWORK
FOR RESPONSIVE

BUYER
ENGAGEMENT

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20


The following ideas and techniques could form the basic elements of a
framework for building highly responsive sales teams.

3.1 Focus on the buying process, not the sales funnel.

Fifty years or so of B2B selling has
produced a sales model that is
structured around process steps
verified from the sales manager’s
perspective and mark clear
transitional states in the selling
funnel with the goal of predicting
future revenue.
The problem with this model is that
it is obsolete, because buyers no
longer behave the way they did 20
or even 10 years ago. Buyers have
moved on, the “sales process” has
stayed the same.

Scott Santucci of Forrester
states that at least 80% of
the time leads fail to make it
through the sales process.
There are many possible
reasons why leads die, but I
suggest that most early leads
don’t make it past the critical
internal “fight for funds” or fail
to get into the “priority to-do
list” in the (Positioning) phase
in the buy cycle.

The simple graphic below (based
on the upcoming book by Mark
Gibson) overlays the universal
Buying process (IMPACT) onto the sales funnel. It is useful to begin using
transitions in the buying process to measure a prospects actual progress
through a buying cycle. When we understand and communicate with
buyers based on their progress through the IMPACT cycle, we can begin to
unify sales and marketing activity to best facilitate their journey.
Note that the Position step in the IMPACT buying process is highlighted in
red and marks the transition in the traditional sales funnel from a marketing
lead to a sales ready lead. Unfortunately, for most salespeople, Position
is the point at which most leads die. They are not lost permanently and
may reemerge at some point in the future. For now, they get relegated to
becoming marketing leads waiting to be nurtured some more.

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Start

Identify

Universal Buying Process - IMPACT
Mentor

Position

Assessment

Case

Finish

Transaction

$$
$

Lead-gen, marketing automation platform

Inbound
Leads

Marketing
Leads

Sales-ready
Leads

$’s

CRM

Analytics

Universal Selling System

3.2 Align Your Sales and Marketing Initiatives
This is easier.said.than.done.
Note: Sales and Marketing alignment is a journey and not a destination.
Your offerings change and your sales and marketing teams change. So,
make this a practice and not a checklist item.
With the above model in our minds, we need to envision a contiguous
process where we use one set of underlying messaging in different forms
to communicate value and differentiation to buyers, based on their position
in the buy cycle.
A proven method for creating consistent communication is to create
a Messaging Architecture that is used to align sales and marketing
messaging and is built from the buyer-persona up.

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Messaging Architecture
Website Messaging

Value Proposition

Web Pages

Big Idea

Brand Messaging
Mission Statement

Positioning Pillars

Tagline

Win Themes/
Capabilities

Positioning
Statement

Buyer Persona

Corporate
Presentation

Content Creation Templates
Role: VP Marketing
Goal: Generate 3X leads
Hook
Keywords
Barriers
Win Themes
Solution Summary
Who I’ve Helped

Blog Posts
Blog Posts/Campaigns

Sales - Ready Messaging
Solution
Summary

Visual confections, storytelling
scripts, sales letters, proposals

Proof
Points

© 2004
-2013 Advanced Marketing Concepts.

Effective marketing messaging maps relevant capabilities, barriers to
success, the buyer’s status quo and complications that come with change
onto the buyer persona. Adding relevant proof points in the form of stories
completes the messaging. Well structured messaging is built on winthemes, which are atomized chunks of content that are reused in all forms
of sales and marketing communication.

3.3 Institutionalize Inbound Marketing
A platform for generating inbound leads and delivering the intelligence
around the lead’s behavior to sales/marketing teams is critical in providing
context to engage with buyers within a few minutes of registering as a lead.
Similarly, it is critical to know when a lead is revisiting your website, when
he or she opens an email from you or when he or she clicks on a link.
Armed with this information, your salespeople can engage the buyer more
thoughtfully and sometimes right while they are actively engaged with the
content that you have created for them.

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23


3.4 Provide Information at their fingertips.
Responsive engagement means exactly that. For inside salespeople and
salespeople in general to be responsive, we need to provide the right
information at the salesperson’s fingertips. Sales scripts, website activity,
buyer persona information, proof points, conversation starters need to be
readily available and accessible to them within a few keystrokes.
This cannot be achieved by simply
building a better internal website to
store more information. The system
has to be flexible enough for your
sales team members to “find and
assemble” the right information
into any medium (examples: email,
document or presentation). In other
words, you need to provide this
information to salespeople right at the point of use.
In addition, the “point of use” tool needs to be available offline too.
Salespeople are traveling all the time and lack of connectivity should not
disconnect them from the information that they need to be responsive.
Last but not the least, ensure that the “point of use” system is available on
mobile devices for the reasons mentioned above.

3.5 Provide Seamless Integration With Your Portals
Portals do have their place. They are not going away anytime soon. For
instance, your portal can house web-based training programs. Portals can
also house information that is for internal consumption only.
But, when the information needs to be packaged and sent outside, you
need something better than a portal or you need to seamlessly integrate
your portal to the “point of use” system in place.
When salespeople need to pull information from a portal to send a follow up letter
or send meeting request, they don’t want to have to dig for it in a portal. Ideally they
will be presented with a search window on their desktop so they can quickly enter a
query, identify that it is the right information and embed a link to the information that
pulls the right document from the portal at the time of transmission.
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3.6 Integrate Your CRM With Your Sales
Communication Systems
Integration with CRM systems is essential to quickly identify prior history
with customers and prospects. Ideally all written communication with
clients is automatically captured in the CRM tool.
Your CRM provides your sales people information about your buyer’s
company and about the buyer. On the other end, if your sales person has
the information available in “meaningful chunks,” he or she can easily stitch
those chunks together to create thoughtful communication exchanges with
the buyer in question.

3.7 Define and Refine Your Taxonomy
A single logical hierarchy of information based on the company products
and services offerings that everyone uses enables sales and marketing users
find and access information. Tagging information and adding metadata to
describe information will aid in finding the most relevant information.
Because your company will evolve and the marketplace will change, what
you define as your taxonomy today may need to be revisited and refined
as time progresses. Have a taxonomy audit at least once in six months to
ensure that you have something that works for the current times.

3.8 Make it Easy to Share and Collaborate
Your sales managers and sales teams need to be able to create, share and
re-use content, letters scripts or proposals that work, without having to rely
on outside help.
In addition salespeople should be able to comment and add notations to
identify issues or gotchas related to using certain content.

3.9 Keep it Simple
It’s important to remember that salespeople always do what’s convenient
for them. Tools that are “super easy to learn, use and deliver value to the
salesperson (not necessarily sales management)” will get used. Simple
does not mean facile. Salespeople should be able to tap rich information
in support of meaningful conversations and communication with buyers at
any stage in their journey and instantly deploy it in their daily tasks.
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3.10 Don’t Forget Governance and Metrics
Administrators will need control over who sees what information, who
can edit or modify information and to ensure that information is protected
from theft or compromise. Administrators must be able to easily remove
duplicates and manage the maintenance and updating of documents and
information to ensure freshness.
Analyzing performance, usage and effectiveness of content and in what
context is key to ranking and rating content to help salespeople find the
relevant content in a simple query.

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4
RESPONSIVE

SALES
ENABLEMENT
USING

WITTYPARROT
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WittyParrot is a disruptive content distribution platform with potential to
change the way salespeople work, manage information and interact with
clients.
WittyParrot enables responsive sales engagement with buyers and saves
sales people time, improves quality of response and delivers analysis of
information used, individual usage and time saved.

Integrated Marketing & Sales Enablement Methodology
Inbound Marketing

Visitors
Leads
Marketing Content

Marketing
Buyer Need

Sales

Field Engagement

Sales & Marketing
Alignment
Value
Messaging
Pillars
Big Idea
Win Themes
Messaging
Architecture

Sales-Ready
Content
Content Delivery
• Letters
• Scripts
• Images
• Videos

• Proposals
• Collateral
• Presentations
• Stories

Sales
One Voice
Support
Channels
Consistent
Communication

Sales Enablement & Operations
Train

Message Consistency

Lead Generation

Customer Engagement

Brand Protection

WittyParrot is a cloud-based content delivery application that manifests as
a Widget on desktops, smartphones and tablets. WittyParrot places the
content that salespeople need at their fingertips.

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The graphic below is a screenshot of the WittyParrot Widget being used
to create on-the-fly custom email response. This enables salespeople to
instantly access relevant information to support buyer-seller conversations
in real time and drag and drop this information into an email or CRM tool to
immediately follow-up the call with a written meeting summary, including
links to resources and confirming next steps.

WittyParrot brings the following powerful set of capabilities to compliment
inbound, marketing and CRM tools to elegantly solve the problem of
responsive sales engagement.

4.1 Speed + context enables responsiveness
Keyword Search
WittyParrot enables users to keyword search-for, find, and instantly use
relevant information to improve personal productivity.

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Instant Access
WittyParrot gives marketers, salespeople and customer support
professionals instant access to sales messaging, positioning and field
enablement insights over any device, whether online or offline.
Drag and Drop
WittyParrot helps sales people find, drag and drop the right information
from a Desktop widget, share it and track it, to save time and sell more.
Always-On. Available Online And Offline
WittyParrot helps marketing professionals to create and distribute sales &
marketing collateral and make it available at the point of use and moment
of need over any device whether online or offline to ensure salespeople get
what they need, when they need it without having to dig for it.

4.2 Consistency strengthens brand
Context
WittyParrot in conjunction with inbound marketing and marketing
automation intelligence provides contextually relevant content for
responsive telephone engagement and follow-up communication.
Content Freshness
WittyParrot enables marketers and enablement profs to publish and
maintain a master version of information for sharing and reuse across the
enterprise and business partners to ensure freshness of information.
Brand Messaging Alignment
WittyParrot enables multiple departments to use the same brand elements
to maintain brand consistency.
Single Version Of Truth
WittyParrot enables marketing managers to create messaging chunks or
building blocks and to combine them into compound documents which
update automatically when the underlying message chunk changes to
create and maintain a single version of the truth and improve marketing
efficiency and brand protection.

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Consistent Interface
WittyParrot uses a generic widget across desktop, tablet and smartphones
from which to extract information - not a Plugin. This means that drag and
drop works consistently to and from WittyParrot into any email client, Web
browser or HTML application whether online or offline to provide uniform
functionality.

4.3 A Platform to Enable Responsive Communication
Intelligent Hub
WittyParrot is an intelligent communication hub that enables salespeople
to access best practices and the latest content and collateral from original
sources over a cloud-based service when it is needed. WittyParrot runs on
the desktop, tablet or mobile device of choice whether online or offline and
requires no IT intervention to deploy and implement.
Content Delivery
WittyParrot gives sales enablement professionals, the ability to create,
manage and deliver (by simple drag and drop) sales content via phone,
email and written communication to improve productivity.
Manageability
WittyParrot enables users to create, organize, share and track multiple
content types and rank and use content based on name, size, publication
date, frequency, favorite, or most frequently used to easily manage
volumes of content from diverse sources.
Analytics Dashboard
WittyParrot contains a dashboard that allows sales enablement
professionals to track most used shared content over time and to rank
content effectiveness, i.e. utilization frequency, time saved, storage used,
top users.
Wit Analytics
WittyParrot captures the usage statistics about individual wits and attached
documents to provide insight into content effectiveness at the atomic level.

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5
SUMMARY AND

TAKE-AWAYS

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WittyParrot in combination with inbound marketing methods facilitates the
building of a responsive sales force.
WittyParrot is a new technology platform that can be applied to achieve
five of the top 7 sales initiatives for 2013 combined. WittyParrot saves
sales, marketing and channels sales reps time and improves the
effectiveness of the sales enablement process.
In summary, the WittyParrot technology platform provides out-of-the-box
functionality to:1. Physically align sales and marketing messaging to drive content
creation that resonates with buyers.
2. Facilitate “on-message” written communication with customers and
prospects, so that everyone speaks with one voice.
3. Enable instant information access, for sales, channels, pre-sales and
support professionals, to become more responsive.
4. Facilitate useful team communication and collaboration.
5. Provides tools that sales people will actually use to improve sales
performance.
6. Enable marketing, operations and enablement professionals to track
content usage, productivity and performance to improve effectiveness.

Top Sales Effectiveness Initiatives for 2013
Enhancing lead generation

48.9%

Aligning sales and marketing

38.3%

Improving rep access to key information

36.8%

Revising sales process

33.4%

Enhancing team communications

30.4%

Analyzing customer’s buying process

27.2%

Revising sales tools

26.6%

Revising sales team structure

25.3%

Revising channel strategy

24.5%

Revising compensation

24.0%

New CRM tools
Revising hiring stategy

21.7%
15.3%

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TALK TO US
For Companies:
If you are interested in getting WittyParrot to help your sales team be more
responsive, we would love to hear from you.
Please fill out this short form to discuss a pilot:
http://www.wittyparrot.com/contact-us
For Potential Partners:
Join a growing list of our partners and become part of our family.
1 Become an OEM partner and deliver a solution on top of WittyParrot.
2 Become an Integrator: Become an implementation partner and support
the implementation of WittyParrot enterprise accounts.
You can learn more about our partnership programs here:
http://www.wittyparrot.com/partner-inquiry

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