You've Built a Sales Intranet; Why Doesn't Sales Use It?
by Alison Chandless

If your reps don’t use your Intranet, you’re not alone. Sales teams often avoid their Intranets because these sites don’t provide what they need--quick answers to their questions or insights to shorten their sales cycles.

The Problem

And yet the need for sales collaboration is intensifying. Sales cycles continue to grow longer and more complex, sales ramp times-to-productivity on new products are getting longer, and customers are more demanding. The need for sales teams to share best practices and get quick answers to their sales questions is critical.

CSO Insights 2006 Sales Productivity study reveals that companies who share best practices are 15% more likely to make their revenue goals than those that don’t.

The Alternatives

If your Intranet isn’t going to solve the problem, what is? Sales force automation tools focus primarily on managing opportunities, contacts and forecasts, and little on collaboration among sales teams.

Organizations have tried to facilitate sales collaboration with sales communities, wikis, and blogs on their Intranets. But these often become the “catch all” repositories for documents; content is frustrating to find and frequently out-of-date. Wikis quickly become hard to manage, and blogs can’t support the needs of hundreds of sales people sharing information. The designs of these applications just don't meet the unique needs of sales teams.

The Solution - StreetSmarts

StreetSmarts is the first on-demand sales collaboration software specifically designed to help sales teams increase sales performance. Using StreetSmarts, your sales and marketing teams can identify, capture, manage and automatically send best practices and know-how.

First, it offers intelligent access to useful information that's accessible anywhere, anytime, online or off-line -- even wirelessly. Second, StreetSmarts keeps content fresh by automatically flagging out-of-date content based on user reviews. Experts add new content by answering questions asked by sales reps and by answering predefined questions automatically e-mailed by StreetSmarts. Third, StreetSmarts improves an often inefficient and ineffective process of asking and answering sales support questions using e-mail.

The bottom line? Sales reps ask questions using the StreetSmarts toolbar, because the answer may exist in the database. If not, they know they will get a timely answer from a knowledgeable expert. People who answer sales questions use StreetSmarts because they won't have to answer the same question over and over again. Everybody wins.

To find out more about StreetSmarts go to www.StreetSmarts.com or call Alison Chandless (former KickStart Alliance consulting partner) at 650-315-7501.