Stage Three: Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge Sharing is continuous 

Once Relevant Insights have been added to some of the Knowledge Pages, the Value Map becomes a significant marketing and sales asset.  It is during Stage Three that ValueMapper leverages that asset and creates a highly efficient and effective knowledge sharing and sales coaching environment for marketing and sales that continuously improves the knowledge in the Value Map.

In Stage Three, the other two Knowledge Tabs; Best Sales Practices, and Content & Sales Tools are turned on for every Knowledge Page and the entire sales and marketing organization is given access to ValueMapper so that other people can add knowledge to these other two Knowledge Tabs and provide feedback on the knowledge already contained in the Value Map.  It is through this continuous improvement process that the Value Map gets better and more valuable the more it is used.

Best Sales Practices are added through the same question and answer window that was used for adding Relevant Insights. The questions that drive the Best Sales Practices are specifically aligned with each Topic and contain things like questions to ask, competitive best practices and other actions that help sales people move the process forward.

It is critical to remember that ValueMapper is not intended to replace a company’s Marketing and Sales content.  Instead, it acts as a smart front end to existing Content and Sales Tools.

These links can be easily added to each topic so in effect the Value Map becomes a situation specific index to the most relevant solutions centric collateral and presentations. This ability to access a company’s marketing and sales content in the context of a specific Customer Need, Stakeholder and Market Segment has huge sales productivity implications.  It also clearly shows the marketing organization where they are lacking the kind of sales ready content that is needed to truly sell solutions.

This ability to link Content and Sales Tools to the Value Map creates an environment where the sales person has instant access to a quick reference knowledge base (sort of like a set of Cliffs Notes) with the ability to launch the detail content when they want to see the whole story.

The organization of the three Knowledge Tabs for each Knowledge Page also gives management the opportunity to assign the primary responsibility for those sections to different organizations.  For example, the Relevant Insights can be assigned to Product Marketing, the Content & Sales Tools to Marketing Communications, and the Best Sales Practices to Sales Operations & Support. This makes the entire Value Mapping process a collaborative effort with every body that benefits from the process having some skin in the game.