Sales Enablement and My Ipod

Confession of a technology junkie: I was a late adopter of the iPod. Even though I bought a first generation iMac, bought a 128MB USB thumb drive when they were $100, heck – my family had Prodigy in 1987, I couldn’t bring myself to buy an iPod. But I finally broke down and got a first generation iPod mini (remember those?), and I’ve been addicted to it ever since.

When I think about what my iPod means to me, I have to think back to my first month with it. My first experience was probably like a lot of people’s who grew up with CDs (let’s not even talk about tapes) and have now moved to digital media. I brought my iPod home, and what’s the first thing I wanted to do? Put on music. I had a lot of music on my computer that I had downloaded in college (thank you Napster), but the vast majority of my music was on CDs. I had CDs in my entertainment center, in boxes under my bed, in my car – they were scattered all over the place. Some CDs were in their cases, but some were unlabeled shiny discs with who knows what on them. Most of them I hadn’t played in years.

But now I had my my iPod with room for all this music. So I took all of my CDs and put them on my iPod. And you know what? I started listening to music that I hadn’t listened to in forever. And while my iPod shuffled song after song, I thought to myself, “You know what? I’ve got some really good music!”

What does this have to do with SAVO? Well we hear something similar from a lot of our clients. Not necessarily about their love affair with their iPod, but about how the ability to actually find things increases their value.

For me, I owned a ton of CDs, but they weren’t bringing any value to me. But once I could access them quickly and easily, and in a way that delivered music directly to me, I appreciated the value of the music I already had. The perceived value of my music went up.

So, just owning music wasn’t bringing value to me. Because unless I can get access to it, and get access to it easily, it doesn’t have value. And by having easy access to it, I actually found additional use and value in things I didn’t know

What does this mean for our clients? When they take their materials and information and put it into SAVO, the perceived value goes up. An example:

One of our clients conducted a survey of their marketing materials. The result? 70% of salespeople rated it “average to poor”. They put their content in SAVO and they pushed it to salespeople. And they conducted the survey again. In the second survey, 70% felt the content was “good to very good.” It was the same stuff! Exactly the same material – no changes at all! They had essentially taken their CDs and put them into their iPod. And they loved what they heard.

Ease of access really increases the perceived value of what you already have. Now if I could only set my SAVO homepage to play Pearl Jam when I log in…