I just started in January as a strategic account manager at SAVO, a position where I help our customers continually find value through their SAVO implementations. Although I am new to SAVO, SAVO is not new to me.
I’ve been in sales for the majority of my career and although I’ve worked for different companies, the challenges of a salesperson are mostly the same. Current customers want you to know their industry, their business and what they’re trying to accomplish in their position, both personally and professionally. Armed with that information, sellers can make suggestions that add value to their clients, rather than making random suggestions that may or may not be relevant. The more you can show that you’ve been thoughtful in any recommendation you make, the more helpful your clients will find you, and the better your ability to build relationships.
In my last job, I was used to dozens of different marketing managers ‘pushing’ out materials via email or a website of marketing content they built that I could never find again. After a few years I had a hard drive full of marketing materials and 47 bookmarks of intranet sites that might have been built with an industry focus, or around specific products, or in 1992. I had no idea when they’d been last updated or by whom. Sometimes I would find marketing brochures for services or products I had no idea the company sold, only to find out that was because we stopped selling it 5 years before. It got frustrating because I either couldn’t find or couldn’t trust the marketing materials on the web. I eventually just relied on asking other salespeople or SMEs that I had worked with before whether they had anything on their laptops that they used and trusted.
Then my company implemented SAVO and things changed immediately. I was skeptical about a new tool at first, because at my old company we seemed to have a million tools, none of which were that helpful to me, but when I logged in to SAVO the first time I was amazed at how easy it was to navigate , how quickly I could find materials that were helping me give my client’s better recommendations, and how easy it was to comment and rate things to help my colleagues find the best stuff or let marketing know when they wrote stuff that was great…or not so great.
Suddenly I had a tool where I knew who wrote the material and I could ask them questions directly. I could find what I needed for my clients’ specific situations at the right time rather than what marketing happened to have published that week. When my fellow sellers would call and ask “Do you have any whitepaper on our X product?”, I would tell them to go look in the new tool , and they’d come back to me an hour later saying, “When did we get that? It’s awesome.” I know.
And so I am thrilled now to have the opportunity not only to use SAVO every day, but to help others make the most of their implementations. A salesperson’s job is infinitely easier if they have a true passion for what they are selling. I know firsthand how empowering it feels to be an enabled seller and I get to look forward to helping my clients feel that way every day.
