Using XWiki for Sales Enablement

26 May 2010 5 min read

I've recently noticed a trend among some of our bigger customers: they're increasingly using XWiki solutions to support their sales enablement initiatives.

The current state of sales enablement

If you're working for a large corporation, you're probably aware that big companies store content. Huge amounts of content. They store content about their customers, their processes and their products.

Your marketing department produces sales assets, white papers and customer case studies. Your sales organization comes up with best practices based on feedback from the field. Product managers publish documents about your company's solutions and its offering. In a big company, you're overloaded with content.

Although it may sound great (who wouldn't want to have access to all that sales-supporting knowledge?), having access to seemingly unlimited amounts of content comes with a number of hindrances.

According to Forrester Research & IDC Sales Advisory Service:

  • $135,262 is spent, on average, in support costs per year for each salesperson
  • 7 hours per week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls
  • 50 percent of the information is pushed through email
  • Only 10 percent is “made available in a useful format”

What your sales enablement content currently looks like to your sales reps. Credits: epSos.de

There should be a better way to access and leverage all that content.

Objectives of sales enablement

That's why our customers are using XWiki as a platform for their sales enablement initiatives. Wikipedia defines sales enablement as "the process of arming an organization’s sales force with access to the insight, experts, and information that will ultimately increase revenue."

Our customers' main goals are simple:

  • Give a second life to all of their existing content that it currently not being leveraged
  • Make it faster for salespeople to access relevant product and solution information when they need it
  • Provide information in a format that's easy to leverage for creating sales proposals
  • Let salespersons and marketers communicate more effectively with each other

    This is exactly what XWiki software allows large organizations to do. Using XWiki, they can address all of the 4 key goals outlined above.

    Turn your sales materials in a package that is easy to use for your sales reps. Credits: L.Marie

XWiki: a great sales enablement tool

Here's a short overwiew of how you can leverage XWiki's feature set to achieve your sales enablement objectives:

  • You can start by doing something useful with all of your existing data by importing Word files into your wiki
  • Once your content is on the platform, you can give your salespersons powerful search and discovery tools
  • All of the content is easy to access and reuse thanks to the web interface and Word & PDF export
  • You can empower your salespeople into providing useful feedback through comments and ratings

    On top of all of these built-in features, XWiki also offers the ability to go way further and build custom-fit applications that are fully integrated with your company's existing infrastructure.

    You can use XWiki to publish and improve your sales enablement information.

Contact me at guillaume@xwiki.com if you'd like to find out more about how you could use XWiki solutions to empower your salesforce.

Guillaume, International Sales

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