Rebuilding CMI Credibility With Sales Teams

Competitive and market intelligence (CMI) leaders across the tech industry are suffering from a credibility crisis with sales organizations.

What's causing this crisis — and how can you fix it?

One problem is that CMI deliverables get lost among "random acts of sales support" — programs and deliverables designed to help sales teams but when uncoordinated, they end up confusing and overwhelming sales reps instead. Salespeople have a hard time separating your CMI content — in form or substance — from this mass of sales support content.

Another problem is that company executives have a difficult time pinpointing your CMI team's value to the company. CMI teams rely on data like usage statistics from sales portals as proxies for their value, when the benefit of influencing even a single sales opportunity provides much higher value than months of downloads.

If you put yourself in the shoes of an observer, could you easily conclude that your CMI team is in the business of supporting sales teams?

As a CMI leader, you need to reconsider the skills within your team, the metrics that you use to determine success, and how you organize and distribute your content. This will help your team provide substantive, sales-ready content to the field and use new metrics that demonstrate your true value to sales teams.

Agenda:

• Learn five things that sales teams don't want to tell you.
• Align messages within deliverables based on how sales teams use them.
• Focus research on customer problems rather than company products.
• Create metrics that emphasize your contribution to sales activity.
• Develop experiences that enhance your team's empathy for sales.