I spent some time today with Eduardo Conrado, senior vice president marketing and IT at Motorola Solutions. Eduardo is one of our guest speakers at our Sales Enablement Forum in March – in fact he is the keynote for the track which I have put together with a focus on the message within our 21st-century sales system equation. This graphic should give you a hint of what we mean:

 

If you’d like to know more, and what MMA and VPM mean, come to the Forum and find out. Eduardo and I discussed his presentation and this is our dialogue.

PETER: Eduardo. What will be your three key takeaways from your speech at the Forrester Sales Enablement Forum?

EDUARDO: When considering how to move your company from a product company to a solutions provider, reexamine your brand and what it means to you and your customers in the lens of purpose, voice, promise, and values. Through a collaborative effort with sales, you need to examine the people, process, and tools/systems you are currently utilize to address your customer’s business challenges. A dynamic mix customer messaging to sales enablement tools reinforces how you can help your customers solve their toughest challenges and can position your company as a trusted advisor and not just a product company.

PETER: How important was it to link your content to sales conversations and how did you do that?

EDUARDO: It was very important to bring our sales organization into our marketing discussions. At Motorola Solutions, our focus is on the solutions, and that centers around solving customer problems. If you look at the sales and marketing relationship, you can put it at three levels: people, process, and systems. With people, we looked at company strategy and identified how to reach the goal of becoming the problem solver for customers. By structuring our marketing teams to complement the company’s strategy, we can more effectively reach the customer.

When looking at process, we match up the customer process and the sales process that we have within the company on both the direct and indirect side. We look at the touchpoints, how customers are consuming information, what type of content is delivered, how the sales or the channel partners pitch, and so on.

Finally, with systems, we saw our people and processes are relying on IT components and tools. Our systems needed to reflect an end-to-end process with customers. That means not having a separate marketing system and sales system that don’t integrate. We need to make sure customers flow across all systems and are getting the right touchpoints from the right groups at the right times. All these items together move our company to doing more than just selling products, but becoming a trusted advisor to our customers.

PETER: What do you think are your messaging priorities for 2014?

EDUARDO: Our priority for 2014 is continuing our focus on the customer. We are moving from a product company to a solutions company, being a trusted advisor for our customers, and solving their problems. This will drive a number of projects around IT on the customer-facing front and a key area of focus for marketing teams around sales enablement.

Want to hear more? Then come to the Forum or place an inquiry with me afterward if you are a Forrester client. I have a further Q&A session with Eduardo and other practitioners at the Forum, so if there are any questions you would like me to pose, just drop me a line. As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics.

Always keeping you informed! Peter