Relevance vs. Time vs. Value

I was reading a post today about the age-old argument that our time/attention problems stem from the availability of too much information.  Jeff Jarvis has a point.  He says that it's not the abundance of information, but the lack of relevance for things that interest him that is lacking.

I agree that we all probably spend a lot of wasted time on emails, websites, searching and reading things that don't make any difference to us in the long run.  But I wonder how you can determine that without actually searching and reading a bunch of stuff.  I think we have to become better filters.

That said, I've been working on a sales portal and helping the client align the balance between knowledge and information.  Much of the content they are going to put on the sales portal is downloadable files - PDFs, PowerPoints, Excel files, etc.  My response was that as soon as their sales reps had come out and retrieved them, why should they return?  What makes the site relevant to improving the way the do their jobs?  What will make it go beyond being a glorified file server?

Jack Vinson's post, Is your island isolated or connected, (which leads to an interesting post by Jeffrey Phillips) brings the point home with: "...the total capability of the firm is based not on what people know, but on what knowledge and information they are willing to share..."

I think the trick to providing relevance, validating time and delivering value has to do with creating knowledge interactions.  Which I've said for a long time, but is hard for B2B companies to grasp, especially during complex sales processes.  It's about harnessing and sharing the knowledge your sales team possesses in a way that creates a usefulness for the entire organization.

It's about the company letting go of the idea that they know it all and need to control all the messaging and branding.  Kind of like when you were in pre-school and learned to share toys, and then in junior high and learned to play on a team for sports.  Sometimes I think we forget how.

But I digress.  Thing is, if all your sales portal does is offer downloadable files, then you don't have a useful tool beyond file sharing.  What you need (especially for a team that's in disparate locations) is an interactive place for collaboration that shares focused and useful knowledge in a way that promotes selling more, faster and better.

I've talked before about Discussion Forums, comments and ratings on content, sharing success stories, competitor comparison matrices, expertise databases, etc. Here's another idea:

A letter writing tool that allows the sales team using it to choose to use the letter parts provided to focus on the relevance in industry, product, values, etc. or to contribute their own paragraphs or bullet points to mix and match with the existing database.  Then allow those contributions to be added to the database for use by others.

The ability to have these letters formatted in your company's letterhead look, converted to PDF or HTML email and sent directly to a prospect.  The ability for all sales people to search the database of letters to see what's working and what's not by comparing the letters and parts used to what the prospects received who turned into customers.

And, hooking the letter to the prospect in your CRM system automatically so the sales rep doesn't have to do any administrative task about writing the letter. 

There are many other ways to look at this and possible extensions of it, but taking something like letter writing and making it easier, more effective and collaborative is a good start in using the knowledge of your sales team to help increase the expertise foundation of your entire team.

Thoughts?