Sales Enablement PRO Awards 2021: Maximizing Sales Content Productivity at Infoblox

Congratulations to Sales Enablement PRO Award winner Ken Blank from Infoblox. Learn more about the Sales Productivity award winning initiative below.

What was the challenge you were facing?

Ken Blank: At Infoblox, our previous state was that the content was located absolutely everywhere. And when it was in a somewhat centralized location it was on a Google site called sales Workspace. That site was sometimes challenging to navigate. It definitely was not up-to-date with all information and made for a very confusing and difficult experience for our internal customers, the sales folks, and sales managers to find the information that they need. So the process that we took to build the sales workspace and remodel it was across many departments. Imagine everyone who might own something in a technology company, from marketing to product marketing. Also we had our technical marketing group and really just our overall sales experience, meaning the sales methodology plays and so forth so we had to collaborate with a lot of people.

At the same time, we also had to help change mindsets within the organization that they understood. We needed to focus on the customer, our internal customers’ experience and not so much about how they would organize it on their desktop. For example, sales operations might take care of salesforce.com. But when I log in, I’m going to search for salesforce.com because I may not know who the department is that owns it. So we had to change kind of the mentality of how information was going to be structured as well. So we are able to only get limited measurements out of the sales workspace. It’s a long-term bandaid right now for us meaning that we’re using a Google site platform to host. So the analytics that we can get out are generally about individual users and so forth. Our individual user increased year-over-year by significant percentage. As a consequence, the overall adoption of finding information goes into that single point of truth kind of snowballed.

What was the process of developing this initiative?

KB: It was a flywheel experience, meaning that the more credible the website became, the more likely others were to say did you check sales Workspace to see if it’s there? We also introduced every other week newsletter and in the HTML newsletter that goes out, we emulated the same header and banner, the menu icons and so forth at the top of the newsletter and the email that matched the experience that’s on the website. So if somebody were to click on one of those icons, it would take them directly to the page in the sales Workspace. So that creates a seamless experience for the end user. So I operate under a philosophy that I call simple genius, which means that information should be simple to find, simple to understand, and simple to implement.

How was the rollout and adoption of the new initiative?

KB: When I layer that on with an ongoing sane or a common saying, which a confused customer never buys, I would say that that was a strategy that was at the very fundamental level for sales workspace, which is if our internal customer is confused about where to find something or is this the right thing, then they’re not going to buy it. Meaning they’re not going to download it, open it, read it, commit it to memory, whatever the case might be. And then when we layer in the simple genius philosophy, which is simple to find meaning, the navigation has to be there. It has to be simple to understand. So we can’t put up a technical document necessarily if it’s a sales audience and then simple to implement, meaning that it needs to be easy for the sales person to realize how they utilize the tool, if it’s customer facing or not so forth.

What are some of the business results and impact as a result of your efforts?

KB: The business results that have been impacted are on multiple levels. In addition to impacts that are had on our corporate expectations, we’ve also had an impact within our own sales enablement function, meaning that the focus on customer centricity, what is that internal customer experience as they go through anything, not just sales Workspace, but other programs and products that we’re developing for our end users. We want to make sure that the mindset has shifted from this is what’s easy for me or for the subject matter expert, whatever the case, this is what’s easiest for our internal customer. So that’s the derivative URL or the chain that’s happening downstream. Well, beyond just the impact of an updated intranet.

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