Talking to Tony Kavadas to find out more about Mediafly for SAP Sales Cloud, an offering now available on SAP App Center, I could totally relate to his remarks about the challenges faced by salespeople – having once been in their shoes myself. It’s a tough job that’s now even tougher, especially in the business-to-business space.
“Buyers are doing their own research and don’t think there’s even a need for salespeople anymore,” Tony, executive vice president of Global Alliances and International Sales at Mediafly told me. “They don’t like being sold to, don’t have time, and don’t believe that a sales rep adds any value to the process.”
Ouch. So how can a rep even connect with these sophisticated buyers – and prove that the sales meeting will be useful?
The short answer: the sales rep must be able to provide relevant content on the spot – information that the buyer is unlikely to have uncovered while researching independently. “Delivering a personalized, interactive, data-driven experience is the only way for sales reps to add that value,” Tony said.
Dynamic, Interactive Conversations with the Buyer
Called Mediafly for SAP Sales Cloud is a mobile sales-enablement tool that lets reps quickly create their own customized presentations. It uses a centralized database where the rep can easily discover new or suggested content for a particular customer, saving a huge amount of time in preparation.
“Sales reps don’t have three or four hours to get ready for a meeting,” Tony remarked. “They need to be out there selling.”
Plus, instead of a static presentation, the rep can have an interactive conversation with the customer by pulling in new content on the fly in response to the person’s interests — even objective data from third-party sources. It has a mobile-first, intuitive design to make it easy for the rep to augment the presentation and automatically generate data visualizations.
On-Message, On-Brand Content from a Centralized Database
Meanwhile, because the presentations draw upon a centralized content management tool, they’re always on message and on brand. “No more embarrassing moments when the rep realizes there’s an old logo on a slide,” Tony observed, “and the marketing team can be confident of consistency in what sales reps are telling customers.”
I was curious to know about Tony’s background, and what gave him so much insight into these challenges. Want to take a guess?
“I was involved in salesforce automation from its very beginnings,” he replied, “and at one time in my career, I was a sales leader at EMC, in charge of a billion-dollar division in Europe. What I recognized is that customer relationship management software, although it has served us very well, has serious limitations when the information is not kept current. And despite good intentions, a lot of sales professionals don’t get that done. And if a solution is not used, it’s not a good solution.”
New Communications Loop for Sales and Marketing
Mediafly for SAP Sales Cloud eliminates the need for the sales rep to make system updates because it’s integrated with SAP Sales Cloud and automatically logs sales activities into the database. It tracks how, when, and where content is used and produces reports showing what’s effective. That has big benefits for the marketing team, which gets the kind of feedback that was never possible before.
I am especially impressed by the way this tool can bring the marketing and sales teams closer together by enabling this collaboration. And I like the fact that it can help managers coach rookie sales reps by showing them in an unbiased way how to improve – for example, with presentation techniques and best practices that emulate the top revenue producers.
Why SAP App Center?
Of course, I asked Tony to tell me about the decision to offer Mediafly for SAP Sales Cloud on SAP’s digital marketplace. First, he noted the integration with SAP Sales Cloud, which recently achieved SAP-certified integration with SAP cloud solutions, making it a perfect fit.
“But it’s all about reaching people who might have similar challenges,” he explained. “We can do that by being there with SAP and your customers, which includes small businesses to large conglomerates. And we believe in the way that SAP is going to market with SAP App Center. Clearly, SAP’s senior leadership team has made a commitment of resources to the channel.”
From my standpoint, that is certainly true; more and more people know about SAP App Center, and the past 12 months have shown us that buyers are using it with positive results. What about you? What’s your experience with SAP App Center?
