also engineer additional customer touch points before and after the events to maximize customer engagement and face time. Creating a selling event series based on your thought leadership assets is valuable because customers are demanding more education a core part of the selling experience. The key to profitable selling event programs is to use customer education events as the basis of a coordinated stream of quality customer contact by sales. Coordinated events that deliver thought leadership have a much higher return on investment than standalone sales events or third party event sponsorships. Any investment in a sales event should give a salesperson a reason to contact a customer or prospect many times before, during and after the event in a manner that fits with your sales process. If planned properly, your thought leadership assets should be able to support this process by providing interesting ideas to generate attendance before the event, quality education about an important issue during the event, and relevant cross sell recommendations after the event. • Sales Playbooks - One of the biggest roadblocks to executing Thought Leadership Selling Programs is the amount of training and program management time required to deliver a coordinated sales program. Sales executives who seek more timely and frequent customer engagement on a broader set of solutions are using Sales Playbooks as a fast and efficient way to get salespeople to deliver fresh ideas and relevant content to their customers. Sales playbooks are a coordinated set of actions that ensures the desired outcome from a specific customer engagement. Best-in-class sales plays will arm the sales representative with “reasons to call” discovery guides, the right advice, most relevant solutions recommendations, and appropriate expert to follow-up. Sales playbooks avoid “product pushing”, increase utilization of your selling assets in sales conversations and help identify the content that most effectively drives sales outcomes. Sales plays that turn meetings into opportunities by mapping ideas and insights to relevant solutions and subject matter experts, or case study to advance the sales process. • Sales Enablement Tools - Sales enablement, engagement and readiness solutions like Highspot, Outreach.io, Mediafly, Seismic, and Mindtickle make it simpler for salespeople to leverage your thought leadership and translate it into sales opportunities because they make if fast and easy for salespeople to access the sales playbooks and best content assets needed to support all aspects of a specific sales interaction. Sales enablement tools use AI and digital technology as a way to deliver the right content and information to the right client at the right time to advance the sale. For example, Hitachi Vantara, RedHat, and HPE are using sales enablement platforms to help front line sellers instantly access research, competitive analysis and sales information from up to 25 different internal sources in faces-to-face client meetings. GE Capital and TIAA calculate they have differentiated the sales experience while saved thousands of many days of expensive sales time by automating sales playbooks and advisor content in this manner. How we can help you become an industry thought leader To leverage our thought leadership selling best practices and move faster than the competition you might consider asking for help or outsourcing aspects of this process. The Revenue Enablement Institute works with top marketing organizations around the world to build and execute world class Thought Leadership Selling Programs that drive measurable sales results in one sales quarter. We design, develop and execute Thought Leadership Selling Programs that support your salespeople with a sustained stream of education and advisory content that differentiates your sales model, drives repeat sales calls, and delivers trusted advice. Thought Leadership Selling Page 17 © Revenue Enablement Institute 2022