Equipping Mobilizers to Drive Consensus through Comprehensive Toolkits

Key Insight

Enabling 'Mobilizers'—internal customer champions—to persuade other stakeholders is crucial for driving collective learning, especially when dealing with complex, new technologies involving multiple disparate stakeholders, such as marketing automation purchases with 5.4 or 5.7 stakeholders (e.g., marketing, IT, sales, finance, procurement, legal). Mobilizers often face significant challenges, including stakeholders having misaligned perceptions, viewing alternative solutions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as sufficient, or prioritizing other investments. To overcome these hurdles, companies like Marketo and Skillsoft convert existing sales enablement tools into powerful customer-facing resources designed to help Mobilizers build consensus on the problem and solution, rather than overtly promoting a specific supplier.

Marketo's 'The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation', an online, downloadable resource, exemplifies this. It includes a talking points guide that anticipates stakeholder objections and alternative solutions (e.g., CRM), phrasing responses in each stakeholder's specific language. A stakeholder guide outlines the diverse stakeholder profiles, detailing their concerns, thinking patterns, metrics, and language, helping Mobilizers connect the solution to each group's world. An objection-handling guide provides tailored responses to common concerns. The toolkit also features stories of companies navigating the marketing automation journey, focusing on the value for the company and the Mobilizer, rather than being supplier-centric. Ready-made business case templates in PowerPoint format, complete with data points and presentation guidance, further simplify the Mobilizer's task, making mobilization as easy as possible.

Skillsoft, facing similar challenges with cloud-based learning solutions and HR personnel not naturally inclined to mobilize, explicitly aims to 'make Mobilizers' through its comprehensive toolkit. Key enhancements include 'Commercial Insight-based reframing' using myth-busting structures to challenge existing perceptions about learning. 'Thought-leader snapshots' from external experts provide credibility without directly endorsing Skillsoft, ensuring the toolkit focuses on the problem and solution. For layered engagement, the core toolkit is ungated to facilitate easy sharing, but deeper downloads like templates, tools, case studies, and white papers are gated. These gated downloads serve as powerful 'nurture indicators', allowing Skillsoft to gauge a customer's stage in the buying journey (e.g., downloading an RFP template indicates the 'Confront' stage). This strategic balance allows for widespread access while still capturing detailed engagement, leading to impressive results like increased RFP influence and existing customer contracts growing by a factor of ten.