Hallo to the lovely Responsive community,
I'm here to pose a question and start a discussion - which I hope will be useful not just to me, but to others in a similar position. This is a long post, but I hope others can recognize aspects of similar issues they might have in their own business.
That question I'd like to ask is: "What approaches and techniques have you successfully used to get people in your business to use the Responsive tool?"
My hope is that you can provide suggestions that I can consider as part of the project.
Here's some context and background:
- I'm a content strategist and project manager working in Sales Enablement (SE) and Marketing for a leading global business, but my work is specifically focused on the US.
- Investigations have shown that we're not getting nearly the engagement from users that we need with the Responsive tool. I've been tasked with increasing our user engagement significantly.
- Although we do have a Proposal Manager in SE, they're challenged because many of our business development, salespeople, and Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs) rely on our proposal manager, instead of managing RFPs / content updates and reviews themselves.
- This means our proposal manager can't focus on the value-adding work that they need to do - so we need to devolve that responsibility for many aspects of RFP creation and content reviews out to our wider business users (where it should always have resided).
In short, we need to get our business users (around 200 people) to own their parts of the RFP process and use the Responsive tool.
I have a few things on my side:
- We have executive buy-in and support.
- The project is completely aligned with and supports our overall business strategy and goals.
- This is being managed as a formal project (by me) so this is my main job focus for the next few months - it has our attention!
- We have a good understanding of the Responsive tool, its capabilities, and the benefits it provides.
- We have good relationships with Responsive as a vendor, and our CSM has been very helpful and supportive.
The main challenge we will face is that this is going to require culture change and a significant shift in perspectives from our BD, SME, and other teams - and there will likely be quite a bit of pushback.
So far, we've identified several key areas where we can make improvements to help our users:
- Feedback / Voice of Customer: Discover what the current issues are with BD/SMEs not using the tool.
- Process: Develop SOPs, tools, and techniques to create a standardized way of using Responsive.
- Content: Create best-in-class content library Q&A pairs to reduce effort for users.
- Support: Use Responsive support guides and resources, together with our own training and guides to ensure people have the information they need.
- Comms: Clearly explain what we're doing, why we're doing it, how it aligns with business goals, and how it can benefit our users.
- Technology and automation: Investigate technical changes that we / Responsive can make to improve engagement and reduce the burden on our proposal manager.
- Accountability: Make our users accountable for using the Responsive platform.
So, with this in mind, are there any other techniques or approaches that you recommend we try as part of this project?
I'm happy to consider any and all approaches! And I'm also happy to let you know what's worked for us in future in case you're running similar engagement projects in your own business.
Additionally, if anyone wants to chat about this and share ideas, please let me know and I can set something up.
Thanks very much!
Paul.
