Portal Development: How Sales Portals Boost Profits

Improve Sales with a Successful Sales Portal

When creating a sales portal, it's crucial to ask: Who makes up your sales force and how do you ensure that they have all the tools and information they need in real time to “move the needle?”

This is the same problem virtually every company faces. Add in the many versions of collateral that you've ever produced and the fact that every person has a different version of each PDF saved somewhere or re-forwarded from another email, and you've got an almost impossible task of ensuring that your staff provides the most updated information to your hard-earned prospects.

A Portal Provides What the Sales Team Needs

Sales is the lifeblood that drives your business and keeps the doors open. This means that executive and marketing staff everywhere are scrambling to build and provide collateral, fill out RFPs, create videos, attend events, and more so that sales can't blame them for not having the right piece of collateral that could have “sealed the deal.”

So we continue to invest time and energy creating and re-creating every piece of conceivable collateral that sales claim the prospects need, without considering a strategy to re-use and update the collateral as the information changes.

Clarity Ventures has built sales portals for less than $10k all the way up to $200k. It all depends on what you need. The most important thing is to find a business partner that's an expert at portal development and can help you sort out what you need but provide all the extras as you grow into needing them.

So what software does it take to build an eCommerce portal? Technically, it's mostly a CMS (Content Management System), with a number of specific features, capabilities, and access controls. What are these extra features and capabilities? Here's a short list of the most important ones, although you're not limited to anything:

Portal Software

So what exactly is sales portal software? Basically, it's the same as a CMS, or website-building software. The main difference is that it's designed to be more modular, meaning that it's designed to be highly customized to allow new functionality to be "snapped" onto the site to extend functionality to your specific needs.

The second is the ability to easily integrate it with other line-of-business applications. You can't have a great sales portal if you can't bring in all your Sales collateral, leads registration, training materials, etc. into the site easily. Portals are designed to do just that.

Dynamic Content

What is dynamic content? It is content that is served up dynamically in the portal only when it is supposed to. How? With granular access control. For example, if you have a page with 10 different partner price lists on it, you'd only want the appropriate price list to show up for each partner (i.e. Reseller sees the reseller pricing, Wholesales theirs, and so forth).

While this feature is easy to talk about, it's much less easy to provide unless the platform you chose has this built in as core functionality. That's why Clarity uses the platforms that we do, that provide this out-of-the-box, and easy so your team can quickly reap the benefits of a powerful, yet easy-to-use system.

Document Management System

Document management is core to a good sales portal. When a remote sales rep is heading to a demo and the prospect asks if you've got any case studies, white papers, testimonials, technical documentation, videos, etc. like theirs, a good sales portal can provide all that information at their fingertips in seconds.

Never lose a deal because you didn't know if you had the proper information. A good DMS will also allows you to do version control, have drag and drop ease-of use, document subscriptions, favorites and more to ensure your sales people always have the latest and greatest information that marketing and development have produced.

Ease of Communication

Wouldn't it be great if an outside sales rep logged into your sales portal and they could see a direct message from their inside rep, their contact info, picture, and an updated message? (E.g., "Hey guys, I'm out in San Francisco this week at Dreamforce. I hope if you're there, you'll call and we can get together. Here's my cell ###-####-####.")

What about the ability to get ahold of another sales rep? What about asking a question of the group? What does your portal do to promote support and collaboration? A good sales portal enables and improves engagement, as well as just providing information.

Compliance Enablement

One of our clients was a medical device manufacturer that we built a sales portal for and therefore had to maintain patient portal HIPAA compliance. Their biggest issue was that their sales reps kept requesting meetings, surgeries, and appointments that violated different compliance regulations. Sales never submitted all the information that was required, and there was no trail to help improve the process.

We performed their patient portal development and built a number of complex and custom workflows into the portal that enabled the sales team to make their requests while requiring the necessary information and enforcing the compliance elements at risk. It also tracked and reported statistics on every request so the company knew exactly where it needed to focus its sales support efforts.

Sales Toolbox

There are about 20 more features that we could share, but most fall under the category of sales tools. Sales portal tools could be simple forms to register opportunities, a scheduling calendar for event supplies, access to sales training materials, sales enablement collateral, approved marketing materials, forms to request MBO (marketing business objectives) funds, and tons more. These are just a few ideas to get you thinking.

Extensible, Yet Affordable

One of the most important things is that the solution provides you the ability to extend and enhance the solution. Your business is constantly changing, morphing, growing, merging, and much more. Your sales portal needs to be able to do the same to match and stay ahead of the needs of your sales team. Your sales team is only as good as the tools that they've got available to them.

Finally, a good sales portal should be affordable, whether it's public-facing or a B2B sales portal. Just like moving into a new home, yes it's expensive, but if you paid cash for it, you'd hope that you'd only have utility expenses, at least until that additional deck or pool is added.

This holds true for any Clarity-built sales portal. Once you purchase the portal, the only ongoing expense is your hosting fees, which you have to pay for any online web property. Other than that, Clarity trains you to be able to manage, enhance and add to your portal. We'll always be here when you want to add the pool as well!