Our Blog

Sales enablement is a cross-functional discipline that integrates and coordinates the customer-focused value chain (sales, marketing, service, etc.) for an adaptive & tailored buyer decision journey experience.

Although several challenges are mitigated by a sales enablement tool, many businesses tackle each challenge with point solutions on a case-by-case basis, and executive decision makers are often unaware of the broader front-line challenges being faced by the sales and marketing team on a daily basis.

Let’s examine why business managers and executives need sales enablement for long term business outcomes.

In our previous post, we offered suggestions for earning executive buy-in for a sales enablement initiative. This article continues that discussion on management value drivers.

1) Cut and/or Control Costs

Sales enablement tools are frequently disregarded as just one more unnecessary added cost for the sales process. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Return Selling Time to the Sales Process

Sales enablement is designed to automate unnecessary, repetitive, and inefficient tasks in order to put selling time back in the hands of sellers

Currently less than a third of a sales rep’s time is spent in direct selling activities with a 2015 study revealing a figure as low as 23% (Source: Market Wired, 2015). This figure is down from 35% in 2013, and well below 1998 figures of 47% (Source: ROInnovations, 2014).

Sales enablement works to mitigate these with:

• 52% increase in job specific roles being completed by sales reps (quotes, proposals, RFPs delivered, etc.); and
• 48% decrease in the amount of time spent in non-selling activities (waiting for approval on contracts, searching for material) (Source: Aberdeen, 2015).

More Efficient Marketing

Sales enablement takes consumption insights from the end of the sales funnel and informs marketers about the real impact of their content during closing.

Content marketing is now a strategy implemented by many, yet as 84% state that content creation is owned by the marketing team, three quarters of sales reps state that they “occasionally” or “never” get what they need from marketing (Source: Firebrick Consulting, 2012). Furthermore, only one in five (21%) sales reps felt they had anything relevant to share with buyers (Source: The Sales Way, 2014). Interestingly, the 21% found in 2014 aligned with our 2015 study, where the feeling was that their content was effective for closing when no sales insights are integrated (see below).

Wasted marketing content damages profitability and sales process effectiveness. Here’s the difference with shared insights:

[RELATED CONTENT] Shared insights are one way to drive stronger sales and marketing alignment. See how you can drive sales and marketing alignment in your organization with our FREE eBook.

2) Comprehensive Sales and Marketing Level Insights

Knowledge is power, and sales enablement automatically logs digital content consumption from the sales process into CRM, providing deep geographic, demographic, and behavioral data for sellers, marketers, planners, and leaders.

Fewer than  one-third of marketers are effectively using digital content consumption metrics (Source: Kapost, 2014), 17% stated they had no use of metrics, and a whopping 48% said they use only basic levels of digital content consumption metrics (Source: Demand Metric, 2014).

Sales enablement works to deliver:

• 97% increase in awareness of who accessed content, when, where, and how;
• 54% greater awareness of relationship closeness and frequency of communications; and
• 186% increase in effective and actionable 360 degree customer views (Source: Aberdeen, 2015).

3) Formalize the Sales Process

Extensive visibility into the sales process facilitates strong sales and marketing alignment and breaks down silos. Sales enablement closes the gap between your best and worse sellers, highlights key behaviours, and enables integrated marketing communications for inside and outside sales teams.

Fewer than two-thirds of sales reps were deemed as knowledgeable about their own products, and buyers feel that only 22% of sales reps understand the their issues, and are able to see and position where they can help.

Other noted issues:

(Image Source: CustomerThink, 2014)

Interestingly here, it seems that the top challenges are almost symptoms of those listed near the bottom of the graph.

Meanwhile sales reps with sales enablement tools and processes (like extensive visibility) see 15% greater attainment of their quota, 33% greater lead acceptance rate, and 22% greater year-over-year increases in total company revenue (Source: Aberdeen, 2015). Furthermore, 7 out of 10 top performing organizations excel at providing consistent messaging throughout the buyer’s journey, compared to 37% of all others (Source: Forbes, 2015).

4) Add Value to Existing Systems

Enhanced CRM Usage

Sales enablement tools automatically update CRM systems with comprehensive end-of-funnel data that saves hours of sales labour hours from manual, and often anecdotal, CRM updating.

Among organizations with any CRM and sales integration, only 19% have mobile access to the tool, and a fewer 14% have behavioral and touch point analytics built into the system (Source: Aberdeen, 2015). Meanwhile CRM adoption rates among users is under 50% (Source: SmartSellingTools, 2014) with some recent studies suggesting adoption as low as 26% (Source: Top Sales World, 2015).

Sales enablement improves ROI from a CRM investment with:

• 186% greater use of data quality integration;
• 230% increase in mobile access to customer data; and
• 78% increase in the integration of multiple management platforms.

Eliminate Point-Solutions from your Sales Stack

The sales stack is suffering from an explosion of point-solutions built to address specific challenges in a fragmented digital sales process. While the number of inside sales companies doubled in recent years, an effective sales stack only warrants five tools.

Sales enablement allows for the use of rich multimedia tools and app integration that reduces or eliminates the need for several point-solutions like signature capture software, trade show forms, 3D graphics, and etc.

Are the challenges of digital content sales and marketing hampering your sales team? Request a demo and let us show you how sales enablement software puts money back in your pocket.