While sales enablement technology is proven to increase revenue by 66%, 93% of companies have yet to implement a sales enablement platform. This is often due to the myths of sales enablement being expensive, complex to deploy and having low adoption rates. Before diving into the benefits of a sales enablement platform and what it does, let’s first dive into what sales enablement is and why it’s important.
What Is Sales Enablement?
According to Forrester Consulting, sales enablement is defined as:
A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.
Forrester Consulting
What Is “Sales Enablement” And How Did Forrester Go About Defining It?
So what does that actually mean?
If you think of your salesforce in the context of a bell curve, imagine moving your average sellers from the bottom of the bell curve to the top with your top performers. The goal of sales enablement is to move your average sellers from the bottom to the top to get them to start selling like a top-performer. For your new or average sellers, it’s possible they lack the knowledge or charisma to execute the value-based sales presentations your top performers do with every buyer. Having the right sales enablement technology in place allows your new and average sellers to see what’s working with top sellers to help elevate their sales success. At Mediafly, we call this evolution of a sales organization, Evolved Selling™.
Why Do You Need Sales Enablement?
Simply put, buyers have changed. Up to 70% of the information B2B buyers see is self-discovered online, not given to them by a sales rep. When a buyer connects with a seller, expectations are high. They don’t want to hear a pitch about the product’s features and functions. Instead, they seek out personalized and engaging buying experiences, allowing them to understand what unique challenges your product or service solves and how it will help them achieve their financial goals.
With this change in buyer behavior, sellers need to go beyond a stagnant PowerPoint presentation. Instead, they need to have the technology to be able to pivot on the spot, providing real-time information to build trust with their buyer and ultimately, close the deal. Sales enablement technology does just that.
According to Forbes, sales enablement solutions are the top technology investment for boosting sales productivity. Report data shows that 59% of companies that surpassed revenue targets – and 72% that exceed them by 25% or more – have a defined sales enablement function.
What Should A Sales Enablement Platform Do?
While there are many capabilities in a sales enablement platform, we, at Mediafly, believe a sales enablement platform should provide sellers with the following:
- The ability to easily find relevant, up-to-date content including videos, interactive tools, slides for use in conversations with buyers
- The ability to quickly pivot in sales conversation to meet the buyer’s exact needs, creating a personalized and unique experience for the buyer
- Interactive tools including ROI, TCO and value-selling calculators, and product configurators, capturing input from the buyer to help guide sales discussions
- The ability to pull real-time data from various sources, helping address the buyer’s unique challenges
- Data and analytics on how content is performing, buyer-specific data-driven insights to move deals forward and insights into how content is being leveraged by sales and consumed by prospects
- Integration with CRM to help effortlessly craft meeting follow-up messaging and reference materials used in previous meetings
These capabilities set buyers at any level up for success. Unfortunately, sales enablement technology is often perceived as expensive, complicated and risky. But it doesn’t have to be. All sales teams or sales organizations are on their own sales enablement journey. With no one journey alike, organizations must take the time to work with their sales enablement provider to create a platform that is uniquely specific to their organization’s needs.
Recently, Mediafly acquired iPresent to help provide sales enablement for all. Through this acquisition, we’re able to deliver the most comprehensive and agile sales enablement solution to businesses of any size, removing the enterprise-level cost and implementation hurdles many companies feel intimidated by when purchasing sales enablement technology.
If you’re debating purchasing sales enablement technology but are concerned about implementation, time commitment, etc., take smaller steps toward your goal. Always remember this is a journey. By incorporating sales enablement technology, you can stop watching your average sellers struggle to meet their goals and in turn, watch your entire sales team prosper.
