What, Why and How - Sales Enablement, Revenue Operations ... · Consider this: The CSO Insights...

The CXO Guide

Sales Enablement 2019What, Why and How

www.regalix.com

June 2019

2 The CXO Guide to Sales Enablement 2019 - What, Why and How

Introduction

According to a 2017 Harvard report, the number of people involved in B2B purchases climbed from an average of 5.4 in 2015 to 6.8 in 2017.1 These people come from a variety of roles, functions and geographies, making the purchase decision a complex and long-drawn process. This increasing complexity in the B2B sales process has led organizations to look for solutions that can enhance their sales productivity, shorten the sales cycle and help them achieve a higher conversion rate. Sales enablement is one such solution that has received much attention from marketers in recent years.

Consider this: The CSO Insights ‘2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study2’ found that 59.2% of organizations in 2017 had sales enablement in place, as compared with just 19.3% back in 2013. Even as recently as 2016, the figure was a little under 33% of businesses. In a more recent study done by Regalix, ‘State of Sales Enablement 2019’,3 81% of companies surveyed stated that they had dedicated sales enablement resources in place.

62% of organizations say their sales reps need to search at least six different locations for relevant sales assets.4

The CXO Guide to Sales Enablement 2019 - What, Why and How 3

Understanding sales enablement

According to Forrester, ‘Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have valuable conversations 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’.5

In simpler terms, sales enablement is a process that helps salespeople sell more effectively to customers by providing them with relevant content and tools to compellingly address the individual needs of their customers at different stages in the buyer cycle.

Sales enablement delivers a compelling benefit – it allows a large number of salespeople to achieve their sales quota in a scalable, predictable and repeatable fashion. Sales enablement plays a key role in scaling the sales organization beyond a handful of overachievers. It provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools and resources required to be successful.6

The need for sales enablementWith the market in constant flux, a customer’s buying pattern is no longer linear; most of them follow non-sequential processes to make purchases, which is drastically different from the traditional way of completing a deal. As customers go back and forth in their buying process, sales organizations need to play the role of a guide in helping them decide. Gartner’s research shows that ‘organizations that will succeed going forward will be those that materially simplify the purchase process for customers’.7

However, buyers are becoming more aware and demanding at the same time. They want personalized treatment. They demand more self-service capabilities when it comes to product research and trial. They demand easy access to information – not brand talk or marketing push, but actual research-backed product details. Case studies and use cases all add value for the target audience. Since these buyers have a greater depth of technical knowledge and expertise, they expect you, as the solution or service provider, to offer data and information that matches their depth of knowledge and need for information.

A Forrester B2B Playbook, ‘Turn B2B Marketing Into A Customer-Obsessed Organisation’, says, ‘The next wave of competitive advantage for B2B companies will come from taking swift action based on deepening customer knowledge and delivering what their customers want before their competitors do’.8

Since every customer context is unique, you need a strategy that addresses individual customer needs. B2B buyers want to buy from a seller who understands a


buyer’s business journey and offers not a product, but a solution. The buyers want fluidity in their interactions with sales teams and a consistent buyer experience. This puts a big onus on the sales team to be updated on every aspect of the buyer’s journey. This has become so crucial for business success today that many organizations are in the process of reorganizing their sales strategies and teams around the buyer’s journey.

It’s here that sales enablement comes into play. It can help salespeople adapt their selling method to the way people buy today. It can equip them with new inbound selling knowledge, best practices and sales strategies, which will actually work in the present context. It will help them connect with today’s buyers, so they can engage with them meaningfully, gain their trust and close the deal.

Attributes of sales enablementSales enablement is less about selling and more about the customer. It starts with a deep understanding of who the customers are and what they want. It provides sales with resources to sell more effectively. Part of these resources enables sales to engage target customers with the information they want when making a buying decision. The other resources – a variety of content and performance-related tools, knowledge assets and training material – help sales to internally improve its own competence. As must be evident by now, sales enablement is not a one-time effort, but an ongoing process that businesses need to commit to.

In spite of it having found favor in most organizations, less than a third of organizations say that all or a majority of their sales enablement goals are currently being met.9 One reason for this is the confusion amongst marketers as to what sales enablement entails. However one chooses to define it, here are some key attributes of sales enablement that need to be kept in mind:10

• It’s strategic. Sales enablement is done by design. It’s deliberate. It’s a discipline. It’s governed by rules that are framed to elicit – through training – desired sales behaviors in a continuous, ongoing manner.

• It’s cross-functional. Sales enablement entails orchestrating a range of tasks and processes, chiefly across sales, marketing and product teams.

• It’s sales- and productivity- focused. The tangibles in sales enablement are quantitative performance metrics. Sales enablement’s structural framework includes assessment and tracking.

• It provides content for achieving quotas, training and coaching. Content is sales enablement’s key currency.

• Its primary target groups are frontline sales teams. Sales enablement orchestrates the interaction between sales and customers.


• It’s powered by technology. Sales enablement is tool-based and data-driven, and should ideally be integrated with CRM and other customer-facing software within the enterprise.

The Aberdeen Group has identified three categories of sales enablement:

Content-based sales enablement: Providing sellers with targeted collateral and sales assets that enable effective sales conversations with buyers.

Technology-based sales enablement: Providing sales reps with tools and technology that enable improved sales performance.

Training/education-based sales enablement: A process whereby sales reps are trained, educated or given access to knowledge that enables them to sell more effectively.

As per an Aberdeen Survey done in 2017, 52% of organizations practice content-based sales enablement, 40% practice technology-based sales enablement and 38% practice education-based sales enablement. Naturally, this means that some organizations are practicing more than one type of sales enablement.

The trend, however, is moving toward a scenario wherein organizations are blending the three forms to practice what Aberdeen Group terms as ‘all-in sales enablement’, which is showing better results than practicing just one of the methods. This is apparent from the data given below:

Figure-1

Growing companies prioritize customer success

All-in sales enablement practitioners All others

6.5%4.1%

5.3%3.3%

-0.3%0.1%

6.6%2.8%

13.3%8.5%

5.7%7.8%

Total company revenue

Marketing’s contribution to revenue

Average deal size/contract value

Profit margin

Customer retention rate

Annual sales employee turnover

Source: Aberdeen11


How sales enablement can improve the sales process

Better content management

Content is the prime asset in sales enablement. It bridges the gap between marketing strategy and sales execution. However, salespeople spend much unproductive time searching for content. According to Kapost, “65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects, representing the most common complaint cited by sales teams.” A good sales enablement tool can address this problem by providing the sales team easy access to content as well as the ability to track content effectiveness in the sales process.

Sales enablement allows you to manage content effectively. You can view and manage all the content on the same platform. A good tool will enable you to offer content in different formats, be it demo videos, data sheets, guides, product walkthroughs or playbooks. It allows for easy authoring. Importantly, it provides you with real-time analytics to discover trends and customer preferences, and determine which content is working better with which type of customer.

Picture this12

Sales enablement at the travel technology company, SAP Concur, is a fundamental part of the entire sales cycle, from top of funnel to deal close. Communicating the company’s mission to prospects and clients throughout the process is considered critical to success. Playing a central role, sales content forms the foundation upon which sales reps engage with prospects.

However, the content at Concur was scattered across multiple repositories and sellers often couldn’t find the content they needed. Reps were wasting valuable selling time hunting for content. Some sellers were using content that was badly out of date — even up to seven years old — while others were creating their own “original” assets, resulting in inconsistent messaging and ineffective sales conversations. Moreover, the sales, sales enablement and marketing teams all lacked visibility into usage data; no one could measure which content pieces were more or less effective. Without the ability to understand what was useful, it was difficult to improve content and hone messaging.

Having considered various options, Concur chose to implement a sales enablement platform. After the initial pilot run, the platform was rolled out worldwide.


The result? 90% of sellers were satisfied or very satisfied with the platform. Adoption was impressively high, with 95% of sales reps using the platform each month. Concur estimates that reps now save 4 hours a week, which they used to spend looking for content. With more than 1,000 reps worldwide, this adds up to impressive productivity gains.

Aligning sales with the customer journey The quality and relevance of content will determine how well B2B buyers engage with you. A sales enablement tool can help deliver the right kind of content to each prospect based on their buying journey.

According to the ‘2017 World-Class Sales Practices Study’ conducted by CSO Insights, over half of sales organizations (54%) do not formally align their sales process, or other aspects of how they sell, to the specific journeys taken by their customers. Interestingly, those that do have such an alignment report quota attainment rates up to 14% greater than the average13.

Given the benefits of aligning the sales process to the customer journey, it’s apparent why companies are progressing from a one-size-fits-all process to a customized approach to selling based on their understanding of the customers and their needs. However, it should be kept in mind that the buying journey is not necessarily linear;14 customers are channel agnostic and seek information at every level of their buying journey. A good sales enablement tool allows you to follow a customer’s journey intimately. It provides you with a better understanding of their buying behavior, their preferences and their future intents.

Automating the admin function A large percentage of the salesperson’s time is spent in admin work, taking away attention from the selling process. According to a Pace Productivity report, only around 22% of the average salesperson’s time is actually spent on selling activities. Around 12% is spent on order processing and post-sales tasks, while 23% is spent carrying out basic administrative tasks15 (See figure 2).

One of the potential uses of digital technology within the field of sales enablement is in automating many of the more repetitive administrative tasks which do not necessarily require human involvement. This reduces the time spent by the sales reps on non-sales activities, so that they can spend more time on the actual selling process. In this, artificial intelligence is emerging as an effective solution.


Figure-2

Typical sales rep’s split of weekly hours

4%

10%

22%

12%

10%

23%

13%

6%

MiscPlanning

Selling

Order processing

Service

Administration

Travel

Lunch/Break

Source: Pace Productivity16

Improving team skills Sales enablement tools can help increase the effectiveness of a sales training program. The use of voice recognition software and other methods of collecting behavioral data are becoming popular amongst corporate trainers. They help trainers understand the specific strengths and weaknesses of individual sales team members, so coaching modules can be personalized to suit each member in terms of content and duration.

In most organizations, the difference between achievers and laggards in the sales team is often significant. A sales enablement tool can help the leaders understand what’s working with the achievers and what’s not with the laggards, so they can use that information to improve performance, thereby increasing the overall productivity of the team.

Easing the onboarding process One of the biggest challenges that sales managers face is devising methods to quickly ramp up new hires so they can start closing deals. According to The Bridge Group, the average ramp time for new sales hires in a B2B technology company is 4.7 months;


that’s an awful lot of time, given that the average tenure of a sales rep is only 2.6 years.17 According to the Regalix study, ‘State of Sales Enablement 2019’, 42% of companies said it took anywhere between 3 and 9 months for them to onboard sales representatives and get them ready to sell.

With the implementation of a sales enablement tool, one should ideally see a decrease in the overall ramp-up time of a salesperson. Using the tool, you can create your own onboarding plan and set objectives for the new sales team based on different milestones. This will give you a clear idea of how each sales rep is performing, and thus, help you identify the slow learners for whom you may need to provide additional support.

Technologies powering sales enablement

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have come together to play a significant role in driving sales enablement technologies to the next level. Artificial intelligence, along with speech recognition, can help reduce the iterative human interventions that are required to get the sales process implemented effectively. This will afford the salesperson time to focus on more important sales-related activities like connecting with clients, interacting over social media or collaborating with marketing to create customized content.

Sales coaching is another area that will benefit from artificial intelligence in the future. Sales managers will be able to utilize the technology to gain a better understanding of how their salespeople work. For instance, AI systems could be used to analyze sales conversations as they occur and provide in-the-moment feedback to salespeople. The benefits of such a system could be far reaching. Rather than occasionally listening in on sales calls or relying on role playing to make assessments of sales techniques, sales managers would be able to receive completely unbiased accounts of real-life sales conversations and use them to inform their coaching efforts.18

AnalyticsBig data analytics can help the sales enablement efforts of B2B seller organizations with meaningful insights. It can be used to track the success of various interactive and social selling initiatives that a sales team might have started. It can be used to understand which initiatives have worked and which haven’t. Data collected from such sources can further help the organization develop its customer engagement approach.


Sales enablement tools can provide valuable insights into how reps and prospects are engaging with sales content. Marketers can then use this information to further optimize content creation. They can promote content that customers are interested in spending a longer time with. Marketers can also identify trends and correlations between content usage and revenue, then use this data to inform reps of which content is most likely to help push a deal forward.

Mobile technology

Mobile is no longer merely a B2C platform; even B2B buyers are increasingly making use of it. They now access content as much on their desktops as on their mobiles. According to a 2017 Boston Consulting Group report, mobile drives or influences an average of over 40% of revenue in leading B2B organizations.19

This has given rise to the emergence of mobile sales enablement tools. Now, sales teams can conveniently access engaging content across multiple platforms. In fact, this trend of organizations migrating to mobile devices, whether tablets, smartphones or laptops, should prepare B2B sellers to have interactive sales and marketing experiences made available to their customers on any device.

Picture this20

Caterpillar, the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines, and diesel-electric locomotives has a huge network of dealers and salespeople. It has a network of over 220 dealers in more than 180 countries to sell and distribute machinery and equipment. These dealers have thousands of sales reps who interface with the customers. This presents a unique challenge for Caterpillar’s sales and marketing teams – how best to disseminate sales and marketing content in a timely manner? The company needed a tool to send up-to-date material and information to the sales reps in its network of dealers. It needed to be sent out in different languages, in a format that could be opened on any platform.

Caterpillar turned to mobile technology to gets its sales enablement strategy up. It used a custom-made CAT mobile sales app to help its on-ground sales force with dynamic content. Over 12,000 users (sales reps in the dealer network) of this customized app can now access a media-rich platform to show videos and 360-degree views of large equipment to their customers. The mobile sales app also allows each dealer to develop and add their own branded material under the Caterpillar umbrella. The salespeople have access to Caterpillar’s media libraries and other content at all times, through mobile technology.


Road ahead

In the future, sales enablement platforms will continue to evolve and go from being generic sales tools to intelligent sales platforms; they will focus on merging talent development, technology, sales processes, messaging and sales methodology so as to better train, support, coach and guide sellers, similar to how buyers are supported throughout the buying journey and customer lifecycle.

Processes will become more automated and actions will be driven by data and insights. Machine learning, analytics and AI will drive this change. Going forward, data science will be very relevant in understanding and identifying customer behavior trends. There will be a higher level of customer mapping. This will enable the sales team to realign their content and information using sales enablement tools, so as to give a hyper-personalized experience to the target audience.

As businesses move into the digital space to seek information, data will have to be made available to customers in all possible platforms and easy-to-access formats. Social selling will become even more relevant in the B2B space as platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook become the space for information sharing and gathering. These platforms will also help the team to network further and find the next set of customers. As social media evolves further, sales teams will have newer dimensions to map their audiences to and create content for. There will be a demand for relevant, timely and niche information that customers will seek out.

In the future, we see sales enablement tools being powered further by more evolved AI, data science and speech-recognition technologies to create highly specialized customer-facing content. There will be a higher level of business intelligence in use and less human intervention to help sales teams drive more successful deals.

47% of organizations’ salespeople spend over 20 hours each month searching for, editing, creating and managing content.21


References:1 https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-new-sales-imperative

2 https://www.csoinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/10/2017-SE-Execu tive-Summary.pdf

3 https://www.regalix.com/insights/state-of-sales-enablement-2019/

4 https://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/four-sales-enablement-facts-that-will-make-you-nervous-about-taking-too-much-summer-vacation-part-ii

5 ‘WhatIs“SalesEnablement”AndHowDidForresterGoAboutDefiningIt?’,www.blogs. forrester.com

6 https://blog.topohq.com/sales-enablement-who-what-how-when-why/

7 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-keynote-the-new-imperative-for-b2b-sales-and-marketing-leaders/

8 https://www.forrester.com/report/Turn+B2B+Marketing+Into+A+CustomerObsessed+Organiza-tion/-/E-RES136117

9 https://www.sharedemos.com/articles/sales-enablement-and-the-elephant

10 https://www.highspot.com/success-stories/concur/

11 https://www.aberdeen.com/cmo-essentials/what-is-sales-enablement/

12 https://www.csoinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/08/2017-World-Class-Sales-Prac-tices-Report.pdf

13 https://www.paceproductivity.com/single-post/2017/02/09/How-Sales-Reps-Spend-Their-Time


15 https://blog.bridgegroupinc.com/hubfs/resources/Periodic_Table_Inside_Sales.pdf


17 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sales-enablement-use-ai-future-monika-goetzmann

18 Source: Mobile Marketing and the New B2B Buyer by Boston Consulting Group in part nership with Google,Oct2017.

19 https://www.gomodus.com/case-study-caterpillar?__hstc=80530888.6debd92f-b9eb4edf0df9ba31e4bdb2af.1553427972308.1553427972308.1553427972308.1&hssc=80530888.1.1553427972309&__hsfp=38473495

20 https://www.denave.com/the-continuous-evolution-of-sales-enablement-over-the-years/

21 https://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/four-sales-enablement-facts-that-will-make-you-nervous-about-taking-too-much-summer-vacation-part-ii

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