Sales Enablement

• Upland Software recently acquired Kapost, a content operations and marketing platform vendor
• This acquisition may foretell a trend in the marketplace
• Buyers and vendors alike must tread carefully, balancing the potential opportunity against near-term needs

• B2B companies are investing heavily in customer insights and personalization technologies to better engage with customers
• Massive amounts of customer data aren’t helping companies understand customer behavior because they’re looking for out-of-date, siloed behavior patterns
• SiriusDecisions’ Respect and Relevance Continuum provides a five-step process to help companies focus their customer interaction strategies on customer needs

• Many organizations that implement sales asset management (SAM) technology achieve some level of benefits, but over one-third still cite content findability as a top challenge
• To maximize the benefits of SAM technology, sales enablement practitioners need a realistic understanding of how reps spend their time and prefer to engage technology
• Sales asset creation and curation must align to specific selling motions and be informed by the behavior and preferences of top-performing reps as they interact with buyers

Sales enablement is poised to be a formidable engine of growth in the years to come. Watch the video below to see Principal Analyst Mary Shea lay out her vision of the future of sales enablement, and read her full report, “The Future Of Sales Enablement Is The C-Suite,” to learn what all this means […]

• As consumers, we have strong preferences for the companies we trust and admire
• These companies thrive because they focus on customer interactions and treat their buyers with respect and relevance
• B2B organizations can earn the same loyalty – and economic advantages – by learning from their consumer-driven peers

• The volume of information and the pace of change make it impossible for sellers to retain everything
• Sellers must learn to anticipate the buyer’s context and the types of information buyers will need
• Sellers must be taught how to apply information in selling situations to move buyers along the path to purchasing

• Organizations struggle to manage and govern taxonomies, leading to fragmentation and poor performance
• Content is only found, used, engaged with and measured appropriately to the extent that it is adequately tagged
• A taxonomy guild can help content organizations replace silos with bridges by fostering community collaboration and common governance

• B2B healthcare organizations waste significant funds on content creation and management, letting up to 70 percent of content go unused
• Many healthcare organizations have no idea how much is spent on content creation and management, how many sources exist or which content is used
• Successful marketing leaders are creating and deploying content centers of excellence to improve content effectiveness, lower costs, drive operational efficiencies and enable sales

• Sales enablement is a rapidly growing function with a wide variety of definitions and responsibilities
• Some organizations take a legacy approach to enablement rooted in product-centric learning to inform seller-buyer interactions
• Best practices in sales enablement favor a more holistic approach to developing role-specific skills, knowledge and process awareness that yields stronger sellers

• Sales enablement teams today often have broad mandates – but lack the resources and organizational support required to enact effective and lasting change
• SiriusDecisions provides activity studies that sales enablement can leverage to understand the sales team and gain additional support from key leaders
• Findings from the Sales Activity Study have led to increased support in asset overhauls, infrastructure changes and sales training

• B2B marketing, product and sales teams need to have the right skills and knowledge to support business goals
• Team members who feel their employer is invested in their success are more likely to stay
• Because SiriusDecisions learning is based on our research, it’s already aligned to business initiatives

• SiriusDecisions’ 2018 Sales Talent Study uncovered the preferences, behaviors and perspectives of B2B sales reps and managers
• Comparing the results of high- and low-performing sales reps reveals what works and what doesn’t when closing gaps in sales knowledge
• Four key approaches to sales knowledge transfer drive better enablement and, ultimately, better sales performance

• Although centralized content teams are becoming more common, many functions are still in their formative stages
  
• Before creating their first annual plan, new content teams need to establish an identity
  
• This identity provides a foundation by outlining a team charter and core set of strategies

• Global and regional marketing teams can use content marketing to build inbound awareness and seed demand, but they often struggle to craft a strategy to accomplish these goals
• Organizations can use the Content Marketing Strategy Turbine to achieve their content marketing objectives
• At Summit Europe 2018, Christine Polewarczyk and Paul Dolan described how to use a globally consistent – yet locally relevant – content marketing approach

• Compared to the reps they lead, first-line sales managers often receive significantly fewer opportunities to develop competencies specific to their role
• Ad hoc and reactive sales manager enablement leads to inconsistent results and processes that lack scalability and repeatability
• A lack of effective sales manager enablement drives away high-performing managers and their best reps

• Glacier formation is a slow and steady process – but the end result is something truly spectacular
• Sales enablement organizations can learn from glaciers – a deliberate, strategic approach can yield valuable dividends
• Three particular areas can benefit from the deliberate approach

• Sales enablement is a challenging blend of art and science that requires an extensive understanding of your internal customer
• Organizations taking a holistic view of enablement – focusing on building great reps instead of conducting simple knowledge transfer – produce win-win results all around
• While the research business focuses on teaching and guiding customers, sometimes you can learn a lot from them as well

• Among methods for training sales reps, gamification scored low in a recent SiriusDecisions study
• Sales and marketing technology adoption continues to puzzle many sales and marketing operations leaders
• When using gamification for tech adoption, follow a structured approach of define, design and execute

• The SiriusStars blog series provides an inside look at how select high-performing clients use SiriusDecisions research and analyst inquiry to increase revenue, meet and exceed goals, and transform their organizations
• In this edition, we feature Kathleen Pierce, director of content operations at Illumina
• We talked with Kathleen about what it was like sharing her story as an ROI Honor winner at Summit 2018, her favorite dish to cook and her dream job