No Longer a Luxury: Why the Best-in-Class View Sales Enablement as a Must-Have

When the latest business trend evolves into a job title you can find among thousands of LinkedIn profiles, it's already too late. Stop playing catch-up and figure out how your enterprise is going to leverage what your competitors are already deploying. Our recent Research Report explores why sales enablement has evolved from a nice-to-have niche into an essential tool for successful business selling.

The foundation for Aberdeen's research methodology is based on comparing the performance and behavior of different cohorts of real-life, business-to-business (B2B) practitioners. In the case of Sales and Marketing Kumbaya: Putting Content in Context to Seal the Deal, 261 end-users in sales leadership and sales operations roles self-reported around a series of current and year-over-year performance metrics, and were segmented by Aberdeen into its traditional top 20%, middle 50%, and bottom 30% performer groups. Summarized in Figure 1 are the four KPIs that were used to define Best-in-Class, Industry Average, and Laggard organizations:

Figure 1: What Best-in-Class Sales Teams Achieve

It is hard to over-emphasize the measurable business value of achieving Best-in-Class sales results. There doesn't exist a single SVP of Sales who wouldn't like to deliver to their CEO dramatically better same-year quota results, either on a team-wide basis or in the context of far more individual contributors hitting their number. And in terms of annualized performance change, no one wants to be "that guy" who delivers Laggard-like reductions in revenue attainment, or growth-killing expansions of the average sales cycle. Nevertheless, 80% of survey respondents failed to achieve the admirable aggregate performance results of the Best-in-Class, and it is for this audience that ongoing findings from Aberdeen’s research can prove the most beneficial.

It’s All About Line-of-Site

When we explore research findings in detail, a number of clear trends emerge that provide insight into how Best-in-Class companies achieve their numbers. One of the more striking results is the differential between top-performing and other organizations, around the extent to which survey respondents indicated that “Marketing has extensive visibility into the sales team’s utilization of content / assets.” Here, 60% of Best-in-Class companies reported a formal, current competency around this knowledge management capability, while only half that number — 31% of Industry Average and 28% of Laggard firms — were on board with this crucial tenet of sales enablement deployments. These data points reflect a delta that still exists between how marketers and sellers embrace modern analytics and software tools in order to continuously improve their crafts: while the vast majority of the former utilize marketing automation platforms to track the effectiveness of their content, only 35% of the sales audience replied affirmatively to the question above. Still, if marketers have the technology and processes in place to understand what happens with their messaging, why shouldn't sales teams enjoy the same visibility?

This is where well-deployed sales enablement platforms enter the picture. In addition to efficiently creating, collecting, and providing sellers with situation-specific marketing content, they also help both teams track the effectiveness of assets, messaging, and collateral that are sent or presented to buyers. Indeed, when we analyze the performance of that 35% population against non-adopters, we see in Figure 2 a significant number of KPIs that reward the effort made to provide this clarity within the sales enablement initiative:

Figure 2: You Can't Measure What You Can't See

The lesson here: take the time to acquire and deploy, within your sales enablement process, a specific methodology around formally tracking what marketing content is most and least often presented by your sales reps or channel partners to their audiences. Not only will you be able to correlate such street-level, real-time intelligence with your various creative efforts, you'll also contribute to enviable sales performance improvement metrics by continuously refining the connection between your marketing ideas and the checks that your customers write to your company. Now, let’s take a look at how top-performing organizations support this approach.

How Do I Start?

When asked about the strategic actions that they take to improve their sales performance over the long-term, Best-in-Class companies’ top three selections are: “Improve differentiation in messaging to tell a better, unique story personalized for each prospect/customer” (61%); “Better align content to buyers and journey stages” (46%), and “Tightly align marketing activity to specific sales objectives” (44%). It's hard to make a better case for sales enablement, isn't it? But, what are the concrete initiatives that fulfill these mission statements? In Figure 3, we explore three process capabilities that Best-in-Class companies deploy, on average, 30% more frequently than under-performing firms.

• In an era when the traditional "sales cycle" has been co-opted by a data-driven "buyer's journey," it is crucial for B2B enterprises to recognize the dramatic shift that has taken place in the balance of power between modern sellers of goods and services, and their buyers. As we learn from Customer Engagement Has Evolved. Can Your Sales Team Keep Up? , enterprises must acknowledge the now-enormous ability of their prospects and customers to deeply understand all of the behind-the-scenes details – pricing, features, benefits, etc. – at work in purchase decisions. Otherwise, as the research shows, such unevolved enterprises fail to close more deals. When, however, marketers and sellers team up to align content with key stages of the buyer’s journey, they are more likely to win business because they have personalized their messaging for savvy buyers who no longer respond positively to generic, one-size-fits-all mass communications. After all, those who get in front of the right buyer, and stay in front of them throughout their journey, win.

Figure 3: Processes that Contribute to Success: Always Focus on the Buyer

• We also know from Aberdeen's extensive sales training research that utilizing formal sales methodologies is a more impactful and organized approach toward successful, large-scale enterprise selling. At first glance, this process might seem to contradict the theme of the first item in Figure 3: is it truly wise to deploy a broad, corporate, consistent messaging strategy to all of the various individual buyers of our products or services? Don't each of our markets, verticals, and target personas deserve their own unique sales pitch? Of course they do, but it is only with the help of the marketing team that the ability to develop and measure different messaging

• Lastly, Best-in-Class companies are 30% more likely than under-performers (43% vs. 33%) to capture feedback on marketing content from all possible stakeholders. Let's face it: the days when marketers could get by with "I know that half my marketing dollars are working, just not which half” are long gone. Modern corporate marketers cannot survive without measuring, in great detail, the links between virtually all of their output, and the resulting audience reactions and eventual spend. They also benefit, as proved above, from understanding not only which messages are linked to which purchases, but also the extent to which their sales counterparts are comfortable putting such content in front of their buyers. This feedback can be collected not only with anecdotal communications, but through the formal "tribal knowledge" capability embedded in the best sales enablement platforms. These applications often include an element of enterprise social collaboration that efficiently gathers user-generated ratings and comments into clear indications around how the marketing team’s many stakeholders react to their different creations. It’s not about what we create that matters – it’s about what our internal and external customers consume.strategies can be part of a continuous improvement effort within the sales operations group. These strategies, in turn, are best deployed in a way that allows the organization to collect accurate data regarding which general themes can more or less effectively be personalized for various buyers - which, in turn, begins with an agreed-upon methodology that both departments can support and collectively deploy via content performance analytics.

Check out the full report here. 

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