Category: Sales Enablement Strategy

After stepping into The Standard at High Line NYC, Alyce Bernstein, a marketer at Euler Hermes, was hoping to walk away from Highspot Spark with a handful of best practices and new industry connections. What she got was much more.

“I have filled multiple pages in a notebook with ideas,” she told our team afterward.

Alyce’s experience was no happy accident — Highspot Spark is an annual customer roadshow designed to help sales, sales enablement, and marketing leaders learn from one another through a community of enablement experts.

And learn they did. Four cities, more than 30 sessions, and hundreds of “learn-it-all” moments later, customers returned to their day-to-days armed with real-world best practices from their peers.

If you couldn’t attend, don’t worry. We’ve compiled a number of learnings that surfaced throughout conversations at Highspot Spark for you to explore and put into practice.

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“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.” –Oscar Wilde

Oscar’s words ring true for many occasions, but especially so for the current state of sales enablement. In our quest to learn more about the state of our industry around the world, we partnered with CSO Insights for their Fifth Annual Sales Enablement Study. A consistent theme emerged — sales enablement has solidified its place as a necessary business function and, as a result, organizations are focused on maturing processes and strategies to maximize impact.

The study found that companies with an aligned sales enablement team and formalized collaboration processes had the most impact on:

• Increasing win rates for forecast deals
• Improving the full-funnel customer experience and customer relationship
• Driving seller engagement, including higher adoption rates for sales processes and methodology

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Most people who change the world don’t set out to do so. Innovation expert and New York Times contributor Pagan Kennedy has found genius often unexpectedly strikes those “in a position to see a problem that needs fixing in a very personal way.”

The evolution of sales enablement technology follows this pattern. For decades, salespeople have wasted precious hours searching for sales assets while marketers have been beset by countless inbound content requests. Necessity demanded a more efficient way of organizing, discovering, and analyzing content — and those who experienced these challenges first-hand invented technology that is now changing the way millions work.

But not all sales enablement platforms are created equal. Recognizing real innovation is increasingly difficult amidst industry hype and buzzword-laden marketing. So how can you separate a genuinely game-changing platform from the rest? Look for these critical capabilities:

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The phrase “if you’re not early, you’re late” is one of the most familiar pieces of advice passed down from generation to generation and mentor to mentee. So much so that the phrase has over 1.4 billion search results on Google — which is understandable when you consider how often the advice is applicable. From job interviews to product differentiation, it’s always beneficial to stay ahead of the competition.

Sales Enablement PRO recently published the 2019 State of Sales Enablement and the report clearly echoed a similar sentiment — companies without an established sales enablement function are behind the curve and risk falling prey to their competitors.

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Sales enablement is sweeping the globe.

In partnership with Sales Enablement PRO, we surveyed more than 500 executives, sales enablement, and marketing leaders from companies of all sizes across the world. What we found validates that sales enablement is becoming the backbone of successful sales organisations spanning industries and geographies.

More than 79% of participants have a sales enablement process or practice in place, or plan on inventing one this year — a 20% increase from last year’s survey. Despite urgent demand and clear evidence of sales enablement’s business impact, clear definitions and best practices are wanting. The 68% of respondents who reported having a dedicated sales enablement tool named more than 150 different solutions when asked to identify the tools in use — demonstrating confusion in the market around what is truly needed to enable reps.

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Every founder anticipates the moment when their business must scale because rapid growth demands it. But growing a business is as challenging as it is exhilarating.

That’s because it’s difficult to hire, train, and enable a sales force capable of sustained growth. Only 16% of sales leaders are confident that they have the talent they need to succeed in the future. Research conducted by Xerox showed that 87% of the new knowledge learned in sales training is lost within 12 weeks. And once they’re trained, up to 1/3 of a sales professional’s time is spent looking for or creating content to share with prospects.

Though harrowing, these numbers reveal an opportunity for operational changes that can optimize the sales process from onboarding to content. The solution I’m referring to is sales enablement.

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Effective sales strategies are developed through careful evaluation and constant improvement. At Highspot, we work with sales and marketing leaders every day to enable their success, so we know firsthand the importance of a strong sales strategy.

Below, we’ve answered the most frequently asked questions about developing a winning sales strategy.

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Prospecting, pitching, tracking engagement — there’s no question that modern technology solutions have made it easier for sellers to complete these essential tasks. But even as the tools have improved, selling has become more complicated as buyers’ expectations have risen. With increased access to information, buyers today do more of their research independently and invite more internal stakeholders into buying decisions. To capture and win buyers’ attention, sellers must now research and present insightful solutions tailored to multiple decision makers’ needs. The result is that reps end up spending more time trying to keep up with increasingly complex sales processes, impacting overall sales productivity.

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Quality over quantity: we’ve all heard the age-old advice to prioritize value instead of numbers. But of course, in sales, sellers need both quality and quantity to build a busy pipeline of qualified buyers. Sales enablement and sales engagement support sales teams in forming meaningful connections with buyers at scale and streamlining sales processes. There’s strong support for both:

• Sales enablement: Aberdeen has shown that companies with successful sales enablement programs see 23% higher lead conversion rate.
• Sales engagement: SiriusDecisions reports that training and supporting sellers with sales engagement can potentially increase the tenure of sales reps by 40 to 65%.

But what’s the difference between sales enablement and sales engagement — and which do you need for your sales team to ensure quality and quantity? To answer that question, it helps to start by defining the two different practices.

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I always find it fun to interview fellow marketers and bond through our shared understanding of great products, strong value propositions — and common pain points. The pain of sales and marketing alignment (or misalignment) is one that every marketer knows but few know how to solve. After trying to tackle this issue in several different ways, Phill Sundal at DiscoverOrg finally found success with Highspot. In the interview below, he outlines the successes and failures he encountered as he worked to bring sales and marketing into alignment at his company.

Here is the video interview, as well as the interview transcript, below:

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