Sales Enablement

In Forrester’s recently published report, “The Forrester Wave™: Sales Content Solutions, Q3 2020,” we evaluated the nine most significant ones — Accent Technologies, Bigtincan, ClearSlide (a division of Corel), Highspot, Mediafly, MindMatrix, Pitcher, Seismic, and Showpad — against 40 criteria. After researching, analyzing, and scoring each vendor’s current offering, strategy, and market presence, we identified […]

Data from the SiriusDecisions 2020 Customer-Facing Roles Survey indicates that the right content makes the difference in the ability of CSMs to meet customer expectations. Just as important: The right content reduces time wasted searching for material, which means B2B organizations are more likely to keep those CSMs around.

Most B2B organizations invest significant effort in customer feedback via customer advisory boards, but many fail to consider the same kind of insight from their internal sales team. Sales advisory councils represent a valuable opportunity for organizations to collect vital sales feedback on major strategic initiatives and identify any broad sales issues that must be addressed. Forrester’s own council is a textbook definition of how high-performing sales teams leverage a sales advisory council.

Summit plenary sessions will include actionable insights about changing B2B buying habits and practical advice about how to create resilient sales plans to navigate turbulent times. Sales-specific track sessions will outline how to build a best-in-class outbound prospecting organization, how to select and implement a sales methodology, and how to adopt dynamic selling. technology

Sales enablement and marketing professionals interested in the current and future state of the sales enablement function should take this survey and be the first to receive results.

• Far too many sales asset management (SAM) technology purchases are treated as a project, not a lifestyle
• The result is disappointed sales enablement leaders who miss the ROI potential of their deployment
• Organizations that best leverage their SAM environment reap the most long-term benefits

• B2B revenue enablement demands an understanding of the specific combination of personas, competencies, assets, and communications inherent to every buyer and customer journey
• As Forrester SiriusDecisions defines it, revenue enablement is a discipline that seeks to bring the skills, knowledge, assets, and process expertise to all customer-facing roles
• Our research shows that organizations with advanced capabilities around revenue enablement are more likely to outperform others still employing more siloed approaches toward optimizing their customers’ experience

• Pivoting to new messaging and content is a top priority in B2B at this time of global crisis
• To support shifting needs, cross-functional B2B teams must be flexible and nimble
• Content leaders and their teams are well positioned to provide strategy and resources to support the new normal

• COVID-19’s full impact is far from known, but its reach is unprecedented
• B2B interactions have been affected severely by the crisis, leaving sales professionals uncertain about how to proceed
• We offer a discussion on how to tell whether it’s too soon to sell

• Podcasting has witnessed a boom in engagement with more senior-level executives
• SiriusDecisions research reveals that while podcasts don’t prove to be effective for sales-specific learning, they are effective for communications
• Podcasts are most effective when they’re part of an integrated communications plan with the field

• A year ago, SiriusDecisions’ Jeff Lash presented “’Twas the Night Before Product Launch: A SiriusDecisions Holiday Poem”
• Peter Ostrow continues the tradition with “’Twas the Night Before Year-End,” with an homage to sales enablement
• Best wishes from our pipeline to yours!

• Content must be treated as data to deliver on the increasing expectations of B2B buyers
• A modular approach to content is key to an organization’s ability to capture and classify valuable insights
• Marketers must be able to respond to customers in real time with content that motivates the next-best action

• Aging or antiquated tech stacks lead to inefficiencies, including manual or under-automated sales processes
• SiriusDecisions 2019 Technology Exchange focuses on data and technology for sales, marketing, customer success, revenue operations and revenue enablement
• Sales engagement platforms provide sales reps with superpowers by increasing their productivity and effectiveness, shortening sales cycles and boosting revenue

• B2B content marketers often struggle with the complexities of pulling together strategically effective plans
  
• Programs demand better audience focus with content personalization, but technology, process and regulatory challenges lurk
  
• On the occasion of Halloween, here are a few tricks to help unlock the secrets to better content planning

• Though sales enablement is making progress via competency-driven support for sales reps, other customer-facing personas receive less formal enablement
• B2B organizations vary widely in their approaches to enabling customer-facing associates, which can significantly affect the consistency of outcomes, scalability and measurement of impact
• In his Summit Europe 2019 session, Peter Ostrow shared how organizations can optimize their revenue engine by using the SiriusDecisions Revenue Enablement Framework

• Revenue ops and sales ops leaders should make understanding the latest sales technology innovation a routine part of their jobs
• Five key activities help determine what technology can be leveraged by sales management
• Technology solutions improve the sales management process by automating, accelerating and increasing the effectiveness of coaching, management and forecasting

• Organizations frequently think of marketing, sales, service and renewal cycles as independent sets of customer interactions
• Customers are more likely to purchase and renew when their experience is consistent across all interactions with an organization
• Sales enablement is making strong headway via competency-driven support, but other customer-facing personas should receive similar enablement

• Revenue ops and sales ops leaders should make understanding the latest sales technology innovation part of their jobs
• Six key activities determine what technology can be leveraged for opportunity management
• Technology solutions can improve opportunity management by automating sales activities and informing, advising and predicting outcomes at various points in the sales cycle

• Modular content is a best practice for high performing content organizations, but only 49% of B2B content organizations use modular content strategies in website content management, according to the SiriusDecisions 2018 State of B2B Content study
  
• Two key blockers to modular content adoption are close to being resolved, thanks to innovations in content fingerprint technologies
  
• Digital fingerprints help marketers track assets within their systems and repositories to help identify bottlenecks and other workflow issues, among other benefits