Enablement Metrics That Matter

More Purchase Decision Friction

• Buyers are having 60% more interactions with you, as a solution provider, from just three-years ago
• 80% of purchases now include a complex buying group with 60% of purchases having four or more people scrutinizing the decision (versus 47% prior)
• 75% of deals now have Executives as decision-makers (versus just 58% prior) and 51% have Finance as decision-makers (versus 35% prior).

Significantly More Buying Interactions and Buyers Involved Post-Pandemic

• From 17 to 27 - the dramatic increase in the number of buying interactions (both conversations and self-service) conducted by purchase decision makers during the pandemic.
• 63% - of purchases have more than four people involved — vs. just 47% in 2017 — and they can include different buyer roles — champions, influencers, decision makers, users, or ratifiers — from multiple departments.

A Matter of Trust - ed Advisor

• 56% of decision-makers will consider a brand if the sales professional understands their business needs
• 88% of decision-makers prefer working with sales professionals they perceive as trusted advisors
• 35% of decision-makers rank trust as the top contributor in closing a deal—above ROI or price

Digital and Remote – Here to Stay

• 53% of workers who are currently remote hope they will be able to continue to work from home (WFH) more often even after the crisis is over.
• 44% of US workers glad their business travel has been cut back
• 38% of respondents said the in-person sales meeting had decreased in value.

• 80% of B2B sales will now be done digitally and remotely
• 70% – At the start of the crisis. nearly 70% of B2B sellers stated they didn’t believe they could be as effective in a virtual sales meeting as they are in person, and as a result
• 40% of B2B reps plan to modify their tactics to adapt to remote selling activities
• 57% of B2B sales leaders plan to make deeper investments in tools with AI and automation to accomplish more with less and improve engagement effectiveness

The Growing Buying Committee

• 14 for smaller purchases, <1M
• 19 for medium sized purchases, of between $1 and $5M
• 23 for enterprise-level decisions of greater than $5M

Buying Ain’t Easy

• 77% of B2B buyers state that their last purchase was very complex or difficult
• 94% of those B2B buyers surveyed experienced a cancelled purchase cycle, ending in “no decision”
• 84% of B2B buyers report that when a buying cycle does culminate in a “Yes” decision, it is taking longer than expected, for many up to two times longer.

Sellers Report Internal Purchase Decision Challenges

• 78% indicating that their top internal decision-making challenge is dealing with multiple stakeholders with different agendas,
• 49% indicating that their buyers and customers are taking longer to make decisions.

No Decision

• Less than half (47.3%) of forecasted business ends up being closed
• A third (32.0%) is lost to the competition
• Over 20% ends up being indefinitely stalled, lost to “no decision”

No Decision is More Costly Than you Might Think

• $70,000 – Buying Organization Costs
• $100,000 – Cost to Vendors ($25K each)

• $35,000 – Buying Organization Costs
• $60,000 – Cost to Vendors ($20K each)

Buying is Definitely More Complex and Difficult

• 38% of purchase processes end in "No Decision".
• There is an increased scrutiny on spending with 53% of buyers have reprioritized their spending across all categories and 38% have put in place a spending freeze.
• Procurement and Finance are more involved, with 54% of all purchases requiring prior central approval and 38% of all new purchases requiring an RFP.

The Modern Buyer Challenge

• 67% of the buyer’s journey is done before speaking to a sales rep (SiriusDecisions / Forrester)
• 40% of buyers say they prefer salespeople who offer solutions that solve their specific challenges (DiscoverOrg)
• 77% of buyers expect sellers to help them learn something new and share customized data insights (Forrester)
• 86% of buyers take the time to listen if their salesperson can provide meaningful insights about their business (Forrester)
• 88% – The percent of buyers who agree that the salespeople they ultimately do business with are “trusted advisors.” At the same time, just 40% of decision makers describe the sales profession as “trustworthy.” So, while buyers may distrust the sales profession in the aggregate, they do trust the salespeople they eventually buy from (Linkedin)

Revenue Enablement Opportunity - Elevating the Customer Engagement Experience

• 43% of B2B customers prefer to not interact with a sales rep at all
• 23% - purchase regret for those customers preferring a rep-free experience is 23% higher than for customers who interact with a sales rep
• 64% of surveyed customers cannot tell the difference between one B2B brand’s digital experience and another’s.
• 76% of customers report doing nothing different as a result of engaging suppliers’ through digital means (e.g., websites, online tools, digital content).

What a Buyer Wants. What a Buyer Needs

• 74% of buyers value sellers who pivot meetings to discuss what the buyer wants to talk about, not just a blind pitch
• 77% treasure getting customized data and insights from sellers who can teach them something new
• 75% want sellers to show how their products and services drive business value outcomes.

The New Reality

• 51% of their customers were experiencing budget cuts
• 45% indicated that specific industries were at a standstill
• 42% said there was turnover or layoffs at their customers’ companies

• 44% of respondents anticipated a decrease in responsiveness to outreach
• 44% of sellers indicated that their customer’s sales cycles had increased

Buyer changes over past 12 to 18 months?

• 53% – indicate that Buyers require more financial justification
• 50% – say that Buyers conduct more research prior to engaging with sales
• 46% – signify that Buyers have increased expectations for value-added insights

Today’s Buyer Prefers Digital?

• 62% of B2B buyers say they can now develop selection criteria for finalizing a vendor list based solely on digital content
• 70% of prospects say that buying from a website is the most convenient way to buy business products or services
• 67% of buyers prefer not to interact with a sales representative as their primary source of information.

Even for Big Purchases, are B2B Buyers Going Pure Digital?

• 33% of buyers say they prefer to engage in a seller-less transaction
• 44% of millennials, even more say they prefer a pure digital engagement
• 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers Will occur in Digital channels by 2025

Tech Buying gets the Business

• 63% of those who influence tech purchases now work in business functions outside of the IT department
• Back in 2014, IT was the most influential voice in 75% of tech buying decisions. Today that figure stands at only 39%.

• Over 40% of buying journeys in the tech sector extend beyond one year
• Nearly one in five takes more than two years.

Are Sellers still Relevant?

• 77% of B2B buyers want integrated customized data or insights from sellers and 77% also want sellers to “help me learn something new”
• 75% of B2B prospects want sellers to “show how their products and services impact my business”, providing relevant use-cases, business value communication and quantification and success story proof-points
• 2/3rds of B2B buyers want access to products, parts and inventory availability online

Sales Experience is the Key Factor to Customer Loyalty, But Sellers are Falling Behind

• Demonstrates unique insights (-52%)
• Helps me come to a decision (-34%)
• Understands and addresses different stakeholder needs (-41%)
• Helps me build support across my organization (-49%)
• Makes it easy for me to make a purchase (-30%)

Buyers Value Good Information and Purchase Ease

• 2.8x more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease.
• 3x more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.

Vendors Struggle to Get Buyer Time and Attention

• Only 17% of the buyer’s journey is spent in meetings with potential suppliers.
• The rest of the time is spent meeting with the buying group (22%), on researching independently online (27%), researching independently offline (18%) and other (16%).

Enterprise Deals: More Friction & More Effort

• 6 – There are (at least) 6 decision-makers who are signing off on the new purchase.
• 14 – There’s a bigger group of 14 stakeholders who are involved in the evaluation process.
• 19 – On average, it takes 19 meetings to complete the sales cycle.

The Value Gap

• 21% of buyers said that their interactions with sellers are “low-value”
• 80% of sellers still predominantly pitch products and services
• Only 20% are focused on what buyers really care about: their challenges, potential improvements, and the business value outcome of proposed solutions.

Sales Operations: Red Hot Growth, But Some Smokey Challenges

• The number of Sales Operations pros increased by 38% between 2018 and 2020,
• Over the same timeframe, the number of Sales Operations pros grew 4.8X faster than the sales function overall.

• 76% - Managing my organization's sales / business development tools
• 72% - Suggesting growth strategies for the sales team
• 72% - Expand selling by building relationships with existing customers and upselling
• 72% - Monitoring sales team performance
• 69% - Forecasting business performance

• More than one-third (36%) of survey respondents say that they found it a challenge to balance strategic and operational work. More than a quarter (27%) say they spent too much time fighting fires.
• Almost 9 in 10 (89%) of Sales Operations professionals agree that planning more frequently in a world that is in constant flux would be beneficial to the business in general and the sales organization in particular.
• Even with this understanding, 35% of Sales Operations pros say they plan quarterly or even less frequently than that.
• Less than half (49%) of respondents say they feel “well-resourced” in their role. Similarly, only 52% say they feel “empowered” in their organization.
• Unfortunately, Only 34% of Sales Ops professionals anticipate a headcount increase in the coming fiscal year
• Almost three-fifths (58%) of survey respondents say they face some kind of crucial data issue.

Sales Enablement Slowdown?

• 80% growth- Between 2016 and 2017, CSO Insights reports that the percentage of organizations with sales enablement jumped from 33% to 59%
• 1.5% – Since then however, the growth has slowed. Two years on, the percentage of organization who have implemented sales enablement grew to only 61% (an anemic 1.5% annualized growth).
• 3 out of 4 falling short – There is general disappointment with current sales enablement efforts. CSO Insights reports that the percentage of sales enablement organizations that met or exceeded stakeholder expectations dropped from 36% in 2018 to 28% in 2019. This means that almost 3 out of every 4 sales enablement groups are falling short.

Sales Enablement Shortfall?

• Only 5% of B2B companies have fully mature sales enablement practices (Forrester)
• Only 55% have rolled out SEA, the most mature of these tools (Forrester)
• Only 9% of B2B organizations say they are optimized around placing buyers at the center of their sales enablement strategies. (Forrester)

Can Your Sellers Find the Right Content?

• 65% of sales reps can’t find the right content to send to prospects (Saleshub)
• 43% – of B2B marketing decision-makers report that their companies have lost sales as a consequence of not having necessary content at the right time for a specific customer and 77% of the rest have experienced costly delays (Forrester/Forbes)
• 55% – the average time a sales rep squanders searching for the content they need and customizing the content for particular presentations and prospects (SiriusDecisions)
• 440 hours wasted by sales each year trying to find the right content (Forrester)
• >50% – the time, marketing is slow in responding to sales team requests for content, so sales team members resort to improvising their own content (Demand Metric)

Turn on the PowerPoint and Turn Off Your Buyer

• One in three – admit to falling asleep during a PowerPoint presentation (MarketingProfs)
• One in five – would rather go to the dentist than sit through another presentation (Zogby)
• 74% of buyers want sellers to pivot the presentation / meeting to discuss what the buyer wants to talk about (Forrester)
• Five hours – the time each week the average seller wastes customizing presentations for customer meetings (Forrester)

Are Your Spending Right on Your Content Marketing

• 28% of marketing spend is currently spent on content (Content Marketing Institute)
• 65% of content provided for sales is wasted because sales reps can’t find the content or because the content is perceived as low value or is not relevant to their selling scenarios (SiriusDecisions)
• $2.3 million is wasted each year on underused or unused marketing content (Forrester)
• 2/3’s of organizations report that they lose deals because they don’t have the content they need. (Demand Metric)

Can you Ensure Content Compliance?

• 4 out of 10 organizations admit that content is fragmented: a lack of consistency in expressing branding and key messages (Demand Metric)
• 50% of the time – marketing is slow in responding to sales team requests for content, so sales team members resort to improvising their own content (Demand Metric)
• 1/4 of sales teams – say they always or often create content without waiting for marketing to do it, unknowingly contributing to content fragmentation in the process (Demand Metric)

Value Selling is a Requirement

• 66% of buyers say making a clear ROI case highly influences their purchase decisions, however, only 16% of sellers are very effective at this. (The Rain Group)
• 95% of B2B buyers now require financial justification on any significant purchase, now set at $50,000 or more (IDC)
• 2/3rds of buyers don’t have the time, knowledge, or tools needed to make business value assessments and calculations. (IDC)
• 81% of buyers expect vendors to quantify the value of proposed solutions and provide a formal business case proposal. (IDC)
• Only one in five buyers will ask for a business case. (IDC)

Importance of Business Value Assessment Tools

• #1 – Thought leadership content by Independent Third Party (43%)
• #2 – Value Assessment Tools (42%)
• #3 – Case Studies (40%)
• #4 – #8 – White papers, recorded demos, video, e-books and blogs

A Failure to Launch

• 18-24 months are spent getting a new major campaign / product “ready” for launch (SBI)
• 40% of new campaign / product launches fail (New Product Success)
• #1 – The biggest barrier to success for a new product / campaign launch is lack of preparation in the go-to-market and sales launch (HBR 2)

The Content Management Struggle

• 68% of organizations have five or more repositories (Docurated)
• 60% of organizations report content growing at a rate of a least 100 percent per year (Docurated)
• Over 90% of the content is currently managed in emails, file shares and cloud storage (Docurated)

Are Your Sellers Falling Short?

• 47% of sales reps did not meet their quota goals last year, the fifth straight year of decline, where the percentage of sales reps missing quota continues to grow (this while the economy grew over the same period). (CSO Insights – Buyer Preferences Survey)
• A whopping 69% of sales reps are considered middle performers, those that are underperforming, but could be improved (Salesforce)
• Most buyers (58%) saw little difference among sellers, and 10.4% found no difference at all. When solutions are commoditized, The differentiation rests on the buying experience. (CSO Insights – Buyer Preferences Survey)

Are your Sellers Pitching or Listening?

• 57% of buyers indicate that their sales reps could do a much better job of discovery (Primary Intelligence)
• 1 in 5 buyers Indicate their sales reps have “poor” understanding of their business needs (Primary Intelligence)
• 90% of buyers would meet with sellers earlier but are delaying these engagements because sellers don’t take the time to understand their business and add value to the assessment. (CSO Insights – Buyer Preferences Survey)

Sales Training Conundrum

• $10,000 – The cost per sales rep to implement a new sales methodology and training (Forbes)
• 79%– In as little as 30 days, people forget 79% of what they’ve learned in training (Qstream)
• 64% – Post-training reinforcement improves adoption. Users are 64% more likely (82% vs. 50%) to adopt when they have access to lessons learned on-the-fly by the entire team, and continuously incorporate them into and improve their ever-evolving methodology. (Aberdeen)

All Onboard

• 34% is the current annual Sales turnover rate (Bridge Group)
• 71% of companies take 6 months or longer to onboard new sales reps; and a third of all companies take 9 months or more (CSO Insights – Sales Enablement Optimization Study)
• The #1 sales enablement productivity goal is “Reducing new salesperson ramp-up time”, indicated by 45% of sales executive respondents (CSO Insights – Sales Enablement Optimization Study)

Making Expand Selling a Priority

• 62% – indicate their top priority is “Driving growth through existing customers” (Forrester)
• 60 to 70% – The probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%, while the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% (MarketingMetrics)
• 3 to 4 times less – Expansion revenue from existing customers is 3 to 4 times less expensive to acquire than revenue from new-logo customers (TSIA)

Can you Spot the Difference?

• 31% of potential deals are lost to the competition (CSO Insights – Sales Enablement Optimization Study)
• 58% – Most buyers (57.7%) saw little difference among sellers, and 10.4% found no difference at all (CSO Insights – Buyer Preferences Survey)
• 41% of sales executives indicate that their top sales execution challenge is “difficulty differentiating from competition” (CSO Insights – Sales Performance Optimization Study)

The Importance of Indirect Sales and the Channel

• 49% of revenue is from indirect channels, with the average company working with 176 partners (Forrester)
• 35% of channel partners are falling short of their revenue targets (CSO Insights)
• 9 to 10 – It can take 9 to 10 months to get a new partner productive (CSO Insights)

Personalizing the Buying Experience is a Requirement

• 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

The Sales Adoption Challenge

• Only 49% had a Sales Enablement Content Management solution with adoption rates of 76% or better (CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study)
• 88% of sales professionals are unable to find or bring up critical sales material up on their smartphones, and 60% of sales organizations report a longer sales cycle due to a lack of proper tools. (CSO Insights)
• 3x – high performing sales teams use three times as much sales technology as under performers (Forrester)

The Importance of Intelligence, Analytics and AI

• 65% of sales rep time is spent on non-revenue generating tasks (Forrester)
• 71% of sales reps feel they’re spending too much time on their data entry responsibilities (Forrester)
• 76% of sales professionals say using sales analytics has significantly or somewhat improved their ability to provide customers with a consistent experience across every channel. Not only do analytics open the door to a more efficient, accurate, and personalized process, but it also gives sales teams deeper insights to optimize their selling process. (Salesforce)
• 89% of top-performers indicate that technology is leveraged to glean better insight into how content is performing (CMI)
• 72% of top-performing organizations go a step beyond, understanding the ROI of their content (CMI)
• 80% of marketers in companies with good sales and marketing alignment show sellers both how and when to use content, and insights on content usage, consumption and effectiveness are essential to do this properly (Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn).
• 40% – the impact of AI technologies on labor productivity, enabling sellers and others to be make more efficient use of their time (Accenture)

Are You Enabling Everyone You Need To?

• 9 – B2B buyers will have interactions with an average of nine different roles before signing on the dotted line.
• 50% – Fifty percent of roles interacting with the buyer before purchase are not titles traditionally supported by sales enablement functions.
• #1 – The most influential customer-facing persona on B2B buying decisions is not the sales rep; it is the vendor solutions specialist
• 50% – Half of all B2B buyers met with a customer service rep during their purchasing journey – second only to the vendor sales rep.

The Value of Enablement Across Roles?

• 12% – Reps in high-performing sales organizations spend 12% less time searching for and manipulating sales assets.
• 47% – Organizations driving significant upsell are 47% more likely to enable customer success roles with an ongoing engagement plan.
• 2x – Organizations with high customer retention are nearly twice as likely to map the post-sale customer journey.

Sales Content Management Responsibilities

• 72% – Delivery of sales content via online sales portal / platform
• 64% – Mapping and organizing the sales content
• 63% – Tracking, measurement and reporting on usage, consumption and value of the sales content
• 60% – Creation of customer-facing assets
• 53% – Creation of internal training and sales playbooks.

CRM and Sales Asset Management Integrations

• 60% – suggests content to reps for specific opportunities
• 55% – provides access to training directly within CRM
• 39% – sales assets available as a tab within the CRM system

Which Metrics to Track?

• 69% – Content sent to buyers
• 59% – Number of content views
• 59% – Content tied to deal progression
• 59% – Won deals by content usage
• 59% – Content usage by rep

The Business Case for Sales Enablement?

• 28% less time spent entering and coping with CRM data requirements
• 25% less time spent searching for needed content
• 23% reduction in time spent customizing content
• 23% less time working on low-value repetitive tasks (Forrester)

• 24% reduction in ramp time for new sales reps
• 19% reduction in the time it takes to engage a new lead
• 18% increase in the average number of transactions per seller (Forrester)

The Business Case for Evolved Selling

• Up to a 82% lift in buyers likely to consider new opportunities, driving repeat business
• Up to a a 70% lift in buyers purchasing more than they scoped, driving an increase in cross sells
• Up to a 60% increase in company growth, driving company growth
• Up to a 43% increase in deal closure, pulling in next quarter or next fiscal year deals into current quarter