Introduction
Enablement professionals find themselves at a pivotal crossroads amid the rapidly evolving landscape of B2B buying and selling. The challenges are stark and the stakes are high — and selling has never been harder. Risk-averse buyers scrutinize every aspect of a potential purchase, searching for any reason to stall the process or walk away. Revenue teams must adapt or risk becoming obsolete.
Today’s sales professionals don’t just need to hone their skills, but adopt entirely new ones to navigate this complex terrain effectively. In this paradigm shift, enablement leaders have a unique vantage point — they hold the keys to unlocking success in this transformative era.
Rather than seeing these challenges as obstacles, we should use them as an unprecedented opportunity. Now is the time for enablement professionals to rise to the occasion, confront this challenge head on, and chart a course toward a new pinnacle of sales success.
Mediafly recently surveyed 300 North American-based revenue professionals at enterprise companies across a range of industries to understand key trends enablement practitioners can take to set their teams up for long-term success. In this guide, we highlight the key findings for enablement professionals and strategies on how to become the revenue hero your organization needs.
Scaling Up Enablement to Meet Buyers Where They Are
of organizations have an enablement function, and over the last 12 months, 53% have increased headcount in that function by more than 5%.
Sales enablement has firmly established itself as a critical business function for revenue organizations. Eighty-nine percent of companies have an enablement function, and over the last 12 months, 53% have increased headcount in that function by more than 5%. What’s even more telling is that 80% of the organizations we surveyed are planning to increase investments in sales/revenue enablement.
of the organizations surveyed are planning to increase investments in sales/revenue enablement.
Today, enablement plays a more critical role than ever. Gartner found that buyers spend only 5% of their purchase process talking to sellers. As a result, every interaction sellers have with buyers becomes more important. At a time when buyer expectations are rapidly evolving, it’s imperative that sellers make the most of every interaction they have with every buyer — and that’s where enablement comes in.
By ensuring the right processes, tools, and training are in place to optimize every buyer touchpoint, enablement plays a pivotal role in adapting to the changing needs and preferences of buyers. It shapes the entire customer journey and ultimately influences the success of the entire revenue organization — not just sales.
Redefining Enablement as a Holistic Approach
of companies using direct, one-to-one personalization observed an increase in market share
No longer limited to solely supporting direct sales teams, sales enablement is evolving into revenue enablement and taking up the charge to support the entire revenue organization with the tools, information, skills, and content they need — when they need them. This requires more than a shift in terminology. Where sales enablement focused solely on frontline sellers, revenue enablement is a comprehensive program to empower all revenue generating teams and systems to drive growth. It involves:
- Organizing and distributing relevant content
- Leveraging data and analytics to gain actionable insights
- Analyzing sales conversations
- Adopting value-based selling techniques
- Enhancing seller skills
Today, 80% of B2B buyers expect the same buying experience as B2C customers, and 77% of companies using direct, one-to-one personalization observed an increase in market share. As buyers increasingly demand the seamless, connected, and personalized customer journeys they get from businesses like Netflix and Amazon, the alignment brought by a shift to revenue enablement is pivotal.
The term ‘sales enablement’ is no longer an effective description of how most B2B organizations support their customer-facing roles with the competence, confidence, and content required to deliver a seamless customer journey.
As enablement leaders have realized that buyers don’t want to feel like they are being handed off from marketing to sales to customer success teams, they’ve come to recognize that consistently enabling their own team members across these disciplines benefits both customers and employees.
The highest-performing organizations have recognized the need to shift from sales enablement to revenue enablement. They are more likely than their low-performing counterparts to enable each role on the revenue team.
In order to enable all teams effectively and ensure the different revenue functions operate together seamlessly, enablement must ensure all revenue teams are aligned around a single source of buyer data.
Combatting the Content Struggle
of buyers say they encounter an overwhelming amount of trustworthy information during supplier evaluations.
When buyers are only spending 5% of their purchase process with each seller, reps must effectively use content to impact deals. Content does the selling when salespeople can’t be “in the room” — making it a crucial element of the sales process, and one enablement must help optimize.
Despite this, we found that many organizations still struggle when it comes to content. The top challenges include:
- 1 Our sellers spent too much time creating/personalizing content
- 2 Our sales content is outdated
- 3 We cannot govern our content to ensure brand and/or regulatory compliance
- 4 We do not have the insights we need to understand what content works best and when.
- 5 Our sellers often send content that differs from our brand
Sharing the right content with the right buyer at the right time increases engagement and advances deals. But 55% of buyers say they encounter an overwhelming amount of trustworthy information during supplier evaluations. To create memorable experiences, it’s essential to have dynamic content that resonates with specific personas and their unique challenges.
So, where do you start? The era of relying on gut feelings and superstar sellers going rogue is long gone. Today, buyers leave behind treasure troves of data and insights every time they interact with your company — directly with a seller or within independent research. Enablement can leverage these virtual breadcrumbs to gain insights into what content works for different audience segments, and share this knowledge across the revenue team and deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.
Better Technology — Not More — is the Answer
Sellers who feel overwhelmed by technology are 43% less likely to meet quota.
One goal of enablement is to drive seller productivity. This could be done by optimizing processes, delegating tasks elsewhere — or implementing new technology.
But adding technology for the sake of it can have the opposite effect and further hinder sellers. Almost half of sales reps feel overwhelmed by the number of technologies needed to do their work, and those who feel overwhelmed by technology are 43% less likely to meet quota.
Consolidating technologies is an effective way enablement can reduce toggle tax and help reps do their jobs. When sellers have to go to one tool to find content, another to send an email, another to log that email, and yet another to see how that email and content performed, it’s no wonder productivity takes a hit.
Consolidation eliminates toggle tax and helps make sellers more productive.
Harness the Power of GenAI to Maximize Enablement
The highest-performing organizations are 44% more likely than low-performing competitors to be using or experimenting with Generative AI.
Generative AI (GenAI) is the biggest technological advancement for business since email, and the impact it stands to have on enablement is transformative. The potential benefits of GenAI far outweigh the risks, especially within the realm of revenue enablement.
Gartner estimates that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.
We’re just starting to scratch the surface of GenAI with today’s enablement use cases, which include:
- Quick answers about pipeline health and forecast changes.
- Summarizations of buyer/seller calls.
- Next best action recommendations.
- Creation of marketing content such as blogs, papers, slides, images, and videos.
- Improved customer experiences with scalable, hyper-personalized interactions.
Now is the time to experiment and get ahead of the curve, and we found that the highest highest-performing organizations are 44% more likely than their low-performing competitors to be using or experimenting with GenAI.
of revenue teams currently use or experiment with GenAI to accomplish tasks
High performers are 44% more likely than low performers to be using or experimenting with GenAI
Now’s The Time: Seize Your Moment
With so much change in the world of buying and selling, enablement teams have a lot on their plates. It’s no longer enough to only enable sales teams; you need to enable marketing, sales, post-sales, sales engineers — anyone who directly or indirectly interacts with buyers. Alignment between the entire revenue team is crucial, and enablement teams are uniquely positioned to be the cog in the wheel that drives alignment.
We’ve got you covered.
Mediafly offers enablement teams the consolidated solution they need to align revenue teams around a single source of truth for buyer data, and arms them with the information and content they need to win in today’s hyper-competitive environment.
