A new research report just surfaced from Aberdeen Group confirms what we at Highspot have known all along: Best-in-class organizations view sales enablement as a must-have.
Aberdeen’s research shows that best-in-class organizations have:
- 99% overall team quota attainment – 62% higher than average companies
- 75% reps achieving quota – 50% higher than average companies
- 13% year-over-year revenue growth – 205% higher than average companies
- 3% reduction is sales cycle time – 725% better than average companies
These improvements are stunning and represent a real competitive advantage for those companies. Aberdeen’s research discovered that a key driver in these results was that 60% of best-in-class organizations have a formal competency to ensure that marketing has extensive visibility into the sales team’s utilization of content.
Interestingly, Aberdeen also found that best-in-class companies make better use of sales data and integrated playbooks. When data analytics are applied to deal velocity, customer retention rates are significantly higher—almost 15%. This is another area where Sales Enablement platforms shine. They provide an ability to measure and analyze actual results to inform future deals.
Often, one of the hardest ideas for marketers to grasp is the fact that their production cycle doesn’t end just because the content is created. Simply producing a product data sheet or PowerPoint deck doesn’t ensure their performance. In fact, the key to delivering effective sales enablement materials is real-world feedback. Measuring the effectiveness of what content resonates with clients and what doesn’t will improve the end product, and a Sales Enablement platform helps close the feedback loop.
According to Aberdeen,
“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.”
In large part, what the research finds, is that we need to ‘tighten up’ the process. With increasing demands on the sales rep, the message, the process and what message gets delivered to whom, all have to be tighter. Content and pitches need to align to the stages of the buyer’s journey, and to the individual buyer. Sales reps need to be empowered to handle the multiple configurations this creates. Best-in-class companies are mapping sales playbooks to this matrix and delivering the necessary components in context of the sales matrix. To do this, sellers need content and pitching solutions that understand the context and can align the multiple key components for the sellers.
The Aberdeen report is full of interesting insights and recommendations from more than 250 B2B sales leaders. You can download “No Longer a Luxury: Why the Best-in-Class view Sales Enablement as a Must Have“, with our compliments.
To learn more about how sales enablement can turbocharge your business, check out the Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement as well as Sales Enablement Tools and Software for a complete list of sales enablement vendors.
