Sales enablement: CRM's forgotten sibling attempts a comeback

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1 Sales enablement: CRM's forgotten sibling attempts a comeback Analyst: Matt Mullen Alan Pelz-Sharpe 18 Jun, 2013 The sales-enablement marketplace a few years after the first flushes of interest passed has recently begun to return to life. We examine how the growth of interest in digital marketing, especially around pre-sales content, is driving this. Sales enablement's basic premise was that the influence of the salesperson is on the wane, so best use the limited touch points in prospect interaction as cleverly as you can. This situation hasn't changed; in fact, if anything, it's even more the case. So what is driving the renewed interest in the use case? Is it file-sharing and collaboration vendors on an actively promoted product pivot, or has this customer behavior finally tipped the balance toward formalizing the sales-enablement process? How has digital marketing changed the sales process? Even though digital marketing in general makes up only about 20% of a typical enterprise marketing budget, it is significant in several ways. First, it is growing, and second, this growth is significantly changing the way complex sales cycles play out. Digital marketing is heavily content-centric. This content-centricity is allowing buyers to perform a greater part of the early stages of a buying cycle independently both as individuals and peer-group teams and crucially, without the support and guidance of a salesperson. It is often only when a degree of decision making has already been concluded and some potential products discarded that any formal approach will be made. This, of course, is why marketing automation and allied technologies are currently so popular, because they are designed to try and take some control back, and drip feed targeted content to these browsing potential buyers. Content that it is hoped will perform some role in that sales-cycle research. Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 The playing out of this dynamic the role of the traditional sales person becoming one of early-stage nurturing to create opportunities and late-stage opportunity management is perhaps what is driving the renewed interest in tools that help enable the sales force. Being able to reliably deploy materials that are proven to help generate opportunities, or critical in closing later-stage opportunities, can be vital in gaining some control over generating and forecasting revenue. What is sales enablement? On the face of it, sales enablement seems like a set of pretty simple processes: Your organization has come up with a new product or service, and you're ready to go to market. A new sales person has joined the company, and you want to on-board them as efficiently as possible. Your inside-sales people want to get some marketing collateral to a potential customer, but are unsure what the best material to send is. Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 Implementing systems that enable all these processes to operate, especially at scale and across multiple geographies, is, however, not a simple task for a number of reasons. Enabling an entire sales force on a new product or service is something that forms part of a greater workflow around go-to-market strategies, where supporting collateral such as 'sales kits' are devised within product marketing teams, and then rolled out to those who will have to articulate its value to potential customers. These are typically controlled as 'teach the teacher' exercises, since it is not always practical to have scarce product management resources tied up in running enablement sessions, especially in geographically disparate organizations. Efficient as this method can be on human resources, it does create an additional tier of materials that must be generated; a superset of collateral used for the training of the enablement experts. It is likely that during this process, the content will need to be adjusted not solely due to feedback from the sales force, but also for regional and cultural reasons. These localized versions need to remain in some sync with their parent materials for future updates. The new-hire onboarding process and the inside-sales collateral conundrum also have some commonality of complexity, in that to really know what material is likely to be most effective, it is valuable to understand how effective the same materials have been in other circumstances. This information is held in a variety of sources, some formal (such as within 'win' records in a CRM system), some less so (custom decks held on a field sales laptop that the salesperson believes are effective). In both cases, there is a feedback loop that not only should inform which collateral should be used for training or sent to customers, but also be fed back into product management process itself. The locally maintained custom decks can sometimes be hard to obtain. This is due to the competitive nature of sales meaning some staff may be reluctant to share winning approaches with colleagues as much as it is to any technical difficulties uploading decks into an appropriate system with guidance notes. Vendor landscape There are certainly a number of approaches toward how to solve the problem of sales enablement, and many of these center on the notion of proving some control and measurability of the process. The CRM has become central in recording opportunities and revenue results, but as can be seen with the rise in the marketing-automation industry, an ecosystem that offers complementary functionality can grow to a considerable size. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Chicago-based SAVO Group has some mature funding and perhaps presents the grandest end-to-end set of pure sales-enablement tools for the enterprise. In addition to the aforementioned scenarios, M&A is another key area that the company sees as a sales-enablement challenge, where the products of a newly acquired entity have to be added to the portfolio of an incumbent sales force. It suggests, too, that because a typical sales force goes through a 30% year-on-year churn rate, it's important to ensure that sales enablement is seen as a continuous ongoing program. Where SAVO has invested heavily of late is in developing a maturity model for sales enablement, based upon roughly 300 interviews conducted with enterprises, with the initial findings appearing to indicate that sales and sales operations lags behind digital marketing in terms of successful adoption. The interviews also show there's often a disconnect between the sales staff themselves and those who execute post-sales activities, especially managerially. Additionally, SAVO suggest that there is a misplaced belief that marketing automation and CRM in combination are enough to provide an overarching level of analytics to understand the sales process in totality. It points out that to the contrary, marketing automation is primarily about performing a set of actions a workflow and is not enough in isolation to really understand customer intent. It also points out that CRM's massive potential scale, if adopted across the entire set of sales stakeholders (e.g. sales, marketing, sales operations), means this doesn't always take place. And where it is attempted, requires stringent data-control procedures which are, in practice, rarely followed. KnowledgeTree's focus on sales enablement is in the main smaller in scope and more recent in execution. Historically an enterprise document-sharing application, it has transitioned through several iterations since it first emerged in South Africa, before relocating its headquarters to Raleigh, North Carolina, in Like SAVO, it recognizes that the CRM primarily, in its case, salesforce.com is weak where document sharing and tracking is concerned. Although is has some capability for documents within its Chatter platform, this is far from its strongest suit. KnowledgeTree enables content recommendations within the salesforce.com CRM platform, suggesting what documents to share based both upon prior success criteria and the records of what has been issued to prospects already in the sales cycle. These recommended documents can then be synced to mobile devices being used by sales staff in the field for immediate use. Bloomfire's technology product can be thought of as an interactive wiki-oriented intranet system, one that has its focus around users creating and posting content that others can then search, find and rate. One can then take this content and create courses or series of linked learning materials. To put it in marketing speak, it's a social learning or social business suite of sorts. Though the Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 product was initially positioned as a pure sales-enablement tool, this has recently been shifting toward more of corporate social-learning, or knowledge management, tool. Bloomfire, then, sees sales enablement not so much as a discrete process in and of itself, but rather a process among many other internal business processes that make up a modern intranet of knowledge management system. It's savvy positioning really, and insulates the firm a little from future market moves. The 451 take Sales enablement should be something that every firm with even a medium-sized commercial organization should be interested in. That it still remains an unknown class of tool for many, even in its apparently ongoing second flush of youth, shows how hard the vendors in the space must work to chip away a niche between CRM and marketing automation. It is probably correct to say that for the majority of enterprises, the sales-enablement process is human- rather than software-driven, relying on locally driven programs within the organization to rationalize assets like marketing collateral. If the increasingly tightly bound CRM/marketing-automation suites are unable or unwilling to add this set of capabilities to their scope, there is an opportunity for third parties to add value creating a solid if not particularly large stand-alone market for sales-enablement technology. However, CRM/digital marketing goliaths like Adobe or salesforce.com may soon choose to add and bundle this as functionality (potentially via tactical acquisitions) in their much larger suites, impacting many more customers, but in the process effectively putting an end to sales enablement as a stand-alone market subsector. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research Äôs Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6