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We’re excited to share the Docurated 2018/2019 Sales Enablement Research results with you as well as provide access to the full Sales Enablement Trends Report. Sales Enablement is a hot sales technology category covering a wide range of needs from sales content and execution to coaching, training and communications. This new research has a heavy but not exclusive focus on one of the most important and challenging areas of sales enablement: sales content.
Content plays a critical role in the buyer journey and yet as you’ll see in the research, simply finding the most effective content can be a challenge. Not only that, aligning sales and marketing to ensure insights and data are driving investments in new sales content is critical. The right combination of sales enablement capabilities can lead to increased sales rep efficiency, higher win rates and accelerating and growing sales pipeline.
Have you ever wondered how prevalent sales enablement teams are? Our research shows that 64% of organizations already one in place with a further 7% planning on adding a dedicated sales enablement team in the next 12 months (13% growth).
Having a dedicated sales enablement function increased sales rep productivity in 71% of organizations. One in four organizations have seen a reduction in the length of their sales cycle and 56% have seen an increase in the sales pipeline.
Highly evolved sales organizations (now almost the majority) have both sales operations and sales enablement functions.
Sales (54%) is the primary owner of sales enablement within organizations, followed by marketing (22%). While these numbers remain fairly consistent irrespective of size, the one area where there is variation is when the CEO owns this function, which is 18% in SMBs versus just 3% in mid-market and 1% in large enterprises.
Interested in how these figures vary depending on the size of sales team and how many organizations have a combination of these technologies?
Sales enablement budget varies by company size. 65% of large enterprises have sales enablement budgets versus just 39% of SMBs. The high-tech sector had the highest percentage of organizations with a dedicated sales enablement budget at 66%.
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Ongoing training and coaching of sales reps is a critical component of sales enablement but is it happening and are organizations using software platforms to support this? What are the top sales methodologies in use?
Sales reps waste a staggering 26 hours per month on non-selling activities related to finding, editing, and managing content. This is time that should be spent selling!
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The top three locations for accessing sales content are Salesforce, email and Microsoft SharePoint. 40% of the locations where sales content exists are typically those that marketing has no insight into, such as email and local desktops. This presents a significant challenge for marketers who need to know which sales content is actually being used by sales reps. Respondents have sales content stored in an average of four different locations.
Sales reps have to juggle a wide range of content types from presentations and videos to analyst reports and proposals. So which content types do respondents view as the most important for their sales team?
Curious to see what other challenges organizations face in regard to sales content?
Just 8% fully agreed that they can track the use and consumption of content distributed by sales.
There is a significant disparity between the view of sales and marketing respondents for this question. Based on the other results in the research it’s arguable that neither department is fully qualified to answer the question! Sales is obviously struggling to find the content and marketing has limited insights into which content is being used and its impact on revenue.
While marketing has been leading the way in technology investments in recent years, sales is beginning to catchup with sales operations and sales enablement teams are leading the charge.
Over the next 12-months the majority of mid-sized and large enterprise organizations will have a dedicated sales enablement function in place. This is hardly surprising when looking at the results of organizations that have focused on sales enablement. 71% have seen an increase in rep productivity. When it comes to sales content, with findability being the #1 challenge faced by sales reps (closely followed by sales content analytics), organizations need to invest in sales enablement platforms that:
Interested in discovering how the Docurated Sales Enablement Platform helps organizations address their sales content challenges? Request a Demo