Sales enablement is a strategic business priority across the entire customer lifecycle for visionary companies focusing on growth, new research details.
Seismic, a sales enablement platform, published its Annual Sales Enablement Benchmark Report (2021): Decoding the Best Practices of Visionaries, a new report examining sales enablement practices at leading global organizations. Based on a global survey of more than 1,000 sales enablement decision-makers, the study found that companies with the most mature sales enablement program:
- Positioned sales enablement as a strategic priority championed by C-level leaders;
- Drove go-to-market alignment by applying sales enablement across the entire customer lifecycle;
- Avoided tech silos by leveraging well-integrated tech stacks;
- Encouraged widespread adoption of sales enablement platform capabilities; and
- Used data-driven insights to scale best practices across the organization.
The report categorized survey participants into one of four groups based on sales enablement maturity: Visionaries, Performers, Novices and Laggards. All Visionaries reported prioritizing sales enablement by the C-suite, applied sales enablement practices across the entire customer journey, used data to continuously optimize best practices and expect that AI will further transform tools and solutions.
Key findings from the report include:
- Visionaries used sales enablement to support prospecting (97%), target customers at the point of renewal (80%) and use it as part of their efforts to win back business post-loss (75%).
- 77% of Laggards enable the sales process for new customers, with significantly less support for the other stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Laggards focus most on supporting marketing (76%) and sales (56%), while Visionaries extend support to sales (76%), marketing (67%), operations (42%), customer support (41%) and professional services (37%).
- Most Visionaries (94%) have high confidence in the data they use to track the effectiveness of their sales enablement efforts, compared to only 28% for Laggards and 68% of survey respondents overall.
- Nearly all Visionaries (97%) predict that artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will be embedded in sales enablement platforms in the next two to three years, while only 52% of Laggards anticipate AI functionality.
“Businesses have had to adapt and evolve quickly over the past year, with sales enablement platforms serving as an essential technology to keep up with today’s shifting landscape,” said Michael Londgren, CMO of Seismic, in a statement. “It’s encouraging to see that the most successful brands are treating sales enablement as a strategic priority elevated all the way up to the C-suite. These findings underscore the importance of platforms like Seismic to meet the increasingly complex demands of the modern B2B buyer. This report shares the best practices that are helping the world’s leading companies deliver strong business performance and outperform their competitors, while providing the B2C-like experiences buyers expect.”
