Dive Brief:
- Sales enablement platform Highspot and Heinz Marketing teamed up to conduct a State of Sales Enablement 2015 report, which found a disconnect between the reported effectiveness of the technology and teams who said they use it.
- In fact, 75% of surveyed B2B sales and marketing professionals reported sales enablement measurement as important for tracking sales support effectiveness, but only 37% reported having sales enablement teams in place.
- The study involved more than 400 B2B sales and marketing professionals.
Dive Insight:
“We see a widening gap in performance and consistent results between organizations that invest in sales enablement vs. those that do not,” said Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing, in a statement on the report’s results. “These coordinated efforts are a difference maker, and significant competitive advantage for organizations to increase their win rates and help their organizations run far more efficiently.”
The most telling result of the research was a wide disconnect between how efficient sales enablement was viewed in terms of measuring sales support effectiveness at 75%, and the relatively low number of respondents reporting actually having sales enablement teams in place at 37%. The study also found three of the top five sales support activities are content related, and 70% of respondents use email to deliver content to their sales organizations.
From producing quality content, helping sales find relevant content, and measuring content effectiveness, the top sales support activities show content is clearly important to the process. Even though content was important to success, some inefficiencies were uncovered in the survey. More than 45% of marketing respondents rely on a shared network drive to deliver sales collateral, and 55% of respondents use three or more channels for the same purpose.
