As buyer budgets shrink and competition for wallet share intensifies, enabling the entire GTM team is paramount to success. Gartner believes that in the next 5 years, enablement budgets will increase by 50%, writing “sales enablement is the most critical function for navigating sales teams through the constant change that surrounds them”. Despite the uncertain and volatile economy, 74% of organizations plan to invest more in sales training and enablement. Traditional sales playbooks, and lone wolf sellers who traditionally rely on their instincts to succeed, will struggle as we enter this new era. The era of Revenue Enablement.
While traditional sales enablement only focuses on sellers, in the era of revenue enablement the entire GTM— marketing, sales, post-sale teams, and buyers — must be enabled and armed with the tools and information they need to be successful through every step of the sales cycle. And B2B decision makers agree. Ninety percent of B2B decision makers say that marketing and sales need to work more closely together. All GTM functions must be aligned and enabled across content management, revenue intelligence, conversation intelligence, value selling, talent optimization, and the use of AI. All of these are crucial to revenue teams’ success. Don’t just take our word for it though. We’ve collated the top stats spanning revenue enablement.
Content Management & Usage Insights
Content management is such an important piece of the sales cycle, and AEs need to be strategic about what they send, how they send it and when they send it. Reps need to send content that’s memorable, adds value to buyers and pertains to their specific pain points. The creation and use of content can’t be ad hoc. There needs to be a clear strategy behind it, with insights to inform what works and doesn’t work. Providing the right content at the right time, in the right way can lead to a win, but the wrong content, in the wrong space can also cost you that win. Content management and usage can make or break any deal. Here are some insights to help:
- Only 8% of B2B organizations are currently set up to deliver highly personalized marketing—but of that 8 percent, three-quarters report growing market share.
- The typical B2B sales rep spends nearly 12 hours per month on nonproductive content chores, such as locating and customizing items needed to support selling activities.
- The typical B2B sales organization makes roughly 1,400 sales assets available to team members and stores them in an average of 5.6 different content repositories.
Value Selling
In today’s uncertain economy and hyper-competitive business environment, companies that want to drive urgency and stand out from the competition must demonstrate value at every stage of the sales cycle, embracing value selling. To succeed with value selling, you need to take a consultative approach — listen actively, ask questions, and tie value drivers to your solution. Here are some illuminating stats and quotes to shed light on the importance of value selling:
- Over the last 24 months, 76% of buyers indicated that it was more likely that their CFOs would be involved in purchasing decisions and 74% said the same of procurement.
- Buyers expressed that value assessments or business-case-development-related content were the most valuable content they receive during the sales cycle.
- Gartner wrote, “an interactive tool that enables buyers to create an internal business case can jump-start the purchase process, especially when a large buying team is involved.”
Revenue Intelligence
Arguably the most important aspect of revenue enablement, revenue intelligence is more important now than it’s ever been. It is key to success in all other areas of revenue enablement. Forrester found that 55% of buyer interactions with sellers occur via digital channels. Meanwhile, Gartner calculated sales reps only have roughly 5% of a customer’s time during their buying journey. It is imperative that reps have visibility into as much of the other 95% as possible. That’s where revenue intelligence comes in: arming GTM teams with the information they need to effectively message the right accounts, with the right content, at the right time, via the right channel. Check out these revealing stats on revenue intelligence below:
- Advanced, insights-driven companies are 8.5 times more likely than beginners to report at least 20% year-over-year growth.
- Players with strong customer analytics are 1.5 times more likely to grow fast, and can drive increases in earnings upwards of 15–25 percent.
- By 2025, 70% of all B2B seller-buyer interactions will be recorded or analyzed to extract competitive, deal and market insights using AI/ML and natural language processing (NLP).
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence (CI) can be a truly impactful tool to identify and scale successful behaviors – and eliminate unsuccessful ones – during interactions between buyers and sellers. Revenue teams need to use CI beyond the simple use case of listening to sellers’ calls. When used effectively, CI can automatically pick up on action items, identify crucial signs of deal health, and determine the best actions and/or content for each stage in the sales cycle to improve seller effectiveness and managerial coaching. CI can be a truly dynamic tool in the GTM team’s toolbox, particularly when combined with revenue intelligence as reflected in these data points on CI tools:
- Buyers overwhelmingly state they prefer to meet with salespeople via a virtual meeting rather than in-person.
- In the 1988 book Business Communication: Strategies and Skills, Richard Huseman stated that the average person listens at about 25% efficiency.
- Sales managers currently spend only 14% of their time on coaching activities.
Talent Optimization
Talent optimization is not only about hiring the right people and training them effectively, it also encompasses having the right people in the right roles. With the recent economic volatility, maximizing existing talent is a key aspect of enabling revenue teams to perform at the highest level and drive the sustainable growth that is so sought after today. These informative insights help shed light on the importance of talent optimization:
- On average, the best sales onboarding programs help new sales hires become productive 3.4 months sooner than low-performing programs.
- Less than half of sales leaders believe most of their reps have the right capabilities to succeed.
- High-performing sales organizations are 41% more likely than under-performers to deploy role-specific sales competencies to define candidate suitability.
Artificial Intelligence For Revenue Orgs
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the topic du jour in B2B revenue, with generative AI and large language models (LLMs) taking center stage as revenue teams seek to increase their effectiveness. Forrester wrote, “watching a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT provide accurate responses to questions, generate blogs from a couple bullets, and do things like pass the Wharton MBA exam gets salespeople dreaming about what they can do with a tool like this”. However, revenue teams can use AI for more than just crafting content. Top tier sales tech will leverage AI to automatically sync activity data to a CRM, identify action items during buyer-seller interactions, prioritize in-market accounts, and determine the best content to be sent at specific times. AI spans all aspects of enablement, and when utilized properly, can vastly improve seller effectiveness. There’s no shortage of pertinent stats surrounding AI, but here are a few of the top insights:
- Ninety percent of organizations back AI to give them a competitive edge over their rivals.
- Seventy-five percent of B2B sales organizations will replace traditional sales playbooks with AI-based guided selling solutions.
- High performing sellers are 1.9 times more likely to use AI tools.
To learn more about revenue enablement and how Mediafly can uplevel your entire GTM team, check out our Revenue Enablement Benchmark report here.
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