• by Byron Matthews , Columnist, May 8, 2018

Sales enablement has gone from being used by 19% of companies in 2013 to 59% in 2017. And for good reason — there's a direct correlation between sales enablement disciplines and attaining sales quotas. Companies that implement enablement programs reach revenue goals at a rate more than 8% higher than those that do not. 

Historically, leaders believed that successful sale practitioners were more art than science. Today, those successful sales teams will combine sales methodology, robust content, training and coaching services, and technology to meet the needs of current and future data-driven businesses.  

Effective content services also result in an 8% improvement in quota attainment.

To succeed, the enablement team must collaborate closely with marketing and other supporting departments. To dive deeper, we’d like to share a book excerpt*:

Who Creates Content? 

A lot of sales enablement leaders don’t pay enough attention to content services because in their minds “that’s marketing’s job.” However, when [we] asked the participants in [our] 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study which functions create the content salespeople need for their selling efforts, the results painted a different picture. 

Marketing creates only 39% of the content salespeople need for their selling efforts. 

Marketing professionals may create some of the content sales uses, but they are usually not responsible for the entire content domain along the customer’s path (see above). One way enablement leaders can permanently put to rest the misconception that all enablement content is created by marketing is to get rid of the term “marketing content.” It’s misleading and doesn’t add any value to the discussion. Instead, label content according to its purpose or its intended audience. What sales needs is customer-facing content (externally focused) or enablement content (internally used), but not marketing content. 

Product management (18%), sales operations/legal (6%) and other sources (4%) provide specific content for the buying and implementation and adoption phases.  

Other teams, especially product management professionals, are strong contributors to content. Product management is needed for the detailed content required during the buying phase, such as technical presentations, recorded demonstrations, technical definitions and schematics. Content from product management is also crucial during the implementation and adoption phase as salespeople and other customer-facing professionals communicate the value delivered. Sales operations, legal and other teams contribute to other types of content, including proposal templates, service level agreements, and legal and contract attachments. 

Enablement teams create 16% of the content salespeople need for their selling efforts. 

Our clients are often surprised by this finding. Some expected a higher percentage; others thought it would be lower. Though enablement is often seen as the responsible role for many types of enablement content, such as playbooks, guided-selling scripts and value-justification tools, a lower percentage isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

Content must be a collaborative effort. The special expertise required of sales force enablement is the ability to connect the knowledge salespeople and buyers need with their content consumption preferences and orchestrate contributions from other functions. Regardless of what percentage of content is seen as coming from enablement, the real question is: Is enablement effectively orchestrating the process? 

Salespeople still create 18% of the content they need on their own. 

While an improvement from 2016 (26%), this percentage is still too high because this is time the sales professional could spend adding value for customers. Whenever sales professionals have to create their content from scratch, something is wrong with the overall enablement approach. At most, salespeople should only have to tailor and customize content that has already been provided. If salespeople can’t find the right content, aren’t satisfied with its quality or don’t know how to use the tools, then fixing these problems is enablement’s responsibility.

* This is an exclusive excerpt from Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip and Empower a World-Class Sales Force by Tamara Schenk and Byron Matthews.