A 2016 CSO Insights Sales Enablement Optimization Study defines Sales Enablement as a “strategic cross-functional discipline that is designed to improve sales results and productivity. It provides integrated content and coaching services for sales people and their managers along the entire customer journey powered by technology.”
With the technological landscape evolving so rapidly your success in the upcoming years requires you to add better technological components to your sales growth strategy. Extensive data collection is already a proven practice to improve integration between Sales and Marketing. The future of Sales Enablement will rely on incorporating more sophisticated uses ofdata and analytics.
Analytics in the Sales Funnel
Data is collected in the buyer’s journey to identify how the prospective buyer is reacting to campaigns. With a growing database of buyer responses through tools like surveys and questionnaires, it is becoming easier to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns.
There is a big loss when it comes to selling when 30-40% of MQL’s are dead once marketing passes them to Sales. Pushing leads to the sales force often becomes a structural problem, and this is where automation goes wrong.”
The way you handle this data is an important piece of the Sales Enablement puzzle. Based on past successes, generating marketing campaigns should get smarter and more personalized in identifying buyer problems and behaviors. This way, Marketing can create content that is personalized and targets buyer problems on a 1:1 level, and by the time Sales makes a touchpoint, the prospect is more informed and ready to buy.
Future of Sales Enablement Analytics
In a predictive sense, AI will be a big trend in the future, and will help salespeople be more productive and effective at responding to prospects by looking at data properly, and, ultimately, delivering the right message at the right time throughout the customer journey.
With AI-enabled apps becoming a hot item in the data-gathering and analytics space, the big questions to ask yourself would be “is AI part of my technological stack?” and “how can I personalize my content such that the buyer’s problems are addressed in a more complete and sophisticated way earlier in the sales process?”
Ryann Ellis at the Association of Talent Development quotes Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce predicting that the “AI Spring” that the world is undergoing will have a huge impact on Sales and Marketing. AI will become part of communication between sales and customers on the phone, chat, text, email, and any other medium where you can engage the buyer, and this growth in data will allow companies to understand buyer problems better and earlier.
With the growing influence of analytics, the potential for using data to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Sales and Marketing integration is infinite. The future of Sales Enablement is peppered with data-driven strategies, and in the upcoming years, your customer growth will be defined by how you use data to guide your campaigns. Are you using analytics to help streamline your Sales Enablement processes? How are you preparing your company for the future? Sales Enablement can get you there.