There's been a lot of discussion in the marketplace asking the provocative question: Is sales enablement dead?
Our opinion is firm: No, it's not dead. It's more important than ever. It's just become overcomplicated, which is an impediment to adoption and ultimately value.
The term "sales enablement" has surged in popularity over the past 10 years. Most companies have established 'Enablement' teams or programs. Analysts and academics are regularly producing research and best practices to support the enablement ecosystem. There are even amazing volunteer groups of passionate practitioners like the Revenue Collective and the Sales Enablement Society that meet regularly to drive the discipline forward. And finally, there are thousands of product and service vendors that offer a sales enablement "magic bullet."
However, although all this great effort has taken place over the past 10 years as the sales enablement discipline evolves, business challenges are not improving:
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Marketing content usage continues to decline. Not only does this result in wasted time and money but, more importantly, critical messages are failing to reach your buyer's sales and marketing teams need easy-to-use systems that monitor content usage, engagement, and buyer intent data. These systems must also product insights that help these teams align and adjust to ensure that marketing teams are creating the content that sellers want and buyers need.
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Sellers are less efficient today than they were just 10 years ago. They spend less time interacting with buyers due to an increase in non-selling activity. Busy reps don't have time to learn and master complex processes and technologies. They want simple yet sophisticated.
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Sellers continue to struggle to optimize effectiveness and readiness. Studies show that sellers are only retaining about 30% of the messaging, process, and tools that training teams deliver. Although these training and enablement teams have done a great job building and delivering these comprehensive, "just-in-case learning" and certification programs, sellers prefer to have quick and easy access to content, resources, and guidance they need on-demand or "just-in-time" as they prepare to engage buyers.
Something Has Got To Change
And this isn't just a Modus discovery. In a recent event where we launched the next generation of Modus, three industry experts added their two cents on these exact business problems.
Jim Dickie, Research Fellow at Sales Mastery went into detail about the need for alignment between marketing and sales (which we know is critical to making your business really hum!). Jim also went deep into the necessity for content that is influenced by the buyer.
Jim challenged us, "how can sales possibly add value to the conversation with a buyer if they don’t have the insight into what that buyer needs? And how can marketing develop the right material for their sellers to reach and have an impact on these buyers without this same input?" Without this, most of the content marketing creates, goes unused. Additionally, the content and messaging must be useful—not only to sellers but to the buyers.
Buyers are in a tough position these days. With multiple stakeholders at the table and much of their buying journey being done through online research, buying has become more difficult than ever. Sellers can play a critical role in helping their buyers. But they need a simple and intuitive platform that can easily engage buyers and give them the right content, just when they need it. It’s also important that usage and intent data is available for quick adjustments to ensure that marketing is creating what their sellers and buyers require for meaningful engagement to occur.
Watch Jim's segment below:
To help us understand the efficiency problems with modern sellers, leading sales strategist, speaker and author Jill Konrath took the virtual stage. "We know that salespeople are spending far too much time on selling activities rather than on actual selling—much less than just 10 years ago. The world has become overly complex and just plain busy." Jill talks about the necessity to simplify. It’s not necessary or ideal to continue to throw more tools and technology trying to help their sales teams sell.
More is not always better. We need simple tools and processes for our sales teams to leverage. Teams should seek to adopt platforms that focus on value, user experience, and adoption to drive the sales efficiency needed to hit revenue targets.
Watch Jill's segment below:
Our last speaker, Tim Riesterer—Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Visions—focused on increasing sales effectiveness and shared his point of view on just-in-case vs. just-in-time (or as he called it, "the On-Star button”) learning. The priority for enablement teams should be placed on delivering just-in-time content and resources on-demand to meet buyers where they are. It’s an on-demand world, after all. Sellers can increase their effectiveness by gaining access to the information they need, right when they need it to become situationally fluent. This helps engage buyers and move them along in their buying journey.
Watch Tim's segment below:
These sales and marketing experts shared compelling insights that every company should be able to leverage and implement to improve upon your sales enablement endeavors. And Modus can help!
Again, we don't believe sales enablement is dead...it's just become confusing, crowded, and overcomplicated. If you run a Google search on the term "sales enablement", you get 2 pages of results from technology vendors who continue to build and acquire high volumes of capabilities that add clutter, cost, and administrative burden to their platforms and render them complicated and hard use and adopt. In fact, studies show that unused capabilities account for over 50% of a company's technology costs. Isn't it time that your business tools are as delightful and easy to use as those applications we use in our everyday consumer lives?
Welcome to the era of sales enablement simplified!
Modus has been working over the past year to transform our company and our platform. With a leadership team that has over 50+ years of combined sales enablement experience, and more than 1,000 implementations under our belts, we’ve "been around the block." We’ve seen, first-hand, the lack of adoption and lower than expected ROI. And we’re fixing that. That’s why we’ve opted to focus on their highest-value foundational capabilities that end-users need to efficiently and effectively engage buyers. We didn't cut corners - we just cut the BS!
Modus has recently announced the launch of our next-generation product that delights users with an intuitive user experience that optimized adoption, makes implementation and ongoing administration easy, and delivers the highest value to cost ratios in the industry.
Our new product has been designed to mimic the world's leading consumer content distribution service (think Netflix, YouTube, Hulu) so that no training is required and your revenue teams can up and running quickly.
What makes Modus different? We are 100% committed to user adoption and customer value rather than financial growth goals set by our investors! Our easy-to-use platform allows sellers to cut through all the clutter to access relevant, up-to-date, and real-time information that provides the personalized and high-value interactions that buyers want.
Modus makes sure that content created by your marketing team is utilized by your sellers to enhance their interactions. We ensure that you experience higher content and messaging usage and improved sales efficiency so that your sellers can spend more of their valuable time selling. Through just-in-time learning and access to collections of on-demand resources related to your most timely and strategic initiative, your sales reps are more prepared to deliver what their buyers need resulting in higher value customer interactions.
If you’re a business that’s seeking to improve sales efficiency and sales effectiveness and drive meaningful engagement between buyers and sellers, check us out—we won’t disappoint.
Watch the Full Launch Event Here 👇
