The survey from our latest report led with some questions about specific elements of SE: training, content and customer insights.
B2B sales training is mostly static with room for improvement
When asked who is responsible for seller training, 33% reported that there is a resource for that in the sales organisation. 15%, meanwhile, have the resource in marketing, and a significant 37% said ‘it depends on the project’, which would imply that there is actually nobody responsible – a product manager training the sales team before a launch should not count as sales enablement.
The next question was about whether there is a software platform in place for seller education. An incredible 34% (the #1 response to this question) replied ‘don’t know’ – a worrying indication of how little attention some B2B marketers afford to the sales process of their own company. It’s no wonder that marketing/sales alignment is a challenge in these cases. Some 27% of the companies revealed that the corporate learning management system (LMS) is used for sales training, while 13% have a separate sales training system.
Sales executives commonly object to their people spending too much time in training, especially on products or concepts they may not even need. So, the ideal sales training scenario would be a system that pushed out training, or coaching modules, to sellers just before they really need it. In the survey, just 9% of companies are able to provide this on-demand coaching to their sellers.
Digital marketing can support this scenario, and many marketers now do this for their digital audiences by identifying what needs to be presented/displayed and rendering content accordingly. Sometimes, sales enablement is just the realisation that sellers can be part of marketing’s digital audience too. B2B sales training is mostly static with room for improvement
Providing content to sellers is still pull/self-service in many companies
Around half of the respondents stated that they make content available to sales via a portal, which does not sound very proactive, dynamic, or helpful. But 18% of companies do tag their content pieces by sales stage and or persona, in order to help their colleagues decide whether the content applies to their next meeting. An encouraging 20% also stated that they even promote or recommend content to sellers according to their meeting scenario. However, another frightening 11% of B2B marketers admitted they do not know how their sales colleagues find suitable content at all.
While 13% of companies have separate sales content management software, 16% reported that they have an SE platform which channels content to sales. These companies are then also able to monitor how the content is deployed and then make decisions about the success of that content project.
Ensuring that sales stay on-message was the #2 driver for SE in a previous question, but companies seem to rely mainly on trust to achieve that objective. When asked about how they address the challenge of message governance, 49% of respondents reported that they merely ship out the ‘corporate slide deck and expect’, and 29% of the companies also hold regular training sessions.
An outstanding 73% of companies do not have any software that ensures message governance, although brand management and SE software for this task has been available for over 10 years now. One quarter of companies use their SE software platform for this purpose.
Customer insights are rarely shared
Many B2B marketing organisations now have extensive market/customer data gathering systems in place around their digital marketing programmes, which generate predictive analytics on buyer preferences, and even intent. But less than a quarter (22%) of respondents share this data with sales.
12% percent admit that they only use the data for marketing purposes and do not share.
One in five (21%) of the respondents know of resources in the sales organisation also collecting data about customers, and therefore presumably do not see the need for sharing. Realistically though, this data is more likely to be contact-data cleansing or perhaps organisational data within an account as provided by services like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Sales operations is hardly likely to have access to analytics from the digital marketing systems. So, around one third of companies are missing a golden opportunity to help their sales colleagues with behavioural analysis and, more importantly, the research history of individual contacts. Buyers continue to be frustrated by sellers wanting to hand over a white paper or webinar invitation which they already obtained themselves. Just 8% of companies have an SE platform which provides predictive analytics with sellers.
