So much in sales has changed over the course of the past two years. Sellers are expected to be more informed and productive than ever before. They have to engage with more stakeholders, more often during the buyer journey. Fewer opportunities to meet face-to-face mean that social media is more important than ever—relationships still matter.
The “great resignation,” coupled with rapid growth among successful companies means that businesses are tasked with onboarding more sales reps than ever before. Helping those reps become more productive, faster is critical to realizing a return on investment (ROI) and driving revenue.
Today’s digital-first buying environment requires a smarter enablement solution that enables teams with the skills, content, and context to win deals, engages buyers at the right time and place across every channel, and continuously improves efforts using performance data across people, content, and processes. The most robust solutions bring together these capabilities in one powerful and comprehensive platform that delivers better outcomes.
Why enablement is evolving
The question every Chief Sales Officer (CSO) needs to answer is: how confident am I that my sales reps will hit their number? The answer: only 6% of CSOs are confident that they’ll hit their number this year.
To put it lightly, sales is harder than ever. Enablement can lead to higher revenue and happy customers, but enablement done wrong can be costly. When enablement misses the mark, buyers disengage, sellers leave, and organizations ultimately miss their quota.
Last year, 40% of sales leaders didn’t hit their sales quotas. In most cases, changes in the buying process accounted for missed numbers. Today, 67% of buyers prefer digital-first sales motions, the average sales cycle consists of 17 buyer engagements, and 11 business stakeholders are involved in a B2B purchase.
Here’s how we believe sales and enablement leaders can be successful in the digital-first era of buyer-seller engagement.
How organizations get enablement right
Successful enablement programs support their sales reps across the complete buyer’s journey. Smarter enablement prioritizes skills training, differentiated content experiences, data, and coaching throughout the sales cycle to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Successful enablement programs position sellers to meet the needs of the modern buyer by:
- Ramping and upskilling: Deliver continuous training programs that help sellers reach competency and productivity quickly
- Training and coaching: Educate sellers on their industry, market, and roles and offer sessions that prepare sellers to go to market with confidence
- Differentiating experiences: Recommend the right content for the right channel and create more engaging, interactive buyer experiences.
- Data-driven coaching: Fine-tune skills and scale best practices by using analytics to determine what works and what doesn’t.
How Seismic helps
Seismic is the #1 global leader in sales enablement. Our enablement platform is purpose-built to give sales leaders the confidence that they can hit their numbers through better onboarding, skills mastery, storytelling, differentiated experiences, and analytics.
The Seismic platform operates under the principle that successful organizations do three things well:
- They enable their sales reps with the skills training, coaching, and tools they need to become more productive, faster.
- They engage their buyers through differentiated experiences across the sales lifecycle. Their content experiences meet the buyer where they are and tell personalized stories that stand out from their competitors.
- They embrace data as a resource to enable continuous improvement across every aspect of their go-to-market (GTM) engine.
Seismic offers sales organizations a single, unified platform for all things enablement. Our platform captures data across every stage of the sales cycle, offering deeper insights that enable organizations to continuously improve their sales efforts.
With coaching and training, enablement, engagement, and analytics in a single environment, sellers can engage buyers from the same location where they manage everything else.
If you’d like to learn more, download our guide, Riding the Next Wave of Enablement: The Ultimate Guide.
