B2B businesses are looking more closely at their cost structure given the economic and market fluctuations over the past year. As organizations face difficult budgetary decisions, technology is often first on the chopping block. In fact, Forrester has forecasted that growth in US tech spending will fall from 7.4% in 2022 to 5.4% in 2023.
As organizations look to consolidate their technology tools and optimize the ones that they have, some technologies will remain mission-critical. According to IDC, organizations should “sustain momentum in technology projects that help the overall business navigate and even take advantage of this period of economic instability.”
We believe that sales enablement tools are one type of technology that can help organizations sustain success even in times of uncertainty.
In The 2023 Value of Enablement Report – a survey of more than 1,200 full-time sales, enablement, and customer success professionals – 9 in 10 respondents reported using enablement tech at work and, of those respondents, 99% say it makes their job easier.
In this post, we’ll share how organizations use enablement technology to simplify repetitive, mundane tasks and help sellers succeed by operating efficiently.
Why enablement? Why now?
Executives and sales leaders realize that sales enablement is critical for the success of their go-to-market (GTM) teams. Organizations that have invested in enablement plan to continue doing so. The Value of Enablement Report found that 85% of organizations are increasing or retaining their investment in enablement technology in 2023.
These organizations plan to continue their investment because they believe in sales enablement tech. According to their responses, enablement is integral to
- Weathering difficult economic times (92%)
- Maintaining client relationships (88%)
- Operating more efficiently (84%).
We’ve also heard more about the importance of maximizing existing technology investments firsthand from our customers. Seismic customers already recognize the value of their implementation but, as budgets tighten, they’re looking to further extract value from existing investments. For instance, an organization that exclusively used Seismic to customize its pitch decks may seek to extract additional value from digital sales rooms.
How to operationalize sales efficiency
This concept of finding new ways to extract greater value from existing technology investments falls in line with the guidance from IDC. When increasing headcount isn’t an option, organizations need to be creative in how they maximize their use of technology to operationalize efficiency.
Proper training and coaching, combined with the right technology, can lead to meaningful gains in efficiency. Unfortunately, in organizations without sales enablement tech, sellers waste time searching for the information they need in order to deliver meaningful buyer engagement. In fact, 97% of survey respondents who don’t use enablement technology said they were often (19%) or sometimes (78%) unable to locate the content they needed. Of those respondents, 91% said this makes them feel less productive.
The outcomes change drastically among respondents who use sales enablement technology. 47% of respondents whose organizations use sales enablement technology say it saves them time when locating information. Among those who use sales enablement technology, 83% say it frees up time to focus on other revenue-generating activities. All in all, enablement technology saves these respondents an average of 13 hours per week – nearly two business days to focus on other key business priorities.
Operate efficiently with Seismic
Although 9 out of 10 respondents say they use sales enablement tech at work, 80% of them say that their company doesn’t use their enablement tools effectively.
When sales enablement technology is leveraged to its full potential, organizations achieve smarter outcomes. According to Meghan McHale Bilardo, VP of Culture, Learning & Engagement at BrandMuscle, “Efficiency is always important. Goals don’t seem to be getting easier over the years, nor are people being given more resources to achieve them. The level keeps getting raised year in and year out. I’ve been able to rely on Seismic to help me meet those challenges.”
Seismic is committed to delivering a robust enablement platform that empowers GTM teams to do more with less. Our Winter 2023 Release includes several new enhancements to the Seismic Enablement Cloud™ that are designed to help teams optimize their programs and best utilize the resources they already have. These new features include
- AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis for Coaching: Prioritized coaching, matching knowledge check, automated coaching analysis, and training insights analytics.
- Streamlined Content Management: Simplify and speed up the go-to-market process with better content governance and simplified publishing workflows.
- Requests: A centralized way for enablement teams to manage requests from field teams directly within Enablement Planner.
- Text and Image Replacement in Guided Assembly: Replace and personalize text fields and images when building content with Guided Assembly.
If you’d like to learn more about the latest features and capabilities within the Seismic Enablement Cloud, please visit our Product Innovation Center.
You can also learn more about the value of sales enablement by downloading the report.
