The shift to Revenue Enablement is on. Not merely a buzzword, revenue enablement has quickly become a strategic imperative for companies striving to thrive in a competitive marketplace.
We think the guide is a great resource for practitioners looking for perspective, technology trends, and best practices. In this blog, we’re highlighting four key takeaways. We will dive into what revenue enablement platforms are, what the most successful vendors offer, and where the revenue enablement market is going.
Key Takeaways
Similar to picking a few highlights from a high-scoring sports game, narrowing down the key takeaways from this research is a daunting task. Here are four highlights we have summarized that you don’t want to miss:
- Enablement for all, but start with sellers. Despite traditional sales enablement shifting to encompass additional go-to-market roles, Gartner finds “this has driven the shift toward revenue enablement platforms, however, both buyers and revenue enablement vendors focus on enabling sellers first”.
- Generative AI is here. Vendors have pivoted to ensure they embed generativeAI capabilities for revenue enablement like call summarizations and email writing into their platforms and customers’ workflows. As GenAI continues becomes more important Gartner believes that practitioners should “evaluate the depth of GenAI capabilities of vendors by assessing content creation and summarization” and by “identifying ML and conversation intelligence capabilities by evaluating real-time translation, next best action accuracy and role-based contextual recommendations.”
- Tech stack consolidation is growing in importance.Gartner recommends buyers “prioritize vendors with a holistic approach to revenue enablement that includes content, learning and coaching for any resource that is revenue-generating by evaluating the vendor’s function-specific content learning and coaching, and associated role-based analytics”.
- Workflow + data + analytics: It’s not enough to just have reports or predictions. They key is ensuring that sellers and other roles are taking action based on the insights. In fact, Gartner predicts that “by 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making, using technology that unites workflow, data and analytics.”
Gartner’s Definition of “Revenue Enablement”
Noting the shift to enabling more roles than just sellers, Gartner defines revenue enablement as:
“Revenue Enablement Platforms unite sales, customer-facing enablement and revenue functions. They encompass revenue-generating roles including customer success, marketing, partners and presales. The platforms have capabilities for digital content, learning and coaching as well as machine learning and conversational intelligence for skill building. They integrate with sales force automation (SFA) or marketing automation platforms, feature buyer engagement analysis, and measure and build role skills and competencies that improve commercial execution.” – Gartner’s Market Guide for Revenue Enablement, August 2023
Gartner segments the market into eight capability categories that are common to the vendors in the Market Guide:
- Digital content management
- Coaching
- Analytics and engagement
- Conversation intelligence
- Integration and platform
- Machine learning
- Digital sales rooms
- Learning (Training)
In our opinion, Gartner puts a strong emphasis on tying content performance and buyer engagements to deal stages and revenue success. This includes segmenting success data by verticals and other attributes to provide more detailed information on the effectiveness of specific engagements and empower customers to scale the best behaviors for each engagement. Vendors who do this effectively will see their customers improve content that leads to more high-quality engagement, resulting in faster deal cycles as well as more deals moving deeper into the sales cycle.
Revenue Enablement Market Direction
Over the past few years the sales tech space – including revenue enablement – has been shrinking to a handful of key vendors who are expanding their capabilities to be true one stop shops for their clients. Companies, including Mediafly have been expanding their capabilities – both organically and via acquisition – to become true seller action hubs where sellers and revenue teams can complete their tasks without toggling between different applications. Gartner now sees “the revenue enablement space is aligning and overlapping in capabilities with technology markets such as revenue operations, revenue intelligence, sales engagement and revenue data platforms providing end-to-end support and visibility for sales leadership and managers”.
As end-to-end revenue support increasingly becomes vendors’ goal, Gartner sees vital sales tech capabilities like conversation intelligence, engagement analytics, ML scoring and learning & coaching overlapping into those adjacent areas of sales technology.
Continuing to improve and expand capabilities is crucial for every vendor in the revenue tech space. “In a recent Gartner survey of B2B sellers, 55% of respondents agreed that technology improvements will enable sellers to provide high value to customers in new ways.” Buyers see the value that revenue tech brings when it comes to serving customers. According to Gartner, “the market share for sales enablement for 2022 was approximately $1.77 billion reflecting growth of 35.7% from 2021. Gartner expects continued solid growth in this area.
Generative AI’s Role in Revenue Enablement
Since November 2022, when generativeAI became the topic of the year – it was literally the cover of Time Magazine in February – almost every vendor in every space has shifted their priorities to explore or implement GenAI in capabilities in their product. The revenue enablement is no different. Gartner believes “it is crucial for enablement leaders and their sales technology leaders to investigate the way they’re deploying the use of large language models (LLMs) or other GenAI systems”.
Gartner is seeing vendors create genAI solutions for call summarizations, coaching role-play scenarios, to create quizzes, and to create content like emails. Nearly every vendor will have deployed some form of GenAI in their products within the next year. Mediafly is no different, having organically created the first genAI capabilities designed specifically for revenue enablement.
What to Look for in a Revenue Enablement Vendor
Where to start? What to prioritize? We think Gartner’s Market Guide for Revenue Enablement Platforms is a great place to start. We’re thrilled to once again be included, and that Gartner continues to include Mediafly in this research. Having previously been included in Gartner’s most recent Market Guide for Revenue Intelligence Platforms Mediafly is the only vendor with a single platform included in both sets of research.
According to Gartner, “organizations that want to help enable their revenue-generating employees should evaluate enablement platforms for digital content, learning and coaching, analytics and learning.” We believe that together with crucial analytics they form a holistic enablement program, that allows customers to identify what “great” looks like and be able to coach their go-to-market team to be “great”, while constantly improving the quality of every buyer-seller engagement. According to Gartner frequently requested capabilities include:
- Analysis of buyer engagement from consumption of content in all forms
- DSR activity and conversation transcriptions with analysis including topic modeling and sentiment analysis.
What This Means For Mediafly
Since 2018 Mediafly has seamlessly integrated 8 companies into our ecosystem and simultaneously focused on expanding our capabilities to serve the entire revenue organization.
I am excited to be included in both the Market Guide for Revenue Enablement Platforms and the Market Guide for Revenue Intelligence Platforms We will continue working to provide a single revenue action hub that makes our clients as effective as possible. We’ve got a lot more coming including:
- Enhanced insights capabilities
- Bi-directional deal rooms
- More GenerativeAI!
Stay tuned for what’s next on our journey!
To learn more about how Mediafly can help make your go-to-market team as effective as possible, schedule a demo here.
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