Sales enablement exists because selling is hard. It always has been. But in the current selling environment, even with advanced sales enablement platforms, closing a deal can feel impossible. Can it be that traditional sales enablement solutions that focus primarily on learning and content management are missing something? The answer is yes, and the solution is here.
The Buyer Journey Has Changed
In the past, B2B revenue teams (marketing, sales, post-sales) worked in silos, managing buyer engagement at various phases along the buyer journey before handing buyers off to the next team in sequence and hoping for the best. Marketers drove demand. Sellers engaged buyers and closed deals. Post-sale teams offered customer support.
This approach may have worked when the buyer journey was linear and in-person. But in recent years, as relationship-based selling waned, the amount of public content available to buyers exploded, and the buyer journey became more digital and complex, more sales organizations have begun to recognize the need to align revenue teams with visibility and tools to work together to guide buyers toward a confident purchase decision at every touchpoint.
I’m excited to announce that Mediafly has completed its acquisition of InsightSquared to help revenue teams do just that. The combined Mediafly and InsightSquared solution is the first to offer B2B teams one visual dashboard for content engagement, conversational intelligence, buyer intent, value engagement, and sales activity data. From emails, meetings and call recordings to web page views, content engagement and shares, Mediafly’s Revenue360 product, powered by InsightSquared, delivers the first holistic view of every buyer-seller touchpoint across the buyer journey and prescriptive next steps so you can better engage buyers, accurately forecast your sales pipeline, and drive predictable revenue.
Traditional Sales Enablement Falls Short
While traditional sales enablement can help you improve individual sales rep performance, it won’t be enough to drive transformational change across your organization in the most challenging sales environment ever. Here are a few reasons why:
1. 83% of a typical B2B purchase decision happens before a buyer engages with a vendor. Meanwhile, existing account growth is more paramount to business success than ever. The B2B sales landscape has shifted, and marketing and post-sale teams are now accountable for the same goal as sales – revenue. While traditional sales enablement empowers sellers to be more efficient and effective, it largely ignores other revenue teams in the organization. To be successful today, you need to enable all of your customer-facing revenue teams with the data, tools, content, and technology required to drive revenue.
2. A 2020 B2B Buyer Behavior Study published by DemandGen report revealed 70% of B2B buyers ranked “relevant content that speaks directly to our company” as “very important”. And 96% of respondents considered messaging that “spoke directly to our industry needs” to be important. Traditional sales enablement platforms focus on content and learning management. The belief is if you put good content in front of sellers and coach them on how to use it, they’ll better engage buyers and close more deals. But that isn’t necessarily true. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “If content is King, context is God.” Revenue teams need advanced data and insights to personalize and customize relevant content experiences for specific buyers based on their industry, challenges, behavior, interests, and sales stage.
3. According to Forrester, insight-driven businesses are growing at an average of 30% each year. Without revenue intelligence capabilities, traditional sales enablement platforms fail to support an insight-driven sales model. Your revenue teams need to tighten execution alignment to help sales reps move the needle. And in order to do that, you need to understand where you win, where you lose, and why. If you can identify what a deal that’s on track to close looks like, you can ground all conversations on data, develop sales and engagement best practices, accurately forecast sales pipeline, and prioritize the deals most likely to close to drive more predictable revenue.
Revenue Enablement is the Future
To fix the issues outlined above, many organizations are adopting a Revenue Operations (RevOps) model. With the adoption of RevOps comes a shift in mindset from sales enablement (enabling sales reps to help buyers make purchase decisions) to revenue enablement (enabling all customer-facing revenue teams to effectively engage buyers throughout the buyer journey and drive more predictable revenue).
Revenue enablement prioritizes:
Alignment
All revenue teams including marketing, sales, post-sales, sales leadership, and sales enablement should follow the same processes, leverage the same integrated tech stack and content, and use one set of data to inform business decisions.
Technology & Data
Leverage revenue intelligence solutions to capture buyer intent, conversational intelligence, content engagement, value engagement, and sales activity so you can understand where you win, where you lose, and improve sales execution.
Insights & Automation
Use AI-empowered technology to gain prescriptive insights into how to best engage buyers, what deals to prioritize, and accurately forecast your sales pipeline.
What are the Benefits of Revenue Enablement?
Revenue enablement combines the power of sales enablement, content engagement, and revenue intelligence in one platform to help B2B teams better engage buyers, accurately forecast sales pipeline, and drive predictable growth. Aggregating data from previously siloed technologies, our new Revenue360 solution, powered by InsightSquared, helps revenue leaders accurately assess opportunity health, improve forecasting, and drive deal wins with prescriptive recommendations for the next best sales motion.
Instead of relying on partial insights captured and siloed in various revenue intelligence solutions, revenue teams that leverage Revenue360 can capture data on every multichannel touchpoint across the buyer journey, including critical but often ignored content engagement data, in one visual dashboard to provide a holistic view of deal pipeline with prescriptive next steps.
The platform offers the following benefits:
For Marketers
- Ensure buyers always see accurate, on-brand content
- Understand what content impacts revenue
- Get your reps to appreciate the power of content by surfacing proven content at the right time for the right buyer
- Improve marketing and sales execution alignment to help sales reps move the needle
For Sellers (New Business & Growth Reps)
- Receive on-demand access to content proven to close deals
- Eliminate manual data entry to spend more time in front of buyers
- Prioritize deals based on data
- Receive prescriptive recommendations for the next best sales motion
For Sales Enablement Managers
- Capture analytics to determine what to replicate and develop sales best practices
- Learn what pain points in your sales execution practice to prioritize
- Understand where you lose and why you lose
For Revenue Leaders
- Stop interrogating reps and ground all forecast discussions on data
- Focus coaching time and resources where you can make the biggest impact
- Understand where you win and where you lose, to align cross-functional teams to execute
For Revenue Operations Teams
- Understand breakdowns and drive process efficiency throughout the customer journey
- Reduce silos and align data and tools across the organization
- Ensure you are operating at peak performance levels, ready to scale
Advance Beyond Traditional Sales Enablement
With Revenue360, Mediafly advances beyond traditional sales enablement, offering powerful tools and insights marketers, sales reps, and management can use to identify if a deal is on track and what to do next.
We named the product Revenue360 because it represents the vision of what we want to deliver for our customers. Our logo is a dragonfly – the most efficient predator with a 95% success rate. It is twice as successful as the great white shark and four times as effective as the lion. Why?
Because the dragonfly is the only creature that can see a full 360-degree view at once. The dragonfly can fly in any direction at any time, and the dragonfly brain is optimized to predict where its prey is going and the appropriate muscle commands to intercept it.
Similarly, Revenue360 will give sellers the ability to understand their customers from all directions at the same time, proactively predict where the customer is going, and give them the information and tools to meet the buyer where they’re at, so they too can win. Not 50% of the time like a shark or 25% of the time like a lion. But 95% of the time like a dragonfly.
Interested in learning more about Mediafly’s acquisition of InsightSquared and the Revenue360 solution? Check out this on-demand webinar.
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