Trust Enablement

Improving Sales Performance with Enablement Recruiting, Consulting, Outsourcing, Coaching, and Insights on Strategies, Tactics, and Tools

Our Process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights Report

This article is being released to outline the process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights Report that we will begin running in January.

Goal

The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights ReportTrust Enablement’s mission is to Help Enablement Practitioners and Leaders succeed, the businesses they work for achieve positive, measurable business outcomes while making our work environments more diverse, inclusive, equitable, with openness to all people and ideas.

In short: Empowering and Enabling the Enablers.

The goal for this reports is to provide feedback to the Enablement community based upon what Enablement, and the customer-facing teams they support, actually need.

In the process, we will be thoughtful to call out any area that positively or negatively impacts:

  • The overall impact on Enablement professionals as human beings, including from diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging standpoint.
  • The ability of Enablement professionals to be successful in delivering positive, measurable business outcomes.
  • The ability of businesses using Enablement to achieve demonstrable results.

This research phase of this report, which will be our first one, will launch at the beginning of January.

How will this report be conducted?

Let’s review the process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights Report

Initial Notifications

We announced the report to the Enablement community, and vendors, at the beginning of December through this a post, emails, and LinkedIn outreach.

Many vendors responded quickly, others beyond our initial outreach raised their hands to participate, and a few have yet to reply.

Report Analysis

We committed to releasing the Enablement Maturity Index (EMI) (done as part of our release of the LEARN Enablement Framework) and sharing details of the research at the beginning of January.  We are slightly ahead of schedule and will begin notifying vendors of the report details being released (via this blog post, emails, and LinkedIn outreach).

We will spend January and February of 2022 conducting business reviews and analyzing the vendors against the index and use cases below, then write and release our report in March of 2022.

The Trust Enablement team will:

  • Evaluate each solution against EMI using the methods listed just below.
    • We will also ask each vendor to provide a business overview session to help us best position them against their ideal customer profile (ICP).
  • Reach out to a random sample of customers to ask for their commentary on the products (questions are listed below).

Vendors can choose to participate in one of three ways:

  • No involvement.  Vendors who choose not to participate will still be listed as Uncertified and customer feedback will be included for their solution.
  • Vendors can provide Trust Enablement with a demo account.  We will validate the capabilities against EMI and these vendors will receive a Trust Enablement Certified badge.
  • Vendors can share a video of them meeting the use cases, or walk Trust Enablement through the use case in a live meeting.  These vendors will receive a badge of Certified but Unverified. 

As results are coming in, we are sharing them here.

 

What Vendors Are Included?

We are including the following vendors in this report.  Note that no one is being charged to be involved in, or read the results of, our report.

  • Allego
  • Bigtincan
  • Bloomfire
  • Data Dwell
  • Dealplay.io
  • DocSend
  • enable.us
  • Highspot
  • LevelJump
  • Mediafly
  • Mindtickle
  • Modus
  • Paperflite
  • Pitcher
  • Saleshood
  • Seismic
  • Showell
  • Showpad
  • Spekit

The Business Reviews

We will be asking each vendor the following questions during the business review portion of the report:

Customers-Focus and ICP

  • Size of the current install base in number and value of licenses.
  • Primary verticals you are having success selling into and supporting.
    • Can you connect us with 1-2 customers in that vertical I can speak with for primary verticals?
  • Any other verticals you have success selling into and supporting?
  • What is the average headcount of companies buying your products?
  • What is the average revenue of companies buying your products?
  • What is the average size of Enablement teams using your products?

Customer Purchasing

  • Why do customers buy from you? 
  • When they go with a competitor, why do they make that choice?
  • What makes you different from the other solutions?
  • What are the primary use cases you support, and what products do they buy for each?

DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging)

What is the business doing to improve DEIB in the organization, from front-line to executive table to board room?

 

The Enablement Maturity Index

Process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights ReportThe Trust Enablement team has recently launched its LEARN Enablement Framework, and the Enablement Maturity Index (EMI), a core component of the framework, is used in our analysis of software solutions.

For each level of EMI below, the supported use cases have been included.

Level 0: Absent

Cannot determine what content has been used.

Level 1: Limited

Can determine what content has been used but no method to easily determine to who, for what opportunity or scenario.

May be able to identify what content is never being used in deals or may simply have to know the full set and remove what’s been used.

Level 2: Basic

Can tie content usage to a specific account/deal/stage but no insights on impact.

Can easily identify what content is never being used in deals.

Level 3: Informative

Can tie content usage to a specific account/deal/stage and provide revenue attribution to its usage.

May be able to measure the impact of content on:

  • Deal stage velocity
  • Deal stage exit %
  • Overall Deal Velocity
  • Win Rate

Can identify what content is never being used in deals.

Level 4: Insightful

Can tie content usage to a specific account/deal/stage and provide revenue attribution to its usage and be able to identify the impact on:

  • Deal stage velocity
  • Deal stage exit %
  • Overall Deal Velocity
  • Win Rate

Broken Down by:

  • By Persona/Job Title
  • By Industry

Can identify what content is never being used in deals.

Can automatically identify all content gaps against the manually created buyer and customer journeys.

Can identify the next piece(s) of content to send.

Level 5: Transformational

Can tie content usage to a specific account/deal/stage and provide revenue attribution to its usage and be able to identify the impact on:

  • Deal stage velocity
  • Deal stage exit %
  • Overall Deal Velocity
  • Win Rate

Broken Down by:

  • By Persona/Job Title
  • By Industry

Can identify what content is never being used in deals.

Can automatically identify all content gaps against the manually created buyer and customer journeys.

At the beginning of opportunity, and as the opportunity flows along, can orchestrate recommendations of who in the buying team to share content with, and all of this based upon all existing deals in the CRM, what has worked with similar roles, people who are typically involved, and so on.

Can automatically identify all content gaps against AI-mapped buyer and customer journeys and prioritize content recommendations to develop based upon potential ROI.

No reports to run, just insights on what is working, what isn’t, how to correct challenges. 

Customer interviews – Questions for Users of Vendor’s Solutions

As we connect with customers for each product, we will ask them the following standard set of questions.  Their answers will be included in our report.

  • Name of Person (will anonymize).
  • Name of Company (will anonymize).
  • Industry.
  • Use case supported by the tool.
  • # of customer-facing teammates supported.
  • Size of Enablement team.
  • Where do the vendor’s capabilities fall on the defined maturity model?
  • What have you most enjoyed about working with this vendor and/or using their products?
  • Where does the vendor, or their product, have the most room for improvement?
  • On a scale of 1-10, (1 lowest, 10 highest), how likely are you to use this product again if the decision was completely up to you?

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

The final portion of this interview will be a question for the vendor’s CEO:

“What is the business doing to improve DEIB at all levels of the organization, from the front-line to the executive table to the board room?”.

Have questions about the process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights Report

Please reach out.  The process for The State of Sales Enablement Content Insights Report has been defined to be transparent, equitable, and unbiased — while providing value to the Enablement professionals who use these tools to solve their challenges.