Need help navigating the upcoming autumn rough waters? The Touch & Sell team has got your back. We carefully handpicked the 5 most telling Sales Enablement statistics to help you up your Sales game. We’ll also share with you our insights on each figure.
Stat#1: Sales Enablement is (still) a differentiating factor
One might think that Sales Enablement is widely used in B2B. The fact is it’s not. A recent UberSuggest study shows that more than half of the professionals surveyed have never even heard of that expression. While it is hard to believe, the finding is backed by the relatively low volume of Google searches for the keyword “Sales Enablement” (5,400 average monthly searches).
Insight: the low penetration rate of Sales Enablement gives its aficionados a big head start to outperform their rivals. To quote strategic marketers, Sales Enablement is still a competitive advantage that allows you to beat the competition.
Stat#2: salespeople spend most of their time… not selling!
This is probably the most impactful hidden cost for businesses. The actions of salespeople are in fact closely linked to the company’s business volume. The figures vary according to the methods of calculation and the sectors of activity but on average, salespeople spend 40% to 70% of their time on tasks that are not related to sales per se. A CSO Insights study even showed that 67% of salespeople’s time was spent on secondary tasks. This is confirmed by an InsideSales.com study: salespeople spend only 37% of their time on revenue-generating tasks. Needless to say that it affects your global performance.
Insight: this hidden cost is the Raison d’Êtrerationale of Sales Enablement, which is designed to help salespeople stick to what they do best: convert leads. Sales Enablement provides them with the right data, the right content, the right training and the right technology stack to make them focus on closing.
Stat#3: the leading companies (heavily) rely on Sales Enablement
According to the 2021 HubSpot’s Data and Insights Report: “In uncertain and turbulent times, decision makers need to keep their salespeople focused on selling. This means minimising the time spent on non-revenue generating tasks.”. HubSpot states that 65% of companies that exceeded their sales quota in 2020 had a team or at least one person in charge of Sales Enablement. HubSpot also highlighted a rather surprising figure: 10% of the decision-makers surveyed did not know whether their company had a Sales Enablement function.
Insight: despite the fact that no econometric or large-scale studies have been carried out on the subject, it is very difficult to ignore the incidence of Sales Enablement on sales performance. As a matter of fact, investing in this decisive function gives your company every chance to quickly get positive results.
Stat#4: Content is important, but not without coaching
HubSpot asked B2B decision makers the following question: “What kind of content do you offer your salespeople to help them convert their leads?” Here is a summary of their answers:
- Emailing templates (53%);
- Scripts for phone calls (39%);
- Checklists for preparing phone calls (37%);
- Product demos (36%);
- Positive customer reviews (36%);
- Messaging templates for Live Chat (34%);
- Case studies (32%);
- Blog posts (19%).
Sticking to providing relevant content is vintage Sales Enablement. It’s as simple as that. To maximise your sales teams’ performance, you’ll have to set up a proper monitoring process:
- Identify the best practices, reinforce, formalise and pass them on to the whole team in order to generalise them;
- Identify poorly performing practices to refine or abandon them;
- Analyse the performance of each salesperson to provide content and coaching in line with their strengths and weaknesses.
According to the same study, decision-makers prefer transparent monitoring methods. In fact, 68% of them carry out a weekly review with their salespeople. The use of practices such as telephone tapping (34%) and call shadowing* (31%) is quite limited.
Insight: Sales Enablement goes beyond providing content, tools and information to boost sales performance. You are expected to use data-driven coaching to generalise best practices and launch a dynamic of continuous improvement.
Stat#5: Sales Enablement experts are hard to find
LinkedIn currently lists around 13,000 Sales, Revenue and Growth Enablement professionals… but more than 8,500 of them are in the US.
Insight: you might have some trouble finding the right profile. But you can seek out a Growth Enablement expert who will provide you with ultra-personalized training, tailored content creation and delivery and the proper digital tools, aka the three pillars of Sales Enablement.
Touch & Sell is the French pioneer in Growth Enablement. Back in 2012 when our platform was developed, we had virtually no competition on the market. Today, we support our clients in optimising their processes, activating synergies and realising the full potential of their Sales within the frame of a coherent and multi-faceted approach including People, Process and Technology. So are you ready to go to the next level? Let’s discuss your project!
*Call Shadowing: the practice of randomly selecting a phone call made by a salesperson to analyse it and identify the elements that impacted its outcome (conversion or loss of the prospect).
