With Gartner’s recent release of their annual “Market Guide for Digital Content Management for Sales (November 2017),” and their August 2017 report, “Sales Enablement Technology Transforms the CRM Sales Landscape,” there is suddenly a lot of data available for businesses looking to improve the performance of their sales teams.
This year Gartner has gone further than ever before in looking at sales enablement and how it impacts companies trying to drive sales growth and improve sales rep productivity. The reports provide anyone, even the casually interested market observer, a good look at how they should view the opportunity these technologies represent, and how their customers are starting to think about sales enablement platforms.
As far as we at Bigtincan are concerned, Gartner hit the nail on the head with their 2017 assessment of the sector - To quote analysts Tad Travis and Melissa A. Hilbert, “Sales enablement platforms have emerged as a significant part of organizations' sales technology roadmaps." So, it’s clear that sales enablement is now something that companies of all sizes are looking to implement. The remaining question is, what makes for a successful sales enablement implementation? And what capabilities should customers look for to make their sales enablement investment worth it in terms of both money and time?
The Gartner Market Guide report, looks at key capabilities required across different market sectors, and calls out a variety of areas where customers should look to leading vendors to provide. The critical areas range from sales content management (ensuring that salespeople have the right documents, content, and collateral at their fingertips to help them move a sale forward), through sales communications (making sure that salespeople are fully aware of what is happening in the business and can communicate with their peers easily). Another crucial capability is content and material creation. Salespeople need to build the right content in order to be successful with their customers, but with the control and oversight that enterprise customers require. Moreover, formal and informal learning and knowledge development are necessary to help sale reps to stay on top of their game and succeed more.
Gartner also emphasizes the importance of smart software - for example, data science based machine learning and AI technology - that can impact salespeople by guiding them to the right content for each customer, the right message to present in a sales situation, and even identify the right people in the business that they can best work with.
In the report, Bigtincan meets every critical sales use case that was evaluated as well as all 31 capabilities under categories for content repository management, content development, content delivery, sales analytics, and sales process integration. We are also recognized for our “heavy investments in AI,” mobile technology, sales application building capabilities, and new formal and informal learning modalities.
With all of that being said, thank you Gartner for the detailed market view. At Bigtincan we know it’s still early and there is a tremendous amount of new innovation to come, but it’s good to know that all the hard work we are doing is helping our customers achieve their sales and service goals.
Thanks again to our customers, our partners, the analyst community, and the press for making 2017 a great year for Bigtincan, and for the advancement of sales enablement automation technology.
Here’s to a great 2018!
