I've been covering the sales enablement space here at Forrester for six years. While the concept is certainly more common than it was "back in the day", I'm not really sure we as a community have a lot of clarity about how to get various Marketing, Human Resources, IT, Finance, and Sales groups on the requisite same page required to drive the desired effectiveness and efficiencies of most sales enablement initiatives across the selling system.
The problem today? Sales is Getting Too Much Well Intended Help and Not Enough Real Support
One of the important realizations that we continue to illuminate for business leaders is that when all of these groups are working independently to support sales, a tremendous amount of uncoordinated, redundant, or conflicting investments are made. Corralling these "random acts of sales support" is job #1 of any strategic sales enablement initiative…but how do you determine whose efforts are the random ones? Whether you are in a small or large organization there are many different people are certain they know what salespeople need to be successful, resulting in an avalanche of sales enablement deliverables, but few real results.
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