Something’s happening to the sales enablement tools you rely on, and you might need to sit down for this.

Like other sales enablement tools, Showpad was conceived to create ultimate selling experiences for our customers. Helping them streamline processes, win more deals faster, and find a powerful home to create genuinely engaging content. It’s a noble goal. But we quickly realized our customers needed more. 

So sales enablement tools started to evolve.

Welcome to what Gartner calls Revenue Enablement Platforms.

Sales enablement platforms become revenue enablement platforms.

What is a revenue enablement platform, and is it honestly any different from a sales enablement platform?

Gartner’s Definition: 

“Revenue enablement platforms unite sales enablement functions and customer-facing revenue processes. They encompass revenue-generating roles, including customer success, marketing, and presales. The platforms have capabilities for digital content, training, and coaching or, via open APIs, integrate with complementary vendor offerings. They integrate with Salesforce automation (SFA) or marketing automation platforms, feature buyer engagement analysis, and measure and build role skills improving commercial execution.”

Powerful stuff. But what does that translate into when selling every day?

In their recent August 2022 Market Guide for Revenue Enablement Platforms study, Gartner covers this:

What revenue enablement offers sales (and beyond)

Like lots of sales enablement professionals, you might be happy enough with your amazing sales enablement tools. They’ve created efficiencies, made your content easier to find and more engaging, and they’re connecting with your prospects. There’s no need to change, right?

The rise of revenue enablement is in response to a changing world. These tools are designed to help sales teams connect with other internal teams to create an end-to-end buyer experience ready for the demands of tomorrow. Gartner found the additional functionality offered by revenue enablement platforms:

• Supports and enables people in broader revenue-generating roles, such as customer success, presales (technical sellers), and marketing, to create more engaging and comprehensive experiences.
• Lets you target messaging to buyer personas while building the connection to role-based digital content and marketing-specific analytics for even greater engagement.
• Grows conversational intelligence, training, and coaching value with Digital sales rooms (DSRs). Though with live in-call conversation guidance and coaching emerging, you’ll need to ensure sellers are enabled to boost adoption.
• Boosts the connection to revenue intelligence through acquisition or integration partnerships, and increases the overlap of revenue-enablement capabilities with revenue intelligence and sales engagement technologies. Moving revenue enablement into new areas like opportunity analysis, health scores, and sales forecasting.

Where is revenue enablement taking you?

For those currently using sales enablement, a lot of the area revenue enablement covers will already be familiar. So really, what does it give you that’s any different?

Revenue enablement platforms take your sales and marketing knowledge and push it to the next level. And they do this across the board. Though Gartner summed up how they transform the three key areas they impact most (content, training and coaching, and buyer engagement), like this:

This snapshot highlights the power of the insights available. This greater focus on analysis helps you reshape your training programs, use data to understand the power of content, and get under the skin of buyer engagement like never before.

With revenue enablement solutions, not only can you see what’s working, you can see why. And this doesn’t just empower sellers. Now marketing, customer success, and others benefit from all the data you collect with every engagement.

Want to know if revenue enablement is right for you?

Interested in uncovering if a revenue enablement solution is a game changer for your sales team? Gartner’s 2022 Gartner Market Guide had some key recommendations for those looking to take the next step.

According to Gartner, you need to:

• Seek and prioritize vendors with a holistic approach to revenue enablement to include content, training, and coaching for any resource that is revenue generating by evaluating the vendor’s function-specific content, training and coaching, and associated role-based analytics.
• Evaluate conversational intelligence capabilities of vendors by the depth of ML capabilities, such as real-time translation, accuracy, and role-based contextual recommendations.
• Investigate the strength of each vendor and/or its partner ecosystem to support additional capabilities for your organization, such as a connection to forecasting or other sales execution motions. 

To get the full story behind Gartner’s findings and how Showpad performed, grab a copy of the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Revenue Enablement Platforms report today!