When considering a new technology investment, it’s common to stick with the status quo (despite the inherent costs in that decision — see: The cost of doing nothing), so the question inevitably will come up when looking into sales enablement platforms: what is the return on investment, or ROI?
The answer depends on the problems you are looking to solve within your organization, but sales enablement platforms can create substantial financial returns in all kinds of ways, including:
- Increased productivity and effectiveness of your revenue teams
- Greater sales revenue as a result of improved effectiveness
- Improved information accuracy and brand consistency
- Reduced expenses on in-person training or office premises (if you are looking to go remote and want to keep teams connected)
- Increased customer satisfaction and retention
- Reduced selling cycle times
- Better customer engagement in every stage of the sales cycle
- Reduced onboarding time for new employees
That said, there are two areas in particular where most organizations see ROI from sales enablement: increased sales productivity and decreased marketing waste (not to mention the boost in overall effectiveness of your revenue teams when these two benefits feed one another).
We explain how you can use existing internal data to calculate your personal benefit from these two areas and look at some case studies of customers who have done this below.
Need help calculating your sales enablement ROI based on your particular business case? Speak to our team.
Increased productivity of your sales teams
There are many drains on a salesperson’s time, but there’s one main culprit: content.
Sellers need to be able to provide valuable content to prospects at every stage of the buyer journey. The struggle for salespeople often becomes determining which content will be most valuable to the prospect, whether that content already exists, and if so, where to find it.
When comparing numerous reports issued over the past few years on how much time sellers spend looking for sales content, the consensus comes to 15% of reps time, or six hours out of the average 40-hour work week.
Based on that information, below is a simple calculation to help you determine what the cost of that decreased productivity is for your organization, per month per rep.
6 hours per week x 52 weeks in a year = 312 hours, or 39 sales days lost
39 sales days x (Dollars of business closed per rep, per year / 245 working days per year) = lost potential revenue
Though the number will likely vary from business to business, the calculation above is likely an eye-opener, and revenue that your company would certainly like to have in the books.
Read the Sales Productivity eBook packed with helpful metrics and strategies to learn how you can empower sellers to do more with their time.
How sales enablement can help
Sales enablement platforms can help immensely when it comes to content organization and delivery.
Bigtincan, for example, delivers content to sales users based on role, only making available the content that’s relevant to them. This decreases content overload and search time.
All of the content, and only the right content, is available on or offline on any device, and Bigtincan’s AI recommends content based on what’s been successful in moving the needle in other similar sales situations. Reps can access the content and get recommendations directly in Salesforce, cutting time spent switching between the CRM and other applications.
Reps can also make edits to content, within the permissions set by the content creator, to quickly personalize presentations and documents to fit their sales situation, decreasing time spent attempting to do so on a desktop or in a specific software program they may or may not even have access to.
Learn more about Bigtincan’s content management capabilities in The best sales collateral management solution for enterprises.
Decreased marketing waste
Content efficiency and effectiveness is also where you’ll see most ROI from sales enablement in marketing. It’s no secret that marketers spend a significant portion of their time and budget on content creation — after all, it’s the key ingredient in driving inbound and outbound marketing and sales campaigns.
However, research from IDG found that 58% of a vendor's marketing content is not relevant to potential buyers, reducing a vendor's chance of closing that sale by 45%.
Bringing together several statistics on marketing waste, consider the following calculation:
(Marketing budget spent on lead generation annually x 45%) + (Amount of marketing budget spent on content creation and sales tools annually or 12% according to IDG x 70% of content that is not used, according to Forrester) = Amount of Waste
How sales enablement can help
Sales enablement (SE) platforms help decrease that waste in several ways:
- Track content usage and link content usage to specific deals closed. That information then informs AI and machine learning algorithms, which can begin to recommend the right content for a salesperson to share with a prospect. More relevant content to the prospects = more chance of closing deals.
- SE platforms’ usage tracking is also beneficial when optimizing content creation plans: marketers can now see what content is used, what isn’t, and what helps close deals. They can then spend less resources on pieces that don’t work, and spend more resources on pieces that move the needle.
- SE platforms organize content and deliver it to salespeople so that content isn’t sitting unused simply due to the fact that no one can find it. It’s there at their fingertips. So the time invested by marketers creating those assets is returned in pipeline created by content-driven or assisted deals.
A content analytics dashboard helps quickly visualize the value of all your content, and drilling down into the details will surface more insights on where marketers should be spending their time to have the greatest impact on sales with content they create. See: How to use sales content analytics to close more deals.
Sales enablement ROI case studies
Allurion Technologies
Allurion Technologies provides a procedureless device along with programs that combine medical, digital, and nutritional approaches to treat obesity.
Allurion needs to educate clinics on how their programs and medical device work, deliver training in a quick and consistent way, and give clinics easy access to the training materials and support required to complete their daily routines.
Since implementing sales enablement, they’ve seen 850% ROI in professional education and 67% more productive clinics, along with an overall increase in speed to effectiveness in people going through the training program.
Digi International
Digi International, a global IoT provider, educates and engages their channel partners and customers using their custom-branded sales enablement solution, DigiGo. So far, they have achieved 2000% adoption and 182% revenue growth in the process.
Learn more about their process:
These are just two of the areas where sales enablement platforms like Bigtincan can help make a quantifiable difference in your bottom line and two ways to calculate ROI.
Want more? Read the latest Gartner Market report to understand why sales enablement went from niche to “nice to have” to essential to the sales process and tech stack in just a few years.
