One of the questions we hear most regarding Sales Enablement Automation is where does it fit in the Marketing/Sales tech stack? We understand the confusion. Sales Enablement Automation platforms can do a lot - we’re talking sharing content, editing content, presentations, recording information to CRM, video and message chat, creating leads and contacts in CRM, microlearning, reporting, and more. With so many capabilities, it can be hard to place it in the traditional technology landscape.
The simplest answer is that Sales Enablement Automation is a tool for both Marketing and Sales, and fits somewhere between Marketing Automation and CRM. Because of the name – Sales Enablement Automation – it’s easiest to think about Sales Enablement in comparison to Marketing Automation. The goal of Marketing Automation platforms is to facilitate the communication between marketing teams and many potential and existing customers, through landing pages, email, forms, and more. On the other hand, the goal of a Sales Enablement Automation platform is to facilitate the communication between the Marketing and Sales teams, and between Sales and prospects, through Sales content.
Two key distinctions between Marketing Automation and Sales Enablement Automation are who is sharing the content, and to how many people.
For example, secure sharing of marketing content to prospects is a key functionality of a Sales Enablement platform. While Marketing Automation provides a way for Marketing to send the right content to the right (sometimes thousands of) people at the right time, Sales Enablement is about getting the right content to the right single (or few) people at the right time, through Sales. Marketing Automation platforms help Marketers nurture leads until they are ready to talk to Sales, and once they are engaged with Sales, getting the right content to them is just as important, but it isn’t done through Marketing Automation - it’s done through Sales Enablement Automation.
Bigtincan’s Sales Enablement Automation platform, Bigtincan Hub, gets the right content to the right person at the right time with the help of AI. Bigtincan’s proprietary AI technology, which we call SalesAI, will analyze what content has driven sales success in similar situations in the past, and recommend that content where appropriate to a salesperson, where they can provide it to the customer to progress a deal forward. Bigtincan’s Outlook email integration can even recommend content based on a prospect’s email message to a salesperson. The salesperson can respond to the email, simply click to attach the content right from within the email client, and automatically log the interaction to CRM with no additional steps.
Marketers typically have very granular insight into what public facing content on their website is being accessed, but have virtually no insight into content’s value when it is being utilized in a Sales situation. The Sales Enablement Automation world is here to change that. With Sales Enablement Automation, marketing gets unprecedented insight into what content they’re creating is being used by sales, and what content is progressing deals forward.
Want to learn more? Check out our recent blog post, “25 Indicators You Could Benefit from a Sales Enablement Platform."