Sales enablement platforms are becoming an increasingly critical ingredient to success for Life Science organizations. The most successful organizations have a comprehensive sales enablement strategy and are moving away from custom applications and siloed solutions that are cobbled together, upgrading to innovative and comprehensive sales enablement platforms.
59.2% of companies now have a dedicated sales enablement function (up from 32.7%), while 8.5% of companies have plans to create one in 2019 (CSO Insights).
Here are key elements that our clients tell us they are looking for when making this move:
- A comprehensive Sales Enablement Platform. A sales enablement platform for Life Sciences should drive all of the pillars of your comprehensive sales enablement strategy. These pillars likely include: Overall mission statement, roadmap for each group, action plan, business metrics (ROI), task plan (who is responsible), and items tabled or omitted (phase 2 etc.). Tools and content should be deeply integrated and available offline and across all utilized platforms and devices. Although deep integrations are critical to success, avoid vendors relying mostly on “point solutions” and shallow integrations at all costs.
Having a sales enablement charter is linked to a 27.6% increase in quota attainment (CSO Insights).
- A "single pane of glass" for field teams. Sales coaching, training, learning, playbooks, and reporting are deeply integrated, meeting the needs of the sophisticated sales enablement strategy. This creates a seamless solution of key business platforms, and reduces the number of overall platforms and vendors required to be successful.
- Modern KPI tools as part of the platform. Tools that clearly show marketers what sales-tools they should develop now in order to have the largest impact on revenue, allowing marketing to demonstrate sales-tools’ value. It should utilize data science to analyze pipeline, sales-tools and content usage – and provide answers to the following questions:
- Is the team developing the right tools to help sales reps maximize revenue?
- Which of the sales tools help bring in revenue?
- How can the team minimize last minute requests for customized content?
- Improved measurement of performance. A leading goal in 2019, as reported by marketing leadership, is access to better analytics tools. Per Salesforce, organizations that use sales analytics increase team quota attainment 4x faster than non-users. While Big Data continues to be a driver, there is a treasure trove of data native to their own field teams that is fairly untapped. A sales enablement platform should capture robust data, allow timely access to custom reporting, and have the flexibility to evolve with the organization’s overall data and analytics strategy.
- The solution is user friendly for all stakeholders. A modern, innovative sales enablement platform has a well-designed, intuitive UI for all stakeholders. This UI should be consistent and highly impactful both on the web and on mobile devices. Mobile-first design will correlate with a superior overall performance versus legacy web-first platforms retrofitted for mobile capabilities. Automation should reduce the administrative burden for internal team members such as marketing and operations. Regardless of place or platform, Field teams should be able to easily access highly impactful business tools, all in one place. Field capabilities need to be fully functional offline, resulting in timely access to content and tools, a significant increase in productivity.
Bigtincan Life Sciences (LS) is an award winning product offering that recognizes the unique needs of life science clients with leading core product capabilities, over 100+ deep out of the box integrations, as well as deep API and KPI capabilities.
Want to learn more about sales enablement in the Life Sciences industry? Download our eBook: Life Sciences - Discover the Right Revenue Formula with Sales Enablement.