The move from point solutions to complete sales enablement clouds
There has been a lot of talk lately about what it takes to empower sellers and why a "sales enablement cloud" is the answer to getting sellers to higher quota achievement and more sales success.
The idea that we are moving from what the IT industry used to call “point solutions” to a platform approach that provides complete solutions is something that we have been saying at Bigtincan since before the pandemic.
Software that empowers all parts of a seller's needs from skill development and coaching, through content management and presentation, meeting, and follow-up, and finally insights into the sales process, is an inevitable future for customer-facing workers in today’s economy. A 360-degree view of the seller and their needs is a cornerstone of the complete sales enablement cloud.
At Bigtincan we have been delivering on that through our multi-Hub model:
- The Learning Hub for preparing and upskilling customer facing teams
- The Content Hub for accessing, personalizing, and sharing content with buyers
- The Engagement Hub for building those meaningful relationships with buyers using a powerful set of tools for meetings and campaigns
And while it's nice to have others follow us with their own sales enablement clouds, it's time to talk about where this fits into the big picture.
The rise of the Intelligent Enablement Platform
You can think of the Hubs as the collection place for engagement data — the “sensors” or “signals” that provide views on what is happening in the way sellers work.
We realized that we needed to start with building a system to allow these Hubs to fit together to really help sales teams and managers. We called it our Intelligent Enablement Platform (IEP).
The Intelligent Enablement Platform transparently connects users, files, and data, allowing users to seamlessly move to the Hub they need when they need it and allowing managers to gain insights into seller performance across their daily activity.
These Hubs together with Bigtincan Scorecards — as the sales manager dashboard — empowers managers to not just measure past performance, but to predict the future performance of sellers. Using correlated data from CRM, HRIS and other third party systems means we can go as far as even predicting turnover in the sales team.
The IEP takes that sensor data and turns it into actionable insights to maximize seller performance.
The Intelligent Enablement Platform in the real world
Releasing our IEP to the real world and watching the results taught us a lot.
We learned that by combining the enablement platform with powerful technologies we make an even bigger impact. Our Conversational Intelligence engine enables advanced, scalable sales coaching and our VR/AR/Metaverse tools introduce new ways of selling.
We’ve heard this directly from our customers. I just love to hear what they are saying.
Matthew Johnson the Director of Membership Sales & Sales Enablement for the Sacramento Kings recently said to our investors, “What we’ve seen is about a 3x increase on closing deals in our pipeline with Bigtincan versus those we close without this great tool. At the end of the day, the results speak for themselves.”
So what we’ve seen and heard from our customers is that the platform for sales enablement has become the recognized baseline for what sellers need to be productive today.
But let's now think a little more about what is happening in our economy and look at what customer-facing teams really need for success in the future.
Addressing shifts in the buyer-seller dynamic
The future of our economy is going to be driven by what we call the buying experience of the future.
Let's ask ourselves, “Why does the buying experience matter and what is all this talk about the buyer?”
Our economy is now more digital and remote than ever before and buyers are now more empowered than ever before to drive the buying cycle with sellers.
For decades (some might say hundreds of years) sellers often have had an advantage over buyers. They would have access to special information and be able to use that information to control the buying process, often holding that data back to control the pace and to ensure that they could extract the maximum profit margin from a deal.
This meant that no matter what kind of experience was delivered, the buyer was dependent on the seller to control the engagement.
Fast forward to today. If we embrace what the internet, social media, and remote connections have done, it means that buyers now are no longer at a disadvantage. And if we add in the significant turnover that has happened through the pandemic in many sales organizations, now the buyer could be in a position where they know more about the products they are buying than their seller.
Even if we rebalance that equation by empowering sellers, that is not going to be enough to change the dynamics back and drive increased profit in transactions. Empowering sellers alone is not enough to be successful in this economy.
The world’s leading businesses saw that change happening and have adapted their way of selling to be ready for this world. When you think about leading companies like Apple, Nike, Tesla and others, they have realized that the buying experience makes the difference — not just how sellers sell. They created amazing buying experiences to maintain their connection to customers, and yes, to maintain and grow their profit margins by delivering this experience.
Providing the buying experience of the future
At Bigtincan we believe that it's time for all companies to be able to join these leaders in creating that experience. Just empowering sellers alone is not going to be enough to win in 2022 and beyond.
To help every buyer-seller interaction become about delivering the buying experience of the future, the Bigtincan team has created a platform that empowers sellers and has made creating that buying experience our commitment to the market. We want to help sales enablement professionals to really do their job by driving increased profit, winning more deals, and protecting margin in the new economy.
Our commitment to you is to help you to meet these two needs together as one, and do it with the industry’s easiest to deploy and easiest to use platform.
My ask is that you give us a try and see for yourself why a sales enablement cloud is as much about your buyers as your sellers.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how our new economy is impacting your teams and how we can create this future together.
Get in touch here or on our social channels listed below.
