FROM THE CEO
Sales Enablement Technology – What’s in a Name? At this point, what sales enablement is has
these solutions may also be described as Sales
become pretty well-established. CSO Insights
Coaching & Learning tools (Aragon Research)
reports that the number of companies with a
or broken up into smaller categories like Video
dedicated enablement role has more than tripled
Practice & Role Play (Smart Selling Tools).
since 2013. And while there are many ways to define it, most people agree on the primary
2) Solutions to help reps engage: From an
goals and responsibilities of the function.
enablement perspective, these are the tools that help companies organize, find and share the right
What’s less clear, however, is how to define the
sales assets, and track the prospect/customer
technology available to support it. In other words,
engagement with that content. (These may be
‘What does a sales enablement solution do?’
described using Sales Enablement Automation – a la Forrester – or any of the other initial
The confusion is somewhat understandable. FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @Greg_Flynn
examples listed above.)
There are a lot of terms out there, and different industry analysts and experts use a variety of
Of course, the product offerings themselves
categories to describe what are (essentially) the
are not always this distinct. Some vendors are
same things.
focused on only one side of the market, while others provide varying functionality for both.
Sales enablement automation. Sales asset
What’s important is that each category is an
management. Sales engagement platforms.
equally vital piece of the sales enablement technology puzzle.
These are all terms that different analyst firms have used to refer to the same types of solutions
The alphabet soup around enablement tech is
– and these examples only refer to one side of the
unlikely to go away completely, especially as the
enablement market.
space continues to shift and evolve. But just like any good sales conversation, the more clarity
It’s no wonder that buyers might get confused,
we can provide for buyers, the more prepared
so I’d like to try to provide some clarity. At
they’ll be to make the best sales enablement
Brainshark, our take is that there are two distinct
investments.
sides to the sales enablement technology space: 1) Solutions to help reps prepare: These are the tools used for onboarding, training, coaching,
Greg Flynn
skills development and general preparation of sales reps and client-facing teams. While Forrester uses the Sales Readiness moniker,
3
CEO, Brainshark
