What will Marketing’s Role in Sales Enablement be in 2022?

Sales enablement is a hot topic for sales and marketing organizations everywhere.

In a recent ITSMA survey on Sales Enablement, nearly half (43%) of the 130 respondents indicated that their organization’s sales enablement budget will increase in 2022, with an average increase of 5.2%.

The research also shows that marketing plays a vital role in sales enablement; however, a number of other different functions are also involved in sales enablement at large, complex organizations, from dedicated sales enablement teams, to marketing, to sales management, to the C-suite, and everywhere in between.

So, what is marketing’s specific role in sales enablement that drives growth?

Based upon our survey as well as what we’ve seen from ITSMA members and clients, we have identified three concrete ways marketers can influence leads, engage existing clients, and help sales accelerate the pipeline and close deals:

1. Improve access to high-quality and consistent content
2. Provide deep, personalized insight and intelligence
3. Enable innovative, flexible approaches to hybrid engagement

CRB developed a library that consolidated thousands of marketing and sales assets into a centralized environment. They provided self-service capabilities for sales to easily find and access information and developed a modular content strategy, which centered on creating a single source of truth for company sales information. With a net zero capital cost, this library reduced the time spent searching for information from 10 hours/week per team member to 1 hour/week and helped the company increase the number of competitive proposals issued by 48%.

Atos designed and implemented a digital, client-centric, and highly personalized approach to deal-based marketing and messaging that was tailored to each decision maker and influencer. They then replicated that messaging and creative across 10-15 deals at one time, which led to extraordinary business growth, including a 76% win rate and a 167% increase in new business over a 3-year period.

SAP, recognizing that its customers were fatigued from virtual interaction, changed their approach for virtual engagement. They hyper-targeted their customers, identified a “customer champion” for a specific account who was enthusiastic on the topic, and aimed to humanize their account team and speak to the customer visually through video as much as possible. These changes improved engagement and pipeline, resulting in $2.3M in new, rolling four-quarter pipeline.

In October 2021, ITSMA surveyed 130 respondents, primarily marketers, who are responsible for sales enablement at large B2B technology and business services companies, the majority of which reported more than $1B in total revenue in FY2020. For more details on this research as well as case studies from companies that are seeing success with their sales enablement programs, download Sales Enablement: How Marketing Adds Value.