Trends & Insights
How Financial Services Firms Align for Growth
By Seismic — On November 13, 2024
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Trends & Insights
By Seismic — On November 13, 2024
In financial services, client-facing teams must build trust and foster long-term relationships, all while keeping pace with the evolving needs of their clients and ever-changing compliance requirements. As firms look for new ways to grow AUM/Revenue, increase productivity and personalize client experiences, compliantly, enablement technology is quickly becoming necessary for firms looking to achieve their top business outcomes.
Given that the role of enablement, and enablement tech is becoming more important across the industry, Seismic commissioned a research report to better understand how leading firms are integrating enablement as part of their business strategy.
Our new study, “Revenue Enablement in Financial Services: 2024 Global Findings & Insights,” explores how industry leaders are investing in enablement, driving business results, and integrating AI into their enablement strategies to better support the needs of sales, marketing, compliance and leadership teams. Nearly all respondents (94%) say they are using some form of enablement technology at work and predict (93%) that their team’s reliance on enablement technology will continue to increase over the next year.
In this post, we’ll cover the results of the study and focus on the importance of organizational and strategic alignment and the critical role that enablement plays within financial services.
Enablement technology encompasses multiple capabilities and solutions, including sales content management and automation, training and coaching, buyer engagement, strategy and planning, and analytics and intelligence.
Serving as a critical component in a modern tech stack, enablement technology makes it possible for firms to manage rapid change, keep up with changing customer expectations, improve offerings and services, and close skill gaps.
Enablement tech plays an important role in unifying sales, marketing, service, enablement, sales learning and coaching, product, compliance and leadership teams to achieve the firm’s top strategic priorities. Seismic’s own Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Hayden Stafford, underscored the importance of alignment in a recent presentation, stating, “Aligned teams are efficient teams. Aligned teams are productive teams, and aligned teams are winning teams.”
Enablement helps drive alignment by providing the necessary tools, training, and resources to help teams maximize every client interaction, and drive business growth and stability. Leaders featured in our study also agree with that sentiment, knowing that there is a lot needed to make client facing teams more impactful. They define enablement, a function generally shared across teams, as a mix of content creation and production (36%), sales tech (27%), and sales and training coaching (26%).
Enablement technology makes it possible for marketing teams to create accurate and compliant content at scale, while solving the challenge of making it discoverable for client-facing teams. When client-facing professionals can quickly access up-to-date content and relevant client information, they’re able to deliver the hyper-personalized experiences that are both memorable and impactful.
Although there’s no single blueprint for the ideal enablement structure, one essential quality they must share is alignment. Supporting sales teams effectively requires a coordinated effort across multiple departments. Successful firms understand that aligning marketing, product, sales coaching and training, data, and technology teams is essential for driving growth and maximizing impact.
Firms are choosing a number of different ways to support sales enablement – having components of the function sit across various teams, with cross-functional committees coming together to align on priorities, measurements, and outcomes. Others are looking to centralize more of these functions within one team. While giving careful thought to organization structures is important, it is more important to keep teams aligned on a shared vision for enablement.
According to Stafford, “Enablement drives measurable results — not just efficiency adoption, but concrete outcomes that matter, such as pipeline, sales velocity, value coverage, win rates, close rates, uplift rates, renewal rates, and more.”
When industry leaders were asked about the primary responsibilities of the person leading enablement, responses varied across different focus areas. The largest portion (39%) indicated that their enablement leaders spend the most time on long-term projects, such as business transformation and operations that require a more holistic approach.
Another 31% said these leaders focus primarily on execution, working to deliver on plans and projects they or others in the organization have requested. Meanwhile, 16% noted an equal division of time across all responsibilities, while 12% described their leaders’ roles as handling ad-hoc tasks that arise unexpectedly.
Firms view AI as a powerful productivity booster for client-facing, marketing, and training teams, especially for streamlining content creation and improving efficiency of meeting preparation, delivery, and follow-up.
Over 50% of respondents say their companies are using AI-powered tools in their enablement processes, and 90% report being satisfied or extremely satisfied with these tools.
Use of AI in enablement efforts is expected to become more widespread in the near term. Respondents predict that AI will be indispensable in providing personalized customer experiences (92%) and maintaining competitive advantage (86%) in the next five years.
To make the most impact and drive strategic change, we recommend that enablement leaders follow a six-faceted model:
Align with business outcomes for strategic initiatives: Choose the business outcomes that you can address.
Correlate client-facing professionals’ behavior to outcomes: Determine what they need to do and say differently, and what else they need to know.
Develop the program: Create the program structure with playbooks, content, lessons, and practice.
Monitor progress: Observe whether the program is working. Did the client-facing professionals engage with the enablement materials? Did they apply it with the right skills and behaviors?
Implement modifications: Coach teams, improve materials, promote best practices, and fill gaps.
Review results: Assess whether the program met the outcomes determined at the start (i.e. pipeline, revenue, time-to-close, or win rate).
Alignment is key to making enablement truly effective in financial services, helping teams drive strategic change and create a lasting impact. Our study reveals that industry leaders prioritize alignment across sales, marketing, and training teams as a means to boost productivity, personalize client interactions, and support growth. By ensuring all teams work toward shared goals and outcomes, enablement becomes more than a function—it becomes a strategic force for transformation. Firms that focus on alignment in their enablement efforts are better positioned to grow and set new standards in operational excellence and client satisfaction.
To review the full findings, download the report: “Revenue Enablement in Financial Services: 2024 Global Findings & Insights.”
