Last week was the Sales Enablement Society conference in Denver, and it was incredible to see the number of attendees dedicated to sales enablement and invested in the growth of the industry. It was truly a community of learning in Denver. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the conference about the sales enablement community:
A community that is growing
The Sales Enablement Society is full of momentum. The conference itself has seen a lot of growth from 2017 to 2018, with over 300 attendees this year. Further, the sales enablement space is growing both by vendors and by practitioners. VendorNeutral shared their industry landscape in one of the Experience Rooms at the conference, and the graphic is staggering. Seismic is thrilled to be in the first 25 of Vendor Neutral’s Certified 100, but the number of different specialized tools within sales enablement is amazing. It shows the strong growth of both the specificity of sales enablement offerings as well as the different types of solutions organizations are looking to find.
A community getting more sophisticated
The Sales Enablement Society is beyond wondering what sales enablement is and how it can affect their business. It’s exciting to see the in-depth, advanced topics that today’s sales enablement practitioners and vendors are thinking about. People in the Sales Enablement society are working on things such as how to create a sales enablement mission statement and charter, how to create buy-in from their entire company and their entire leadership team, how to onboard full sales enablement divisions, and more. Hang Black from 8×8 had a great handle on the right questions to ask, leading a session focusing on how to acquire the right talent and how to equip that talent with the right training and continuous learning opportunities.
HPE, meanwhile, has used Seismic’s platform to get their entire down from 100 portals to just two. People are figuring out how to leverage sales enablement in a more sophisticated way for their organizations, and the shared insights from the Sales Enablement Society conference will only continue this trend.
A community looking towards the future
The biggest trend from the conference, though, is that everybody in the Sales Enablement Society is very much seeking what’s next – how to look towards the future and be better sellers, better marketers, and be ahead of the curve with any trend in their varied industries. Sales enablement is a field that wants to push business forward and beyond its current capabilities. It’s difficult to change the status quo, and sales enablement professionals are the people who want to put in the effort to do so. Being in a room full of people invested in that mission shows me that the best for the Sales Enablement Society, and sales enablement as a discipline, is yet to come.
