Life Sciences • Financial Services • Manufacturing • Consumer Goods
What Is Sales Enablement? Why Is It Important?
On a basic level, sales enablement is about providing your sales team with the tools, information, and resources they need to sell more effectively. Everyone agrees that this is important. Successful companies aren’t asking whether they should support their sales teams, but rather how and with what tools.
There are a wide variety of sales enablement strategies out there. Many companies handle sales enablement on an ad hoc basis—members of the sales team pass emails, spreadsheets, and sales collateral around amongst themselves. This haphazard approach to sales enablement means different team members receive materials at different times, promoting little or no cohesion within the overall sales strategy. It also usually means that workers are left without important materials—often without even realizing they’re missing anything—and their sales suffer as a result.
More forward-thinking companies invest in sales enablement platforms that help to automate this process. But that introduces its own set of problems—how to choose a platform when they all seem to offer the same kinds of services?
Finding a Sales Enablement Platform that Fits Your Needs
The Sales Enable Automation (SEA) industry is booming, with new players entering the market seemingly every month. At the same time, Forrester surveys say that 54% of B2B companies already have or are in the process of implementing SEA solutions, and another 19% plan to in the next 12 to 18 months (The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Platforms, Q3 2018).
With all this market activity, it can be difficult to accurately evaluate the suitability of different platforms. Are the biggest platforms the best, or are they overhyped? Which of the feature sets on offer are actually relevant to your organization’s sales process? Which critical tools are missing from the marketing leaders but only available in more niche products?
The key to finding an SEA platform that works for your business is to look for platforms that specialize in serving your industry. Some of the largest and best-known platforms are generalists that do a lot of things pretty well, but have major blind spots when it comes to the unique needs of any particular industry. However, there are SEA platform providers out there that instead choose to go deep on specific industries and focus on meeting the challenges that sales teams in those industries face. That’s where Pitcher comes in.
Pitcher Goes Deep, Not Broad
In order to better serve our key customers, Pitcher has focused on developing solutions to common problems in four industries: Life Sciences, Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Consumer Goods. We have teams working in each industry to better understand how our customers are using Pitcher and how we can better address their needs.
This strategy has paid off in a big way for Pitcher users. The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Platforms, Q3 2018 stated that Pitcher invests in building out platform functionalities to address the unique needs of its customers. Forrester also noted Pitcher’s vertical expertise and functionality, saying that “Pitcher is an ideal choice for organizations that fall into Pitcher’s vertical sweet spot and rely heavily on the field sales model.”
Pitcher has invested heavily in building out platform functionality to address the needs of customers in these verticals. For example, Pitcher has developed functionality for Life Sciences customers that help them to deal with the heavy compliance requirements in the industry. For customers in the Consumer Goods industry, Pitcher has developed trade marketing and store scoring functionality.
These products are constantly evolving as we listen to our customers and work with them to identify new ways that we can help them reach their sales goals and make their sales enablement processes more efficient.
Pitcher: An SEA Leader
The fact that Pitcher is a specialized platform doesn’t mean that you need to compromise on power or features. Forrester named Pitcher as a Strong Performer in the SEA category overall. The Forrester Wave™ report says Pitcher “delivers a best-in-class UX including 3D environments and gamification that enhance visualizations of reports and help sellers with self-coaching,” adding that “companies with a large Millennial sales population may find a good fit in Pitcher” due to immersive UX.
With Pitcher, you get all the features you would expect from a top-tier sales enablement platform, while also benefiting from a design and development philosophy that is focused on directly addressing the unique challenges faced by your sales team.
Try Pitcher Today
If you work in one of Pitcher’s verticals, request a demonstration today. It will only take us a few minutes to show you exactly what your sales team has been missing out on and demonstrate how we can begin improving your processes right away.