Turns Out … Sales Content And Sales Readiness Are Better Together
For the first time, Forrester has published an evaluation of the combined space comprising sales content management and sales readiness (learning and development) capabilities. We call this new category “revenue enablement platforms,” or REPs. Content and readiness have been on a convergence course since the flurry of acquisitions in 2021. This acquisition spree saw legacy providers on each side either scooping up readiness or content platforms or announcing plans to develop the missing capabilities from scratch. Fast-forward to 2024, and we see that the Venn diagram is now a circle — readiness providers have developed content management capabilities, and content platforms now offer readiness features.
In August 2024, we published The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Enablement Platforms, Q3 2024, looking at the 12 most significant vendors and how they stack up across 32 criteria. The Wave evaluation emphasizes synergies from combining content and readiness capabilities into a single platform with unified management and reporting. We were looking for a demonstration of how “1 + 1 = 3,” and for the most part, the vendors delivered: They showcase enablement dashboards that highlight how content and training efforts affect sales results and recommend improvements to training and content programs based on program effectiveness.
To evaluate the revenue enablement platform vendors, we used three primary sources: responses to a detailed questionnaire, a live product demo, and an in-depth survey of the vendors’ reference customers. The Wave evaluation details the scores and strengths and weaknesses of each vendor. Here are our key findings and the trends that we identified for the REP market.
Our Three Key Findings: Effectiveness, AI, And Service Are The Magic Ingredients
Vendors are focused on enablement effectiveness, not just tactics. Far more than ever before, vendors are delivering metrics, reporting, and dashboards that allow enablement teams to understand their impact on the business. With CRM integrations, REP vendors can correlate enablement activities in content and learning to real-world sales results. This is an important milestone, representing some of the first legitimate attempts to field a comprehensive enablement dashboard that measures the impact of behavior-change initiatives — something that has been notoriously difficult to assess. The developments could potentially have broader impacts on other departments that also value competency development.
AI is already integrated throughout enablement platforms. Vendors are using AI to streamline and improve enablement on multiple fronts: generative AI to create and optimize content and learning pathways, AI-guided pitch practice for sellers, AI-based pitch scoring, AI dubbing and transcription to engage multilingual audiences, and AI creation of quizzes and learning checkpoints. Vendors will continue innovating with AI in pursuit of better productivity and learning, but it remains to be seen how popular the innovation will be with customers.
Service still really matters. In our October 2023 evaluation of the sales readiness solutions vendor market and our November 2022 evaluation of the sales content solutions market, we called out the exceptional customer service provided by some of the vendors that was recognized by their clients. We also called out some areas where customer service was lacking. This year, clients again raved about the service from the support teams of most vendors. The ability of support teams to quickly resolve implementation and development issues drives noticeable gratitude and loyalty. Again … revenue enablement platform vendors … you’re probably not paying your CSMs enough!
What’s Next?
Vendors are continuing along this new path of innovating in a combined readiness-content environment, and their development roadmaps promise exciting new capabilities. Their success hinges on their customers’ appetite to digest the changes as quickly as vendors deliver innovation. We expect big advances in generative AI, integrated content and readiness functionality, and more insightful reporting about the intersection of content, learning, and real-world results.
