15 years of tracking the Sales Enablement market & trends
At the 15 year mark of me tracking the Sales Enablement market, I started to reflect on the journey:
I started to research the market players in 2007 and started to blog on February 25, 2009.
2018, a Sales Enablement book came out which I was interviewed for.
Over the last 15 years, many vendors merged, changed owners or went out of business and new ones keep on popping up.
I published a…
- list of questions to ask vendors when shortlisting
- table you can export/download
- Global list / worldwide (+ list of qualifying questions when shortlisting)
- European list / Europe-based players
- Canadian list / Canada-based players
- Australian list / Australia-based players
- Vendors from the Nordics
- Vendors in India or doing development in India
- list of AI /ML powered tools
… and even a Sales Enablement market deathwatch.
I probably just added or updated a vendor this week. Let me know what I missed or got wrong: https://twitter.com/salesenablement
Despite all this, I’m getting something very similar to the following email every 2 months — like clockwork…
“I came across your blog while researching the Sales Enablement space for a company with a sales enablement tool in beta. Would you be open to a quick chat and explore the opportunity of working together for the short term? I’m sure we could use your expertise to understand the sales enablement market and user needs better. Thanks.”
…and I always respond with something like this:
“An integration with salesforce.com is what you will see at the top of the list. If you target startups, then a Slack integration would be a quick win. There are so many vendors & solutions out there from lightweight to enterprise grade, from freemium to million dollar deployments, etc…
I have seen an extremely high number of vendors enter this market and shut down already [without being purchased]. Many more had to sell or partner to survive. It is a very crowded market, because so many companies & sales experts used to have no tool for their sales people (or too many), then built one for their own use, and are trying to sell it to external customers now.
At this point, I would really warn anyone who wants to enter this market: You can burn a lot of money & never get profitable: The moment you have a customer, they will ask for so many changes & features that you will keep building something that either already exists (but they don’t want to combine many tools & ask you to build one that can do everything) or you will build something that only works for them and no other customer.
There have been sales enablement solutions that became too sophisticated and you needed to train their users. There have been sales enablement solutions that were really lightweight small widgets shown in PowerPoint to add slides into auto-generated presentations, but still did not successfully compete in this market place.
It is a tricky one with more and more 800-pound gorillas!”
