an interesting year for Sales Enablement

An interesting year for Sales Enablement!

• For the first time ever someone or something tried to hack this Sales Enablement blog (got the two-factor authentication message on my phone; not triggered by me). Maybe a rite of passage?
• I was interviewed for a book [on Sales Enablement] for the first time. Yes, look out for a book covering the history of Sales Enablement, going to print in October 2018.
• Sales Enablement leader Iris Chan organized and hosted the 4th meeting of the Sydney Australia chapter of the SALES ENABLEMENT SOCIETY @_sesociety.
• ToutApp was acquired by Marketo: Announced date: 19-Apr-2017. $7M in revenue annually & competes with Velocify, Inc., Outreach, & SalesLoft.
• My global vendor list and table (you can export/download yourself) grew
• After almost a decade of vendors having to optimize their experiences for mobile, now almost every new vendor seems to have a Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) story to tell.
• To succeed in large enterprises a Sales Enablement solution has to integrate with or sit on top of the giants like Salesforce.com (CRM, Salesforce One app, Einstein AI, etc), Oracle Eloqua, Microsoft SharePoint and alike.
• My Sales Enablement market deathwatch grew and consolidation in this space continued; Eg. after Sant and Kadient had already merged into Qvidian, Qvidian is now owned by Upland Software, Inc.
• After the focus on enabling your b2b salespeople, the focus needs to become enabling your buyer. Start 2018 with mapping out your B2B product’s or service’s ‘buying journey’ and enable buyers digitally every step of the way / on any channel.
• Trapit was acquired by ScribbleLive in May 2017. (Rock Content has acquired ScribbleLive on 10-Dec-2019. Rock Content: SaaS, Marketplace. Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil)
• The number of LinkedIn users with Sales Enablement in their job titles grew to 5,610 (Edit: In 2019 it crossed 10k and in 2022 it crossed over 16k a few times.)