The Sales Enablement industry is more than 20 years old

Depending on how you count, the Sales Enablement industry is turning more than 20 years old!

I’m proud to be quoted in Pam Didner’s excellent book –

‘Effective Sales Enablement’

As you can see above, we were trying to find out how old the term Sales Enablement or the Sales Enablement industry is.

We used Google and Google Trends.

However, Google Trends only allows you to go back to 2004:

I found out that there is a second book that is quoting my blog and specifically my research on how many people on LinkedIn have Sales Enablement in their job title:

That second book happens to be in Japanese! amazon.co.jp/dp/4761274581/

That book is actually making a great point.

Using Google Translate on an excerpt I was able to read that the author looked at when the domain salesenablement . com was first registered: 1998!

That’s in line with when the first Sales Enablement companies were started:

Depending on when you consider two companies to constitute the start of an industry, the Sales Enablement industry recently turned 20 years old!

It might also reach more than $10Bn USD in annual revenue by 2023:

This blog of mine has been tracking or writing the “History of the Sales Enablement market” since 2009 (See the archive and the search on this blog) and my lists have 765 line items of active, acquired and shut down businesses or rebranded product names.

The company I moved from ‘active’ to ‘out of business’ the most recently was:

Chemistry usechemistry.com @usechemistry enterprise web & tablet technology built to align Sales & Marketing through 3 of the most critical components: Digital asset management, integrated data collection, & customized sales tools. Used to compete with SETVI, SKURA, & Distribion. Kansas City, MO, USA (Website offline since 5-Feb-2020 but last LinkedIn post already 11 months old.)

It will be interesting to watch, if the popularity of the term Sales Enablement reaches the popularity of the much broader term MarTech (in the USA – just like it does globally) or if another term takes over. So far, Sales Engagement does not seem to take off.