We've been doing a lot of research over the last year into a critical part of the buying process that seems to get very little attention in the design and execution of demand generation: sales and marketing efforts. Anyone who has ever been involved in attracting or acquiring new customers knows that buyer intent is an important ingredient in the customer acquisition recipe.

Intent varies by person, by market and/or by what you're selling. There are any number of factors that are going to impact when and where intent occurs, but somewhere along the buyer’s journey, buyer intent hits a critical point. Intent, initially, does not necessarily relate directly to buying from any particular vendor. Buyer intent refers to the decision that some level of action needs to take place. If you think about the last major purchase or even decision that you made, you can quickly and easily identify that point that separates pre-intent actions from post-intent ones.

Last week I was talking with Jess, our Director of Operations, about the inordinate impact that technology has had on the sales and marketing function. I told her about my first “CRM.” As a new hire with Alamo Rent-A-Car, I was assigned 624 travel agencies in my territory. A couple days after I started, I got a thick envelope with 104 pages of cards (there were 6 cards per page) printed on a dot matrix printer. I separated my cards, placed them into a file box and went to work.

Sales and marketing technology (or, the growth stack) has moved from being a complement to the work that needs to be done, to being at the core of virtually everything that happens.

The Role of Technology in Sales & Marketing

Consider the following:

• The average company is spending almost $5,000/sales rep/year on sales technology. (source: Gartner CEB)
• The Marketing Technology Ecosystem had just 120 names when it started in 2011. Today, there are more than 5,000 technology alternatives (and growing). (source: ChiefMarTec)
• Investment in sales technology over the last two years tops $10 billion. (source: VentureBeat)

What’s clear is the mushrooming growth and impact of technology in demand generation and sales. Equally clear is that despite all of these investments, users are not seeing the returns they expected.

The 2001 Oakland A’s had a problem. They’d won their division in 2000, but they were losing the league’s most valuable player, Jason Giambi, to the hated New York Yankees. What’s more, the A’s did not have the money or resources that their competitors had.

The front office, led by Billy Beane, had to figure out how they would replace Giambi and maintain the A’s winning ways. This is where he famously turned to his assistant GM, Paul DePodesta to develop a plan of attack.

This, of course, is the story that led to the bestselling book and movie: Moneyball. While DePodesta and Beane have achieved near hero status and as a result, went on to set a record for most consecutive wins (broken by the Cleveland Indians this past season) and repeat as division winner; they also highlighted essential lessons for every business executive.

In 2016, I spoke at Inbound16 to introduce and define the key principles that have come together to become the growing discipline of Sales Enablement. In that session, I defined Sales Enablement as the ongoing effort of aligning and optimizing all facets of an organization’s revenue generation process. It is focused on increasing the efficiency and acceleration of revenue generation tactics.  

I also highlighted that sales enablement isn't anything new. The world of sports and particularly baseball, have been implementing their version of sales enablement for more than a decade. They called it Moneyball.

So, let’s take a step back and think about the critical question that DePodesta was seeking to answer that led to the breakthrough and in turn, led to the book: