A new report from leading analyst firm Aragon Research, Digitize the Sales Force: Leverage Sales Engagement Platforms to Gain a Competitive Advantage, gives guidance on how to sell effectively in a digital, always-on world. ClearSlide was named a pioneer and best-of-breed provider in the report.

Aragon Research predicts that Sales Engagement Platforms (SEP) will grow into a $5 billion industry over the next five years. This growth is fueled by demands from sales and marketing teams to better communicate and engage with customers through an integrated, easy to use, high mobile platform – one that enables the sharing of high-impact content, delivers insights for what to do next, and integrates and auto-logs to CRM.

There are hundreds of sales enablement tools available, but most only accomplish a small part of the selling process. Stitching together disjointed tools can be confusing for sales rep adoption, hard for enablement and operations teams to manage, and may actually limit productivity. In fact, Aragon Research reports that the average sales rep must use anywhere from 5 to 8 different tools to reach prospects. Aragon Research compares the evolution of the Sales Engagement Platform to Productivity Applications.

Today’s Sales teams require a new digital sales suite for sales professionals (akin to “Office for Sales”).
The Sales Engagement Platform supports the entire cycle – from content management, integrated communications, and advanced analytics – and feeds the engagement data seamlessly with CRM systems and other partner applications.

Source: Aragon Research, 2016

The Aragon Research report reaffirms that the era of Digital Selling has arrived. Business Applications, such as the Sales Engagement Platform that ClearSlide offers, are the answer to the challenge of connecting with and engaging with sophisticated buyers. Aragon Research also finds that shifting to more modern and advanced Sales Engagement solutions can be more cost effective than general purpose tools (e.g., web conferencing, email tracking).

To learn more about Digitizing Sales and the rise of Sales Engagement Platforms, download the Aragon Research report here.