CMO Advisory Best Practices Series: Sales Enablement - Marketing Content and Asset Management

This IDC study assesses the current state of the people, process, and technology involved in sales enablement, with a focus on marketing content and asset management, including identifying best practice companies in these areas. This study provides a road map for marketing to improve sales enablement from a people, process, and technology perspective, including case studies from best practitioners. The results of this study are based on interviews with marketing and sales enablement professionals in major technology companies, including Avaya, CA, Hitachi, HP, Intel, Kodak, Quest Software, Siemens, Sun, Symantec, and VMware. Insights are also included from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Leadership Board meeting and IDC's annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks and Barometer Surveys.

"As marketers, we've invested too much of our resources that have not been leveraged by sales and our customers — over 40% of marketing assets are not in use today, due to either lack of relevancy, asset credibility, or an inability for users to find these assets," said Michael Gerard, VP research, IDC's CMO Advisory Service. "Marketing and sales leaders will reverse this trend of wasted resources by assigning accountability for this and related processes; developing and executing more consistent processes for asset creation, deployment, and maintenance; and executing a more consolidated sales portal strategy that integrates with sales CRM applications and leverages new social media trends and technologies."