On November 4, 2010, Tom Pisello (The ROI Guy) wrote a long and comprehensive post entitled ‘IDC: Economic Buyers, Digital Overload and Sales Enablement Define Marketing for 2011′. Below is short portion of his post. You can listen to his full webinar ‘Capture frugal buyers with IDC Dynamic Reports’ as well as download the presentation.

One of the three Key Technology Marketing Trends for 2011 according to IDC is Investing more in Sales Enablement. It “is critical as buyers indicate that internal decision making is becoming more complex, while at the same time, sales professionals are not adding the needed information and value needed to overcome the growing buying cycle complexity. As a result, sales is being invited later into the decision making process, sales cycles are extending and deals are stalling.”

“[...] Is this digital spending allocation aligning with buyer needs? When asking over 200 IT buyers what they felt was most important part of the overall purchase process, over 1/3rd of the buyers indicated Vendor Content as key to the purchase decision. Content may indeed be king.

IDC survey results indicate that buyers rely on Vendor Content greatly, exceeding the value of direct vendor engagements with technical teams, sales representatives and executives in making key purchase decisions. With a wealth of information available at the click of a mouse, buyers are doing more of their own research and evaluations on-line relying less and less on vendor interaction to progress through the decision making cycle. We call this the “Internet fueled buying cycle.”

Content marketing, and developing content in particular to attract today’s economic focused buyer, is more important than ever to help connect and engage with buyers, and help customer stakeholders make better and faster IT purchase decisions. From these survey results, increased spending on content marketing for corporate web sites and social media would seem to help drive more / faster buying decisions. To help cut through the constant information overload, and help guide decisions more effectively, the most valuable content is that which is tuned to be relevant and engaging to the buyer – one-to-one personalized for example by industry, location, size, stage in buying cycle, role, pain points and opportunities.

The End of Sales as we Know It?
The importance of content marketing, from these survey results, help guide marketers that they should indeed be investing more in developing and delivering the right personalized and engaging content to help buyers drive decisions.

However, the importance of content and lack of priority towards direct engagements points to a troubling trend in that today’s Internet fueled, buyer controlled purchase process is disintermediating sales from the purchase process. Buyers are doing more and more of their own research in the early and middle phases of the sales process, and involving sales reps later and later in the sales cycle, often after key purchase decisions have already been made. Can sales be made relevant and valuable again in these key stages of the buying cycle?

The key to shaping the trends back in the vendors favor certainly requires an investment in content marketing, but also may mean investing more wisely in Sales Enablement to be sure sales is armed with the content they need to effectively engage buyers earlier, and with more value in the process.

Sales Enablement or Perish
Sales Enablement is defined by IDC as: “The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place … to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.” [...]“