What is Gartner Magic Quadrant?
Gartner, a research firm that provides reporting, business insights, tools, and advice for organizations and company leaders, has developed a proprietary method for evaluating businesses and emerging technologies in an effort to help businesses understand how technology providers are performing to assess if there is value for your business.
According to Showpad, a sales enablement platform, the Magic Quadrant information is beneficial because “the analytics and findings give audiences a quick understanding of the competing technology providers in their industry, how those providers deliver on current and future end-user requirements, and their competitive positioning to determine how well their strengths align with a business’s needs. Based on a vendor’s ability to execute and the completeness of its vision, it falls into one of the four Gartner reporting quadrants.”
The Gartner Magic Quadrant categories include:
- Leaders: execute well in current vision and are positioned to continue doing so
- Challengers: execute well today, but may not understand the direction of the market
- Visionaries: understand market direction but do not execute well
- Niche Players: focused on a small segment, or are unfocused and non-innovative
- So what do these reports tell your business?
How can Gartner Magic Quadrant help your sales enablement?
Showpad things the sales enablement benefits of the Magic Quadrant are simple: “Gartner’s decades of expertise in industry research provides a great benefit for sales organizations looking to implement or improve their sales enablement program by evaluating certain sales enablement technology.” Gartner Magic Quadrant sales enablement benefits and insights can be extremely valuable to businesses.
Sales enablement helps to empower professionals with the resources that help sales leaders and teams increase productivity and build relationships. Marketing and sales enablement team members work to align with the goals and needs of sales teams to help make sure they have everything they need to communicate with customers and better sell. This is facilitated, in part, by sales enablement software, which helps sales enablement teams understand which resources are needed and being used, as well as track the customer-facing success of such resources.
The Gartner Magic Quadrant sales enablement impact helps you identify the right software, programs, and technology to properly support the sales enablement efforts at your business. By comparing technology providers, including sales enablement technology platforms, you can easily identify what to avoid and what to invest in. While Gartner won’t endorse any particular companies, their reputation for good and accurate analysis can help you discover which technologies most align with your business needs and goals.
What to know about Gartner Magic Quadrant for your business?
Here are the things that Gartner data suggests that you should look for in sales enablement technology.
1. Content repository and management
One of the primary focuses of current sales enablement is developing and sharing content. Sales will request (or marketing will determine a need) for content that can help customers along their journeys, such as sell sheets, presentations, case studies, and buyer’s guide. Without a way to manage this content, it won’t get found by salespeople and won’t get distributed to customers. That means fewer engaged, educated customers, fewer sales, and a waste of marketing time and effort in developing content. Having a content organization and communication feature is a key component of a good sales enablement technology platform. It helps salespeople easily search for and find relevant content in one place instead of forcing a search through twelve different directories, allowing salespeople to focus on selling instead of hunting down content.
2. Conte development features
Does your sales enablement platform enable customization of content for salespeople to access to tweak pitches for every unique customer interaction? While this isn’t always a requirement, it’s a good option for businesses to have. Personalization and customization continue to be an important part of
3. Content delivery
Salespeople need a tool that allows them to easily distribute content to customers. Some sales enablement tools have built-in pitch platforms or engagement tools that help salespeople send directly to people from LinkedIn, Twitter, Outlook, Gmail, and more. This delivers more value to customers and a program that can offer this offers more value to sales teams.
4. Content analytics
Sales enablement succeeds when the content succeeds in driving more sales. The only way to know if this happening is by knowing if sales teams are accessing and using the available content. Analytics like analytics that shows indicators such as content downloads, views, and pitches offer insight that guides your content strategy to be more effective and can identify gaps. It also gives marketing teams a way to prioritize the content requests.
5. Integration
You want a sales enablement tool that integrates with your sales tools as well as other systems. Sales enablement platforms that work with your CRM, for instance, can help record new contact information and manage all customer engagements from a single platform. Some sales enablement technology can even make recommendations for content based on CRM and customer interactions. It’s also important to have integration with other business systems. Integration with tools like LinkedIn, email platforms, and other tools help to increase your overall effectiveness.
Using Gartner Magic Quadrant sales enablement reports help you understand if the current and upcoming technologies deliver on these necessities.
No matter what industry you work in, if your organization needs to implement B2B sales enablement solutions, paying attention to the Gartner Magic Quadrant sales enablement technology analysis can help you identify the best sales enablement technology for the success of your business.
