Executive Summary
Despite big changes to the environment in which business takes place today, business-to-business (B2B) selling remains fundamentally driven by the importance of building customer relationships. Even so, relationships alone don’t determine success: B2B sellers must contend with highly educated buyers, growing expectations for digital commerce capabilities, and new questions about what constitutes effective relationship selling.
To tackle these challenges, a set of tools has emerged that is designed to address the needs of individual sellers and sales leaders, typically by complementing or supplementing existing CRM systems. By explicitly catering to the needs of the people using them, these tools help dramatically improve the quality, timeliness, and accuracy of the data that executives use to plan and manage their businesses.
This Trends report examines the key trends shaping today’s B2B sales environment, identifies the core capabilities developed to address sellers’ needs, and provides context for understanding the types of tools available and the problems they attempt to solve. Anyone seeking to understand this market or invest in seller enablement tools should use this report to explore the options available and how to choose among them.