"Sales enablement is both a business discipline and a collection of technology. It encompasses the process, content, training and tools to help salespeople (and others involved in the buying journey) be more efficient and effective.  Capabilities include sales content management, coaching, training, onboarding, and account management.

But in the past year, Gartner has been tracking the development of sales enablement platforms. Some of the sales enablement vendors have converted their applications into API-based open platforms, offering their own library of open APIs. With native APIs, sales enablement vendors can:

• Provide native connectors to other API-enabled sales enablement applications
• Create user-interface mashups with other sales and marketing solutions that are based on open APIs.
• Offer basic tools for building custom user interfaces or data capture forms
• Deliver granular functions for capturing and measuring how business contacts engage with the content sent to them by sales representatives."

These are questions that, using the Socratic approach, I usually ask in one form or another during the 30-minute SEA inquiries and in-depth day-long advisory sessions that focus on building a comprehensive set of requirements and expectations:

• What is the most important success factor for SEA?
• What new insights can we gain from SEA?
• How does SEA relate to marketing automation and CRM?