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Back in the 1970s, Xerox recognized the need for a support team that handled many of the basic operations and logistics essential for a successful sales team. The support team took over core sales operations such as sales planning, compensation, forecasting, and territory mapping. The team aptly named, sales operation group, created a working environment that allowed the sales crew to do their jobs with all the right tools.

At the same time, sales managers and business owners were handing out copies of Og Mandino’s, The Greatest Salesman in the World, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, and Dale Carnegie’s, How to Win Friends and Influence People, while developing sales strategies for enabling their sales team once they got out of the office and into the field.

These two processes — sales operations and sales enablement — have been running on parallel trajectories ever since.

Let’s take a closer look at the difference between sales ops and sales enablement, how each impacts your sales organization, and how to implement each to assist your sales team in winning more deals.

If there is a role in modern businesses that is less understood than Product Marketing, it is Growth. What’s more, both roles become more confusing because they often sit in similar pockets in the org chart. There are some overlaps and distinctions between the fields of Growth and Product Marketing, as well as many opportunities for these professionals to work together.

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is an interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In this edition of Product Marketing Spotlight Series, we shine the light on Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing at HubSpot.  

Competitive Intelligence (CI) has traditionally been a manual process. Competitive intelligence professionals and market analysts spend a significant amount of time capturing, analyzing, and acting on competitive intelligence data. However, the traditional way of doing competitive research—manually—may soon be the minority practice for CI pros. As we see competitive intelligence becoming more of a need-to-have rather than a nice-to-have, we’re also seeing a rise in automation. Competitive intelligence is becoming more popular and more digital.