Pieterjan Bouten
Co-Founder and Executive Chairman
Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of Accelerate by Showpad. Accelerate is a virtual community for sales enablement practitioners across the globe to connect, find inspiration and build their skills through a variety of free learning resources.
Over the past eight years, I’ve had a front-row seat to the explosive growth of the sales enablement space. While organizations have long understood the benefits of sales content management, sales training and sales coaching, they haven’t always invested in the people, processes and technology needed to make it a reality within their organization.
But all of that is changing. Sales enablement has shifted from a “nice to have” to an organizational need. Ten years ago, you would struggle to find a sales leader willing to trade a quota-carrying sales rep for an internal team member. But now, we’re seeing more and more organizations creating a dedicated sales enablement function and hire talent to support it. To put this in perspective, look at the growth of sales enablement roles – the number of LinkedIn users with “sales enablement” in their titles has grown 92% in just two and a half years.
These sales enablement practitioners are hungry for a space to come together and learn from one another. We’ve heard this time and time again from our customers and the community at large. These folks are pioneers, doing the difficult work of shaping a new industry. They’re looking for other trailblazers to support them in the challenges they face and celebrate the successes along the way. They want to know they aren’t alone and leverage real-life examples and support from a community of peers.
And that is exactly why we created Accelerate. To give sales enablement practitioners from around the world a space to gather, to share resources, to learn from each other and, ultimately, to evolve the profession together. For the past year, we’ve been working with a small group of sales enablement practitioners to better understand the needs of practitioners and have already added more than 100 educational, practitioner-provided resources to the site.
Now, before you jump in, I want to be perfectly clear. While Showpad has had a hand in creating this community, Accelerate is a vendor-agnostic space. Everything you see on the website – from templates to interviews to articles – is from practitioners, for practitioners. Our intention is to create a space for sales enablement professionals to learn from each other without vendors, including us, getting in the way with sales pitches and product offerings.
As a testament to that commitment, we’ve brought on Allison Sword as Accelerate’s Director of Development and Engagement. Allison is Accelerate’s gatekeeper and leader. Her role is to maintain the integrity of the community, foster engagement among the members and curate Accelerate’s library of materials to ensure practitioners are getting the support they’re looking for.
If you’re a sales enablement practitioner, check out Accelerate by Showpad. Register (it’s free!) and get in contact with Allison. There are thousands of other enablement professionals out there that want to hear your story, learn from your experience and help you along your professional journey.
