Introduction

Sales enablement and deal support teams are essential in helping sales teams win deals. They provide market and competitive intelligence (M&CI), track industry movements, analyze win-loss data, and equip salespersons with battle cards and playbooks, ensuring that sales strategies are well-informed and effective.

But there’s a growing challenge.

As sales teams increasingly rely on deal intelligence, sales enablement teams struggle to keep up. They’re understaffed, burdened with repetitive tasks, and spending too much time manually researching competitors. The demand for competitive insights often exceeds their capacity to deliver.

Instead of driving strategic initiatives, these teams are stuck compiling intelligence, formatting reports, and responding to similar requests from multiple salespersons.

The Growing Burden on Sales Enablement Teams

Burdened with rigorous research and dealing with numerous daily requests leads to many challenges for sales enablement teams. 

  • Delays in delivering insights that could have made the difference in winning or losing a deal.
  • Inconsistent intelligence, as some salespersons get high-quality data, while others rely on anecdotal evidence.
  • A lack of scalability, considering the team can only support a limited number of deals, leaving many salespersons without the required intelligence.
  • Missed market and competitive shifts since manual tracking makes it harder to keep up with rapidly changing market dynamics, leaving sales teams vulnerable to sudden changes.

These challenges indicate the need and absence of a better way to do things. This leads sales enablement teams to rely on fragmented data sources, manually compile insights, and depend on inefficient ways of distributing information.

As a result, deal intelligence is inconsistent, inaccessible, and difficult to scale.

“We often see the same competitor come up in multiple deals. I’m tired of pulling together the same PowerPoint slides for different requests. I just want a dashboard where salespersons can access up-to-date intelligence anytime.” 

– [Member of deal intelligence team at a global Management Consulting firm]

 

This frustration is common among deal intelligence and sales enablement teams. Without an automated, structured intelligence system, they spend too much time repeating work instead of generating new insights.

This leads to an increase in the hidden costs incurred due to inefficient processes.

The Hidden Costs of an Inefficient Sales Enablement Process

 

1. Bottlenecks in Sales Support Slow Down Deals

Sales enablement teams often operate with limited resources, regardless of the intelligence requests continuously growing. Manually tracking competitors, researching customers and competitors for specific deal intelligence, and formatting reports create bottlenecks, slowing down the sales process. 

On the contrary, speed is critical for sales as they can’t afford to wait around for insights, requiring access in real time.

2. Intelligence Resources are Utilized for High-Value Deals, Leaving Others in the Dark

When sales enablement teams can’t scale, they prioritize only strategic, high-value deals, leaving mid-tier and smaller deals without competitive insights. This means many salespersons rely on gut instincts instead of data-driven, up-to-date intelligence.

3. Repetitive Work Wastes Valuable Resources

Teams spend hours recreating the same competitive analysis for different salespersons. Instead of working on strategic projects, they’re stuck updating slides and reformatting reports. This manual process limits their ability to provide timely intelligence and makes the team’s expertise less impactful.

4. Slower Decision-Making in a Rapidly Changing Market

As markets grow and sales cycles shrink, competitive moves are happening faster than ever. Without instant access to the latest deal intelligence, sales teams can’t respond quickly to competitor tactics or adapt their positioning effectively. Every delay in intelligence delivery increases the risk of losing a deal.

5. Inconsistent and Unverified Competitive Insights Hurt Sales Performance

The lack of a central information repository means that different teams within an organization are unlikely to have access to the same information. Consequently, different salespersons end up receiving inconsistent versions of competitive insights; some rely on anecdotal evidence, and others use outdated reports. This leads to broken messaging, weak competitive positioning, and loss of decision-makers’ trust.

6. Lack of Integration with Sales Tools Reduces Adoption and Impact

On top of scattered sources, M&CI is buried in different formats such as emails, PDFs, and static reports, making it hard to track and provide any real value to sales teams. Intelligence needs to be integrated into CRM, Slack, Teams, and email so that salespersons can access it at the right moment in their workflow.

7. The Competitive Disadvantage: Falling Behind in the Market

The big players in competitive markets are already investing in AI-powered sales intelligence tools, enabling their teams to counter market trends and competitive threats faster. Organizations that fail to scale their deal intelligence risk losing deals, market share, and revenue.

90% of Fortune 500 companies already use CI to gain a competitive advantage. 

 

Future-proofing your business means integrating an automated solution that helps you grow and scale. A robust M&CI platform does just that (and more). Let’s find out how.

The Solution: Scaling Deal Intelligence with a Market & Competitive Intelligence Platform

 

Sales enablement teams need a scalable system in place so they can proactively support a large sales force. Such a system needs to be powered by automated competitive intelligence gathering, centralized insights, and ensure information is always up-to-date and accessible.

A Market & Competitive Intelligence (M&CI) platform transforms sales enablement teams from a bottleneck into a strategic enabler of deal success. Instead of chasing down competitor updates, formatting slides, and answering the same questions repeatedly, they can focus on high-value activities like strategic positioning, training sales teams, and refining sales playbooks.

Here’s how an M&CI platform enables sales enablement teams to scale their deal intelligence function efficiently:

1. Automating Competitive Research: Never Start from Scratch Again

From scouring news sources, tracking company websites, and collecting data from salespersons, sales enablement teams spend a significant portion of their time manually researching competitors. This reactive approach is massively inefficient and increases the chances of missing out on critical competitive moves.

An M&CI platform automates competitive tracking, continuously gathering intelligence from a wide range of sources, including:

  • Competitor websites for press releases, case studies, leadership changes, open positions, etc.
  • News sources for industry announcements, strategic moves, mergers and acquisitions, etc. 
  • Social media & reviews for providing insights into customer sentiment and competitive positioning.
  • Earnings calls & financial reports to track market trends and form strategic direction.

With automated research, sales enablement teams no longer need to start preparing from scratch for each deal. Instead, they can instantly access a regularly updated knowledge base that provides faster, deeper, and more strategic insights to sales teams.

2. Creating a Centralized Intelligence Hub: One Source of Truth for Sales Teams

A centralized M&CI dashboard serves as the single source of truth, giving salespersons real-time access to:

  • Competitor profiles and strategic moves
  • Industry trends and market shifts
  • Sales playbooks and battle cards tailored to different scenarios.
  • Win-loss insights to refine deal strategy.

Rather than emailing PDFs and hunting through old slides, sales enablement teams can simply direct salesperson to the dashboard, ensuring they always have the latest intelligence at their fingertips.

3. Dynamic Playbooks & Battle Cards: Always Stay One Step Ahead

Manually updating battle cards can be an endless task, especially when competitors regularly launch new offerings, change pricing models, or adopt new go-to-market strategies.

With an M&CI platform, battle cards and playbooks are automatically updated, reflecting the latest intelligence on:

  • How to position against competitor strengths and weaknesses 
  • Recent competitor activity, for example, any changes to their strategy
  • Key customer objections and counterpoints, and how to handle competitive pushback.
  • Side-by-side product comparisons to understand how your offerings stack up.

Instead of static documents that go out of date within weeks, sales teams get living, dynamic playbooks that keep them prepared for any competitive scenario.

4. Seamless Intelligence Distribution: Deliver Insights Where Sales Teams Work

The best intelligence is useless if sales teams can’t access it when and where they need it. Most salespersons don’t have time to log into multiple systems or dig through long reports and need insights pushed directly into their workflow.

A robust M&CI platform can help seamlessly integrate intelligence into: 

  • CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.): So that sales teams can see competitor insights right in their deal view. 
  • Slack & Microsoft Teams: To receive real-time alerts on competitive moves.
  • Automated email digests & newsletters: This offers a daily or weekly summary of key updates.
  • Sales enablement platforms: So battle cards and insights are embedded in training materials.

This ensures that sales teams are always equipped with the right intelligence without relying on the sales enablement team to distribute it manually.

5. Win-Loss Analysis at Scale: Learn from Every Deal, Improve Every Pitch

Understanding why deals are won or lost is critical to refining sales strategy and sharpening competitive positioning. However, many sales enablement teams struggle to track and analyze win-loss insights effectively.

An M&CI platform helps structure and analyze internal win-loss data, allowing sales enablement teams to:

  • Upload and analyze interview transcripts and post-deal reports
  • Identify patterns and trends across multiple deals 
  • Integrate internal insights with external competitive intelligence for a full-picture view
  • Provide data-backed recommendations to sales teams on how to improve deal outcomes

By making win-loss intelligence searchable, structured, and accessible, sales enablement teams can continuously refine their strategies. 

But for that, the importance of a customizable and comprehensive M&CI platform is undeniable.

How Contify Transforms Sales Enablement & Deal Support

Contify’s Market & Competitive Intelligence platform provides a single source of truth, populated by over one million trusted sources. 

It ensures a significant reduction in manual effort while ensuring that sales teams always have the latest insights at their fingertips. Let’s take a look at some benefits of Contify’s robust platform for boosting sales enablements.

1. Automated Competitive Tracking: No More Manual Research

Contify continuously monitors company websites, news portals, regulatory filings, social media, and custom sources, ensuring real-time intelligence on:

  • Competitor moves, product launches, and executive changes
  • Industry trends, M&As, and emerging market shifts
  • Key customer accounts and deal intelligence

2. Intuitive Dashboards: A Single Source of Truth

Sales teams no longer need to search through scattered reports. Customizable dashboards provide:

  • Always-updated competitor profiles.
  • Sales playbooks with key positioning insights.
  • Market trends and deal intelligence in near-real-time.

3. AI-Powered Fact Cards: Insights in Seconds

Contify structures intelligence into easily digestible AI-powered summaries, so you no longer have to dip for information such as: 

  • Competitor benchmarks and strengths/weaknesses
  • Strategic business events like M&As and funding rounds
  • Product feature comparisons for quick positioning

4. Automated Intelligence Distribution: Insights Delivered Where Sales Teams Work

Sales teams have to be equipped with information within short time frames, leaving them no time to log into multiple platforms. Contify helps by integrating intelligence directly into:

  • Automated newsletters customized for different teams
  • CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot)
  • Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email alerts

5. Win-Loss Insights: Learn from Every Deal

Contify helps sales enablement teams capture, analyze, and apply win-loss data in the following ways:

  • Structuring deal feedback into key themes
  • Identifying sales objections and competitive threats
  • Integrating internal and external intelligence for strategic improvements.

6. Managed Intelligence Services

Contify provides an additional layer of expert-curated insights for deeper competitive analysis beyond AI automation.

Therefore, sales enablement teams can scale their deal intelligence effortlessly, ensuring that sales teams always have the insights they need without any delays or redundant work.

Make Your Future Sales Enablement Scalable, Not Manual

As the volume of intelligence requests grows, the only way to keep up without being overwhelmed is to scale with automation and AI-powered intelligence tools.

A Market & Competitive Intelligence platform like Contify enables sales enablement teams to:

  • Scale deal intelligence across the entire sales organization
  • Automate repetitive tasks and focus on strategic initiatives
  • Ensure every sales rep has access to up-to-date, actionable intelligence
  • Improve win rates with data-driven insights and real-time competitive positioning

The future of sales enablement isn’t about working harder but emerging smarter. With the right intelligence platform in place, sales enablement teams can stop playing catch-up and start leading the charge to winning more deals.