What is it?

The Explorers membership program is a unique research, validation, and verification program designed for the modern digital age.

While free, it is invitation-only and members are expected to patriciate, engage, and defend material. In exchange, members receive: full access to published material, publishing and derivative works rights for materials, and authorship credits where appropriate.

Past Research

Scott Santucci joined Forrester in 2008. At that time, the company was moving from doing research to be about topics or things and to roles and people. Internally within Forrester, a "role" was very much like a business unit or product line. Thus, there tremendous organizational friction was encountered during the evaluation process. Marketing, product marketing, and others roles argued that sales enablement responsibilities rested within their organizations and there was no need for the role. Winning this internal battle within Forrester was a watershed moment for the profession. IDC did have a sales enablement practice, but their were contract work, not direct research about the role. This moment legitimized sales enablement as a department and profession. Below are a few of the research reports that Forrester clients would subscribe to. Each are well researched, following Forrester's research process.

We're providing them as free resources for Explorer candidates and look to republish these reports with a refreshed and modern view. While that happens, these report (along with 40 others that were producded) are being broken down into "wikis" in the forum site dedicated to Explorer members.

The problem and vision of what sales enablement can be - a valuable conversation factory.

Random acts of sales support create massive costs inside businesses.

The Gap between Buyers and Sellers was big in 2010, its worse now.

Sales Enablement - Defined. Extremely through overview of of a definition developed for the function.

The Selling System in the age of the customer gives a strategic overview

Use the SIMPLE framework to classify leadership disciplines and programs.