August 3, 2024
A Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement
Read more
Whether it's sales or any other type of work, with the aid of valuable resources and appropriate tools, the likelihood of completing the task quickly and efficiently increases. That's why sales enablement software exists, enabling salespeople to harness the power of technology and data.
Though the scope of sales enablement is vast, there are some key features and functionalities that must be considered when implementing any type of sales enablement software. Those key factors are sales content management, coaching and training effectiveness, effective collaboration, connected workflows, data analytics and reports, and AI capabilities. Among these aspects, most companies utilize sales content management to manage their large sales content database, which salespeople need to locate and access instantly, as well as sales coaching modules to ensure their teams stay updated with relevant information.
Sales enablement software offers various benefits to improve the ability of sales teams by reducing friction and empowering them with resources and tools. The benefits are as follows:
Sales enablement encompasses a wide range of activities, including content management, training, presentation, and contract management. The domain has several underlying categories. We have classified the domain into the following categories:
Sales enablement is not only limited to enabling sellers. Modern buyers also require enablement. In today's sales, buying is so difficult, and that's where the digital sales room play a vital role. The digital sales room assists sellers in efficiently arranging and tailoring the necessary sales content for the buyer, enabling them to distribute it through a single link.
Primarily, most organizations prioritize implementing this module as part of their sales enablement activities. Sales teams frequently face a deluge of diverse sales collateral such as product pitches and demo videos. It is a cumbersome task to keep the content bank organized, and personalizing each asset with manual actions is nearly impossible. This is where sales enablement software helps manage and organize all the sales assets.
Any organization must prioritize CRM as the central hub for sales enablement. With a robust CRM system in the center and with seamless integration, sales teams can get access to all regular updates about the leads and prospects from the CRM itself. CRM also provides some features to manage the sales content and training tools. Apart from this, it primarily focuses on lead qualification and lead scoring, and it serves as a central repository for most of the sales teams' day-to-day actions.
Another important module under sales enablement is training and coaching effectiveness. A successful sales team is just a troop of knowledge-rich sellers working at the right time with the right people. To achieve that ‘knowledge-rich’ part, a well-organized and effective training system is essential. Instead of merely consisting of a playlist of coaching videos, it should foster a conducive environment that enables every seller to effortlessly understand products and sales tactics.
Communication with customers includes a lot of monotonous, miniscule tasks every day. A sales engagement tool helps sellers to cut down those manual steps and help them to focus on effective communication via chats, calls, and social media interactions.
As the name indicates, sales intelligence tools offer rich data to reveal valuable information about the seller’s efforts, the prospect's business, and their buying behavior. This helps sales teams uncover actionable insights, tailor their approach, and target outbound activities to convert high-potential prospects faster.
Once the deal closes, the contract process is not a straightforward one-step activity. Contract management platforms help simplify the cumbersome activities involved in the proposals, leading to a faster quoting process and moving the customer to a smooth onboarding process.
In the modern sales era, there is no doubt that sales enablement plays a crucial role in enhancing the existing sales performance of every organization. However, in order to implement sales enablement effectively and reap its maximum benefits, it's crucial to have a clear understanding of your specific goals and objectives. The following are the steps that any organization should first take to ensure they are selecting the right set of sales enablement tools for their sales function.
Once you’ve completed the above steps, you’ll get clarity on what category of sales enablement software you should focus on and how it is going to support your sales. This approach will be much more effective in selecting the right tool that can fit right in with your sales process.
During the evaluation phase, it is critical to research various software options to understand the nitty-gritty of each tool. This process is obviously hard, but it will show you the larger picture of sales enablement capabilities and which one is the best fit for your sales. With the previous step, you might have already concluded which category of sales enablement you should go by. Furthermore, consider the following factors for each tool on your list to complete the evaluation with the right data points: core features, customization and flexibility, user experience, mobile accessibility, support and training, vendor reviews, and flexible pricing structure.
The flexible integration capability has become one of the significant pivoting elements in modern software purchases. The reason is that every team has their own set of processes and is already well established with certain tool kits and workflows. If the selected sales enablement software lacks integration, then it will cause a lot of friction and inefficiency for your sales and marketing teams. For any sales enablement software you’ve filtered out, assess their integration capabilities, not only on how it can fit in with your existing system but also on how flexible they are in the long term, through their consistent expansion of integration options with top tools in the ecosystem.
Implementation of sales enablement software requires a proper plan and structure to ensure smooth adoption by the sales team and maximum ROI. This step requires extra attention and care, especially for organizations with larger sales teams. You would have already collected key information from the previous step, such as specific objectives, the current sales process, and so on.
With this information in place, create a detailed timeline for a rollout plan. In this plan, provide a complete picture of the implementation process, key milestones, and deadlines for each step of implementation. To execute this plan, assign the appropriate personnel to various aspects such as support, data migration, and integration. This structure approach can help your teams to easily adapt without creating chaos in the existing sales workflow.
Salespeople must undergo extensive training to learn how to use the new tool in their workflow. To achieve this, the respective team leaders/managers should opt in to create training materials and sessions that are specific to the user roles in the sales and marketing teams. This could take the form of various activities, such as dedicated workshops or video tutorials, to facilitate efficient communication about the real-time use cases of the software. However, organizations should also prioritize consistent training and support to keep their teams up to date with the latest technologies.
Implementing new sales enablement software into the system often encounters resistance from teams across all organizations. Teams adapting to changes, integration issues, misalignment between teams, and not getting proper guidance and training for tool usage are some of the common friction factors. However, by adhering to a structured implementation process that begins with clearly defined goals and objectives, evaluates integration capabilities, and establishes customized training modules for each team, organizations can effectively address the challenges encountered during implementation and new workflow changes.
Once the organization decides to implement sales enablement software, the first crucial step they need to focus on is aligning the sales and marketing team efforts. Correcting certain existing workflows and adhering to crucial practices such as establishing clear communication channels, defining shared objectives, and encouraging regular engagements through consistent meeting scheduling can achieve this. By following these efforts, one can smoothly introduce the sales enablement software in their ongoing workflow. This can help to maximize implementation effectiveness and start seeing results without any hindrance between the teams.
Research indicates that sales content significantly influenced 95% of the buying decisions. Sales content plays a huge role in converting the prospects. Therefore, it is crucial for both marketers and sellers to align their sales content with buyer personas and ensure it delivers the intended value for the targeted prospect. When the sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively, they can effortlessly attain the aforementioned factors, ensuring a consistent brand voice throughout all content pieces.
The next important step is to organize the created pieces. Some of the best practices in sales content organization include bucketing the content by buyer's journey, using relevant tags, and categorizing based on factors such as persona, industry, etc. However, when it comes to content organization, there is no universal solution that works for all sales teams. It’s the job of the sales team to decide which flow and categorization works best for them. The goal is to give all sellers instant access to the relevant content. Sales enablement software heavily supports this aspect to rightly organize the sales content and enables the sellers to hyper-personalize and share at the right moment to spark engaging conversations.
With the sales enablement software in place, you can easily track how the prospects engage with your shared content pieces. Extract and analyze datapoints such as the number of page views, time spent on each document, and what pieces they've downloaded and engaged with the most. This content engagement data is the goldmine for all your sales content efforts. Track and analyze consistently so that you can keep on refining your content strategy by identifying your high-performing content and serve your prospects with insightful, valuable pieces in the long run.
It’s crucial to integrate the sales enablement software with the existing sales processes to maximize effectiveness and drive the planned outcomes. To implement this, in the first place, one should ensure that the chosen sales enablement software aligns with the overall strategy. It is a must to get every key leader’s approval in the selection and implementation process for a smooth adoption by the teams. On top of this, the sales team should customize the software to the existing workflows and integrate with the CRM and other third-party applications to have a frictionless workflow. Cross-functional collaboration between teams helps to learn quickly about the tool for their objectives and maximizes the software's utilization by every team member.
Only by connecting the impact of the software with the sales performance do sales teams know what tweaks they should do to extract the maximum benefits from the sales enablement software. This can be easily done by tracking the following key metrics: sales content adoption by reps, conversion rates across the stages, time to productivity, average selling time, sales confidence attained, etc. With regular tracking and analysis of these metrics, sales teams can identify areas for content optimization and deliver targeted training to reps. To effectively implement the extracted insights, we need consistent measurement at regular time intervals.
Mostly an organization's unsuccessful attempts at sales enablement primarily stem from a failure to incorporate consistent improvements into their overall strategy and process. The market is so dynamic that buyers' expectations are constantly evolving. The outreach methods you’ve used six months ago would be totally irrelevant for today. It is so essential for every sales team to adapt to the buyer’s expectations. To achieve this, the framed strategies should be flexible enough to allow for continuous improvements through iterations and embrace a culture of consistent learning among sellers by providing them with a healthy, knowledge-rich environment.
CATEGORY: DIGITAL SALES ROOM
Buyerstage is an emerging digital sales room platform that helps sellers to simplify complex deals by creating dedicated deal rooms to engage, present collaterals and collaborate instantly with their buyers, from the discovery to deal closure stages.
With interactive mutual action plans and deal rooms salespeople can orchestrate the deal cycle and are able to present personalized sales assets in an organized repository with the buyer. Furthermore, they can track the buyer engagement and take the right, targeted actions to move the deal forward.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to Midmarket
Best for:
Small and midsize sales teams to handle their lead qualification, buyer collaboration, and organize their sales content in a centralized repository through a digital sales room.
Top pros:
Top Cons:
Key features:
Aligned is a customer collaboration platform, that offers a collaborative workspace for sales and customer success teams to engage with the customers. This provides a common digital sales environment where all the engagement activities between buyers and sellers happen throughout the deal cycle.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Small companies and midsize sales teams to implement personalized rooms to collaborate with their buyers.
G2 Rating: 4.8/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Trumpet also comes under the digital sales room category, where they popularly called themselves 'interactive microsites’ which help to simplify the complex deal engagements between sellers and buyers. They termed their rooms as 'pods' where one can create personalized, branded journey for the buyers by uploading relevant content and making engagement with the buyers in the pods.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Early-stage sales teams to handle their collaboration activities with their prospects.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
GetAccept is an integrated digital sales room platform that lets buyers and sellers work together in the sales process to close the deal and collaborate beyond that. GetAccept offers two modules - deal room and contract room. The deal room is the digital sales room part where all the activities from first meeting to proposals can be done. Contract room part assists in documenting workflows, quoting process to sign a deal.
Pricing:
Free plan - 14-day free trial ✅
Paid plan
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Small and mid-size sales teams, who want to implement an integrated platform to manage all the activities of buyer collaboration, proposal management and customer onboarding.
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Seismic is a global sales enablement platform that focuses on equipping customer facing teams with tools, resources and data-insights to deliver great experience to their prospects and win sales.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Enterprise companies who are looking for a comprehensive platform that can handle their complex sales content assets database, sales training and enablement intelligence.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Highspot is an intuitive sales enablement platform that provides content management, sales coaching, contextual guidance through sales playbooks along with AI capabilities and analytics.
Pricing:
Undisclosed (Talk to sales).
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Midsize to large sales teams who want to establish a robust sales enablement system that can handle content management, training and engagement activities with the customer.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Paperflite is one of the sales enablement platforms, that is exclusively dedicated for sales content management. It helps to organize all your sales collaterals, marketing assets, playbooks from multiple sources in one organized environment. By identifying the sales representative’s intent, it helps to locate the right content in seconds with the help of advanced search capabilities.
Pricing:
Starts at $50 USD (Per User, Per Month, 5 Users Minimum)
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Small to midsize sales and marketing teams who are looking for a dedicated sales content management platform to handle their content management, content distribution and collaboration activities.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Showpad is an all in one, AI-powered modern sales enablement platform that offers various solutions like showpad content, coach, video and other integration capabilities. They are termed as enablement operating system (eOS), where it offers an integrated solution to build and implement all the foundational elements in the sales enablement.
Pricing:
Undisclosed (Talk to sales).
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Midsize to large sales teams who want to implement an integrated suite of tools under one platform to carry out all their sales enablement efforts.
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) SOFTWARE
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform, which is now popularly called an 'AI CRM' dedicated to salespeople. It offers a package of features for sales teams to handle their leads and opportunities, forecast sales, manage accounts, automation and workflow management and a wide range of integration capabilities with third party applications.
Pricing:
Starts at $165 USD (Per User, Per Month)
Market segment:
Enterprise
Best for:
Large size sales teams who want to implement an all-in-one CRM that has a broad scope and features to handle their sales environment and seamlessly integrate with wide range of tools in the ecosystem.
G2 Rating: 4.4/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
HubSpot sales hub is an integrated sales automation platform dedicated to sales function to handle all their sales operations in a single platform. It provides a suite of tools to streamline every process and provides an organized environment to handle all the customer data, tools to operate at high efficiency. With this connected environment reps can get actionable insights and offer a coherent customer experience throughout the journey.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business and midmarket
Best for:
Small companies and midsize sales teams who want to establish an integrated sales automation and CRM platform for their sales function, with a wide range of integration options.
G2 Rating: 4.4/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: SALES TRAINING AND COACHING PLATFORMS
Mindtickle is a revenue enablement platform that offers sales readiness modules and deal execution features, that helps to coach and train the sales reps and understand sales behaviors to drive revenue. Sales leaders can design effective programs to train their reps and analyze how their knowledge is getting translated in the sales meetings by tracking their performance.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Midsize and large sales teams to implement a robust platform for managing sales content and sales coaching modules to enable their sellers.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Saleshood is predominantly a sales learning platform that offers extensive features to reinforce knowledge to the sales reps through personalized training and coaching. In addition to this, saleshood also offers sales content and digital sales rooms modules, where sellers can easily organize their sales content, personalize and share them in the dedicated rooms with their buyers to boost the engagement.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Midsize and large sales teams to manage all of their sales enablement lifecycle activities, with more focus on engaged coaching and learning, in a single organized platform.
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: SALES ENGAGEMENT
Salesloft is one of the leading sales engagement platforms that provides sellers with an organized environment to carry out their everyday tasks related to sales communication. With the help of AI powered workflows along with data tracking, sellers can get actionable insights on the next step to do, predict the prospect's actions and reach the right prospects precisely at the right moment to drive revenue.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Midsize sales teams to handle their sales engagement activities, forecasting with the help of a comprehensive platform supported with enhanced automation and AI capabilities.
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Outreach is one of the prominent sales engagement platforms in the industry designed for the sales teams to effectively create and close pipelines. With the help of automation workflows and advanced AI capabilities, outreach covers everything from prospecting to deal management to forecasting, that will eventually help to increase the overall effectiveness of GTM activities and pipeline management.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Midsize to large sales teams who want to automate prospecting workflows and enable multichannel outreach capabilities along with revenue intelligence.
G2 Rating: 4.3/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Vidyard is a video-driven sales engagement platform, that solely focuses on leveraging videos to add personal touch and engaging conversations with prospects through all stages of the deal cycle from discovery to proposals. They provide AI-powered video messaging, video hosting services that can help to stand out from the crowd by better storytelling through personalized engaging videos.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to midmarket
Best for:
Small and midsize sales teams who want to leverage personalized videos in their sales throughout all stages of the deal cycle.
G2 Rating: 4.5/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: SALES INTELLIGENCE
Gong is one of the significant sales intelligences platforms that is widely considered by all the growing and large companies worldwide in the sales industry. It helps sales teams to track customer conversations at scale with AI and deliver intelligent insights that drive business efficiency and impact heavily on data-driven decision making that can influence revenue growth.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Large size sales teams who want to leverage conversation intelligence by tracking their customer conversations at scale.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
6sense is a predictive analytics platform for sales and marketing teams, which helps the revenue teams to predict the customers who are more likely to buy at the instant, with the help of AI and data intelligence. It helps a lot to uncover information about anonymous buyers, learn about their buying behavior and engage with the hyper personalized message.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Large size sales and marketing teams to make use of real time buyer intent data in hyper targeting prospects and deal predictions.
G2 Rating: 4.1/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Klue is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform that helps marketers and competitive intelligence teams by giving them carefully chosen information about rivals that they can use. With these competitive insights from external and internal intel, marketers can strategize their smart efforts in the right direction to reach their ideal customers. Further it provides curated access to the sales team to access competitive insights to win deals.
Pricing:
Undisclosed (Talk to sales).
Market segment:
Midmarket to Enterprise
Best for:
Growing and large companies who want to invest in competitive intelligence for their product marketing teams and sales.
G2 Rating: 4.8/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
CATEGORY: PROPOSALS AND QUOTES
Proposify is a proposal management platform that primarily focuses on the crucial stage of the sales - 'sign off and closing'. It gives complete control and visibility to the sales team, and enables them to easily create, share and track the proposals to smoothly manage the contract signing process, resulting in increased win-rates.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to Midmarket
Best for:
Small size sales teams to seamlessly manage their proposals and track sign-off process with their customers.
G2 Rating: 4.6/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
Pandadoc is a leading proposal management software that helps to streamline the creation, approval and tracking of the e-signing process of contracts and quotes. It provides a central repository to manage all the business closure documents with automation capabilities, collaboration and multiple integration options.
Pricing:
Market segment:
Small business to Midmarket
Best for:
Small and midsize sales teams manage all their agreement signing processes in an organized platform, by ensuring security standards and compliance.
G2 Rating: 4.7/5
Top Pros (from G2):
Top Cons (from G2):
Key features:
The sales industry's technological development has been rapid in the last decade, and it's growing every year. Currently, there are several emerging technologies in the sales enablement space. Emerging technologies in the sales enablement space include AI and machine learning, conversational intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, hyper-personalization capabilities, gamifying sales training, and improved mobile access.
High-growth sales teams have already begun leveraging some of the aforementioned emerging technologies in their sales processes. Overall, utilization of these state-of-the-art capabilities can help sales teams to get rid of information overload, get more visibility to the buyer’s journey, and implement complex tasks in a few simple steps with the help of AI and data.
Here are some of the dominant growing trends in sales enablement:
In summary, the enablement landscape has rapidly evolved with technological advancements and increased sales enablement tools. The future is more data-driven, automated, and hyper-targeted sales approaches to achieve sustainable growth.
AI has already established its dominance in every industry, including sales enablement. Simply put, the scope of AI and customer intent data is causing a significant shift in the future of sales, which is both beneficial and will protect sellers. Say goodbye to boring, repetitive tasks, as sales will become a more engaging profession. Here are the highly anticipated developments in the evolution of sales enablement:
With more efficient systems and tools in place, sales enablement strategies are taking a new level of direction. The entire sales department used to be a laborious and unpredictable task due to its tendency to overlook prospects with low purchase intent. However, with the development of technologies to track customer intent and the integration of AI, the possibilities are virtually limitless.
One of the hottest topics is signal-based selling, which tracks the entire buyer journey at every stage and then launches sales efforts exclusively for hyper-targeted prospects with high purchase intent. These capabilities significantly influence the development of effective strategies that can guide sellers to achieve unprecedented sales outcomes in the upcoming years.
To stay ahead of the curve, in addition to leveraging technologies and AI, one should heavily invest in continuous learning. Learning and development efforts shouldn't exist as a separate entity unconnected to specific goals. Sales leaders should include this as a part of the regular job, where salespeople can enhance their sales skills daily and stay relevant at any time with their customers and market trends. Secondly, foster collaboration between the teams and never push them into an environment where everyone works in silos. Align goals and strategies and build a common, centralized environment for teams to collaborate seamlessly and share content. In addition to the cultural factors, begin investing in emerging technologies to maximize the benefits of AI and data, thereby saving your sales team significant time and effort.
