Types of Sales Enablement Tools

If you’re looking for sales enablement tools to help strengthen your team’s efforts, you’ve come to the right place!

In this article, we will cover what exactly sales enablement is, how it can benefit your people, and some must-have tools you should be using right now. 

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement empowers your sales team with any data, resources, and tools they need to successfully walk a prospect through the buying process, close, and generate revenue for the business. 

According to Mediafly, 84% of sales reps crush quota when the company incorporates sales enablement. 

Typically, sales enablement includes…

• Content sales reps can study (playbooks, courses, strategies, scripts, product guides, etc.)
• Content sales reps can give prospects (whitepapers, webinars, blog articles, newsletters, etc.) that addresses their pains and goals, distinguishes your brand from competitors, and increases the chances of converting
• Internal training like Seamless’ SalesFlix to help your reps shorten their sales cycle and build their own repeatable, predictable, and scalable system

Why Is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement is crucial to the success of any sales team because you could have a team full of rockstar SDRs and AEs who all have passion, dedication, and a stellar work ethic. But if they don’t know how to sell your solution and convert leads, they are going to fail to reach quota month after month. 

Sales enablement can empower an entire team to crush it. 

More importantly, sales enablement creates a cycle of insights, feedback, and iteration that can help sales and marketing teams work cohesively to drive value to customers…

• Marketing equips sales with content to close customers (learn a good opener to start your sales conversations and then deliver that valuable content)
• The sales team in turn gives feedback to the marketing team on what works, what falls flat, and what topics in the buyer’s journey are being overlooked. 
• The marketing team can now produce more timely and relevant materials as a result

Additionally, sales enablement will give you a snapshot of your team’s average sales cycle (How long it takes to close a deal, the size of the deal, etc.). 

Because of the info that sales enablement provides, sales and marketing teams can better align and quickly scale as a result.

Different Types of Sales Enablement Tools

Now that you know some of the benefits of sales enablement, here are some different tools you can leverage to increase your win rates. 

Sales Intelligence

‍Sales intelligence tools like Seamless give you the power to build lists of lookalike prospects similar to your best customers. These tools also provide insights into who your ready-to-buy prospects are so your sales and marketing teams can drive leads, sales, and revenue.

Examples: Seamless.AI, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 

Market Intelligence

‍Market intelligence tools give you a snapshot of your specific market. Learn the trends and forecasts in your industry and how your competitors are faring (market share, etc.) so the strategies and goals your marketing team makes are primed for the greatest success. 

Examples: Emissary, Artesian

Content Management

‍One of the greatest sales enablement tools you could leverage is content. While strong content can help your sales team speed up the buying process and increase conversions, storing and organizing all that content can be a pain. The right content management tool solves this problem by not only indexing your content but providing insights into the content that’s getting the most love so your marketing team can easily replicate it. 

Examples: SharePoint, Paperflite 

Sales Training

‍Over 90 days, sales reps will only retain 16% of the training they receive. This means that your sales leaders will have to constantly reinforce important tactics, and also come up with creative ways to reiterate the same information. The problem here is that a lot of companies, especially the smaller ones, don’t have the time to lead multiple coaching sessions throughout the year. 

This is where sales training tools come into play. Whatever it is you’re looking for, there’s likely a sales training tool that offers it. Some provide their own training courses, others will provide customized content based on your team’s specific needs.  

Examples: MindTickle, SalesFlix 

Sales Enablement Evaluation Questions

Lastly, as you evaluate which sales enablement tools are perfect for your team, in addition to obvious evaluation questions like your team’s specific needs and pricing, consider: 

• How easy or difficult is it to use the tool?
• Does this sales enablement tool align with my business goals? Can it help me hit those goals?
• What does the onboarding process look like? Will we get hands-on training or will the company give us the tool and leave us to figure it out on our own? 
• Is customer success offered to ensure that every employee gets the support they need to get the maximum value out of the tool?

You always want to go with a tool that offers generous onboarding and customer support so you and your team can get started on a strong note. 

In addition to this, Check out this LinkedIn article for more tips on how to successfully integrate a “Winning Sales Enablement Process.”

Sales enablement tools can be the missing piece to your team’s greatest success. 

If you want to equip your sales and marketing teams with ample insights, organization, and training to strike with precision and adequately address customers’ every need, consider investing in a sales enablement tool today and use this article as your guide!