While there is some discussion about what sales enablement entails, it's generally understood that it's intended to help sales teams be more efficient and effective in their jobs. By equipping sales teams with the necessary knowledge, processes, and tools, they can deliver consistent messaging and provide a value proposition throughout the customer journey and sales cycle.
According to a study by CSO Insights, 62% of organizations look to sales enablement software tools first and foremost to help them deliver consistent communications to customers. Consistency is key because it leads to better customer experiences over time, which then ultimately leads to more sales.
Key Elements for Successful Sales Enablement
In the past few years, the demand for a dedicated sales enablement person and sales enablement teams has grown dramatically. In fact, according to a study by Aberdeen, 75% of teams that use sales enablement tools reported higher sales and growth.
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There are several key components to creating a winning sales enablement strategy including:
Training
To start, a successful sales enablement strategy begins with product knowledge training. While onboarding new employees is the most obvious starting point in the training journey, providing continuous professional employee training and development is key to continued growth and success.
Why?
Because as your sales team takes on new products and services, they need ongoing support to guide their strategy and decision-making to close clients.
Content
Content geared towards sales enablement allows sales teams to prepare and successfully deal with any interaction with prospects and customers, regardless of where they are in their journey.
Some of the most common types of sales enablement content include:
- Technical documentation such as case studies, white papers, and RFPs
- Sales scripts
- Product or service one-sheets
- E-books
- Competitive analysis decks
- Video demos
- Blog posts
How do you choose which content to create?
A lot of it depends on the product and service you are selling, who the buyer is, and whether they are at the top or bottom of the sales funnel.
Buyer journey optimization
No sales enablement strategy would be complete without understanding the buyer’s journey. Buyer journey optimization helps salespeople know the best time, person, and type of content to deliver depending on where the prospect or existing customer is in their journey.
Tools such as CRMs, analytics tools, mapping tools and more can all provide significant insights into who your customers are, what they value, and how to better communicate with them.
The Role of Technology in Enabling Sales
Not so long ago, salespeople mainly relied on one technology to close the deal--the telephone. And while the days of Jerry McGuire “Show me the money!” are long gone, new and better sales and marketing tools are now more important than ever to ensuring your sales goals.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is choosing too many platforms. Be strategic about which ones you choose so that your team is empowered to work efficiently to achieve real-time goals as well as future ones.
Choosing the Right Sales Enablement Tool
According to a recent Salesforce study, 51% of sales and marketing teams prioritize retention by forming deeper relationships with customers. There are several types of sales enablement tools to help facilitate these connections to buyers and users.
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When choosing the sales enablement tools that best serve your business, ask yourself these questions:
- What business problems do we want to solve and how does it help sales?
- Does it help with key elements discussed in key elements of successful sales enablement?
- How does the tool fit into the overall sales and marketing tech stacks?
- How does the tool empower sales teams to provide better customer experiences?
As you begin to vet different tools for various purposes, you should create a workflow that best assesses them. To start, gather your team’s feedback on the current sales process and what can be improved. Then, as you research sales enablement tools, assess which ones are used by ones in businesses similar to your own. How do they organize content? How can they help you better prepare for growth?
Ultimately, choosing the right tools means being informed and strategic.
The Best Sales Enablement Tools [2023]
Customer.io
Customer.io is an intuitive sales enablement software that sends targeted messages to customers. By organizing messaging workflows with direct integrations to multiple language libraries (Ruby, Python, Go, etc.), you can have more specialized access and control to your contacts.
Because its data collection is so robust, there are nearly infinite ways to segment and target lists with real time feedback on SMS, push notifications, emails, and more.
Highlights:
- Direct integrations that allow you to send data from multiple language libraries with an API that sends real-time data.
- Limitless third-party integrations. If you currently use Segment, mParticle, Zapier, and Rudderstack, any third-party integrations can be completed in minutes.
- Customizable workflows and real-time segmentation that allows you to turn segments into customer audiences.
HubSpot
HubSpot Sales Hub is the gold standard for sales enablement and for good reason. Not only does it offer a powerful CRM platform that allows sales reps to get a real-time view of their entire sales funnel, but it also offers email templates and even call tracking.
There’s also 24/7 support as well as a robust knowledge base library to help you with any troubleshooting.
Highlights:
- Free CRM and tools such as email tracking and call tracking.
- Subscription-based email sequencing, data-driven deal pipelines, customizable reports and more.
Seismic
Seismic is a storytelling platform that helps you create engaging experiences for customers. By providing insights on your target audience, you can craft messaging that speaks to their needs.
By personalizing content, Seismic’s centralized hub allows you to leverage its competitive intelligence for faster lead times to close buyers.
Highlights:
- Personalizes all communications with data-driven storytelling
- Award-winning, including Forbes Cloud 100
- Centralized hub for content, competitive intel, product news and more to help empower sales teams
Highspot
With Highspot, onboarding, coaching, training, and analytics are unified across one platform. You are better able to organize your marketing content with metrics that prepare you to go-to-market.
This sales enablement software is a powerful training and onboarding tool because it empowers sales reps to learn and adapt.
Helpjuice
Helpjuice is a powerful, easy-to-use knowledge base software solution that is an essential sales enablement tool that serves as a 'single source of truth' for your sales reps. With Helpjuice, you can easily create a knowledge base to capture, organize, and share important information from one centralized location. In turn, your sales reps will be able to quickly find the knowledge they need to effectively bring prospects closer to conversion.
It’s easy to create content with Helpjuice, search for information, and integrate it with your existing platforms.
Highlights
- Extremely customizable
- In-depth analytics that can help you understand what type of content you need to create to help your sales reps
- Easy-to-use and quick
Hunter
Hunter makes it incredibly easy for sales and marketers to reach out to other professionals with simple but powerful tools.
Hunter crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. The data is easily accessible via a simple user interface to find the right person in a company or find how to contact already identified professionals.
Besides that, you can easily automate the whole outreach process with Hunter by verifying the emails you found in the app and setting up simple and powerful cold outreach campaigns.
Highlights
- Fast and precise email lookup
- Email verifications made on multiple levels
- Cold outreach personalization and automation
OnePageCRM
OnePageCRM is a unique sales tool that transforms a static database into a dynamic to-do list with tasks and reminders next to every lead. This action-focused approach will make your follow-up routine much easier.
OnePageCRM has all the features of a standard sales CRM, plus several free and unique apps for efficient lead generation.
Highlights:
- A dynamic Action Stream with due dates, tasks, and reminders next to every contact
- One scrollable page for every lead with all relevant details: contact information, calls, notes, deals, previous and upcoming interactions
- Super quick onboarding and a simple interface
Showpad Content
This content creation tool connects with your existing CRM and DAM systems to help you synchronize your entire content library. By automating this synchronization with metadata, sellers can more easily gather feedback and present information.
One especially helpful feature is the AI-driven search tool that directs sellers to the most pertinent information in their content libraries.
Highlights
- Powered by AI
- Centralized sales enablement platform
- Automatically syncs and updates
Dealhub.io
For a one-stop CLM and CPQ, Dealhub is a unified platform that can push your sales team to the next level. From generating quotes to contracts all while creating dynamic data reports with buyer insights, Dealhub helps you streamline your revenue and make actionable decisions with better-performing pipelines.
One of its best features is its ability to generate automated sales collateral, which helps you better personalize communications to buyers.
Highlights
- Automated sales collateral
- CLM & CLQ
- Generated quotes and data reports
Klue
With Klue, its sales enablement solutions allow you to track competitors, centralize your content, and arm your sales team with collateral that converts. It’s intuitive UI and UX empowers teams to collaborate with better decision-making because its internal resources integrate seamlessly with other applications.
One unique feature is its sales battlecards, which keep teams driven to close and convert.
Highlights
- Robust integration capacity
- Centralized content library
- Powerful collaboration features
LevelJump
Level up your sales with LevelJump, a go-to-market software built in Salesforce. Understand your sales readiness, create and track data-driven milestones, and discover insights that have a sales impact with its innovative coaching programs.
An outcome-based sales enablement technology, LevelJump trains teams to sell with confidence and knowledge about their customers.
Highlights
- Revenue attribution metrics that let you track the impact of enablement on seller performance
- Embedded sales milestones with the ability to automate achievements and correlate performance
- Discover success patterns of top performers with their outcome analytics
Mediafly
An end-to-end sales enablement tool, Mediafly empowers teams to create, share, and improve sales content. From creating engaging content to analytics on its performance, this sales enablement tool keeps teams aligned on their sales KPIs.
Mediafly has an API that can handle any integrations, which means that its technology can evolve along with your business’s growth.
Highlights
- Creates immersive buying experiences
- Centralized content hub
- Integrates with many other software platforms
SalesHood
SalesHood is an all-inclusive sales enablement platform that includes learning and tools to help sales reps close and convert at higher rates. From webinars to expert tips to comprehensive ebook guides, Saleshood prepares sales teams with as many resources as possible.
One distinctive resource is their courses, which provide actionable advice for sales enablement strategies.
Highlights
- Robust sales learning platform
- Coaching resources
- Data-driven outcomes
OneMob
OneMob is unique in that it allows you to send personalized videos that integrate into your CRM. An astounding 96% of emails have improved click-through rates when there is embedded video, and OneMob’s easy-to-use features make it the perfect tool for converting customers.
Highlights
- Easy-to-use video content creation
- Integrates with most CRMs
- Intuitive performance tracking
ClearSlide
Sales intelligence is at the cutting-edge with ClearSlide’s AI-powered sales enablement tools. From sales teams to marketing teams to customer success, ClearSlide’s many features allow you to pick and choose what content works best for your company’s sales goals.
Web conferencing, video mail, email templates, and more are all features of this robust sales platform, which is perfect for companies looking to scale quickly.
Highlights
- Powered by AI
- Easily organizable
- Centralized content hub
Paperflite
Paperflite is a content management software that will take your sales enablement goals to the next level. It helps you create, manage, pair, and track content across platforms, so that you can iterate quickly on what’s landing with your audience--and what isn’t.
One of their best resources is their blog, which is free for content marketers to use as a resource for great ideas and ways to connect with target audiences.
Highlights
- Centralized sales enablement content hub
- Data-driven content pairing feature
- Helpful knowledge base resources and customer-facing blog
Showell
Showell does exactly what its name implies--it helps sales teams show their content at its best and most relevant across devices. The centralized content library automatically updates to ensure that only the most up-to-date sales, branding, and marketing materials are at everyone’s fingertips.
Another great reason to try Showell is that you can for free if you are a small team or company.
Highlights
- Intuitive UX design
- Centralized content library that updates automatically
- Free to try
Relayto
Ever wanted to turn a stale marketing doc into something more interactive? Relayto lets your sales imagination run wild with its “instant branding” features. From files to web links, almost anything can be converted into a dynamic sales document.
Highlights
- Makes slow, time-consuming content workflows fast and interactive.
- Reduces content creation costs significantly
- Centralizes branding assets for easy access and content creation
Enablix
Perfect for B2B marketing, Enablix is a sales enablement tool to find and share content that is relevant to their sales goals and audiences. By streamlining the communications between individuals and teams, the content choices are data-driven and more effective.
An awesome feature is its ability to allow users to create microsites and content hubs that enable buyers and engage customers.
Highlights
- Perfect for B2B marketers
- Robust data analytics
- Scalable content creation workflows
Tiled
This no-code platform is perfect for sales and marketing teams looking to take their content to the next level. Tiled lets your sales teams create micro-apps that they can share with customers about products and services. Its analytics tool gives insight into the content’s impact and helps sales teams create content that converts better at scale.
Perfect for enterprise teams, Tiled’s most unique feature is its drag-and-drop design capabilities, which allow you to create professional, engaging content in minutes.
Highlights
- Great for teams with significant content creation goals
- Easy-to-use
- Provides data-driven insights on content performance