Learn More About Sales Enablement Software
What is Sales Enablement Software?
Sales enablement software provides sales professionals with a repository of marketing collateral and playbooks for all aspects of the selling cycle. These solutions enable sales reps to find the right content, at the right time, to provide to prospects and speed up the sales cycle. Collateral that can be found in sales enablement products may include case studies, competitive comparisons, infographics, or any other collateral that may address a prospect’s needs or inquiries. These solutions provide organizations with insights into prospect engagement on specific pieces of content and ensure that marketing and sales are aligned on messaging and product positioning.
What are the Common Features of Sales Enablement Software?
The following are some core features within sales enablement software that can help users make the most of them:
Content creation: Some sales enablement tools provide the ability to build sales content within the product. This enables teams to consistently update content, as needed, and create new content in real time to ensure sales organizations have the necessary materials.
Content storage: A key feature of these tools is the storage of content in a central repository. This is essential to enabling salespeople to find the right content in a user-friendly manner and increases sales productivity by spending less time managing content.
Analytics: These solutions provide analytics into what pieces of content are being engaged with and who is engaging with them. Content analytics helps marketing teams tailor their content based on customer engagement and supports sales productivity by tailoring outreach based on engagement signals. Businesses can also get insights into sales analytics by learning which content is most effective for each sales stage and its impact on sales pipelines.
Advanced search: Sales enablement tools provide the ability to search through collateral to find the desired sales content and increase sales performance and productivity.
Presentation: Some tools can present content to prospects in real time or seamlessly via social media or email to engage prospects with relevant collateral.
What are the Benefits of Sales Enablement Software?
Sales enablement solutions offer various benefits to organizations, including:
Increased productivity: Sales enablement tools increase sales productivity by allowing sales reps to find the right content in real time to enhance outreach efforts. These solutions hold essential collateral for salespeople to find and provide to prospects in follow-up messages based on stated needs or interests or follow key sales playbooks to progress prospects through the sales pipeline.
Efficient training and onboarding: By leveraging a sales enablement tool, organizations can enhance training and onboarding efforts by centralizing information for salespeople to learn sales processes and best practices and enhance the user experience. These tools can assist in expediting the learning process for innovation companies offering new product enhancements, updated competitive battlecards, changes to a sales methodology, etc., to ensure businesses optimize team performance and close deals.
Consistent messaging: These solutions are critical for sales content management by ensuring that salespeople leverage up-to-date sales content consistent with an organization’s methodology. Companies frequently alter messaging based on competitive positioning and buyers’ ever-changing needs, so sales enablement solutions ensure that reps leverage the right content for sales opportunities.
Enhanced buyer engagement: Sales enablement tools provide metrics into content analytics by highlighting when, who, and how often, specific content is engaged with. These insights provide feedback on the success of specific content and can lead to better-targeted and personalized collateral based on specific personas, interests, and needs.
Who Uses Sales Enablement Software?
Sales teams: Salespeople leverage sales enablement solutions to identify the most relevant content to provide prospects. These solutions empower reps to find the right content in real time by searching through the user-friendly repository. Reps can then track customer interactions on the content to understand if the content was engaged with and for how long to assist in timely outreach. Sales teams can also leverage these tools to speed up onboarding and sales training by providing a central location for new team members to educate themselves on playbooks and sales enablement strategy.
Marketing teams: Marketing teams leverage these solutions to create or import content to ensure sales reps use accurate messaging. Through analytics and measuring engagement, marketing teams can also track how valuable each piece of content is.
Channel partners: These solutions can be leveraged by channel partners to streamline sales training and education on a product. By centralizing content, channel partners can easily learn the sales process and playbooks to optimize sales cycles and close deals faster.
Software Related to Sales Enablement Software
Related solutions that can be used together with sales enablement software include:
Sales training and onboarding software: Sales enablement solutions can work in tandem with sales training and onboarding tools to accelerate sales onboarding and sales coaching best practices. Training and onboarding tools may integrate with sales enablement solutions to retrieve sales content and streamline training and onboarding efforts.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software: As the system of record, sales enablement tools must integrate with an organization’s sales CRM to ensure that interactions are recorded in real time to enhance outreach efforts. This will allow sales leaders to understand what sales content has been provided to prospects and aid in progressing them through the sales pipeline.
Sales performance management software: These solutions may integrate with sales performance management platforms to uncover which sales content salespeople have leveraged and understand its impact on sales pipelines and overall sales performance.
Email tracking software: Sales enablement platforms may integrate with email tracking software to streamline the outreach process and attach sales content to sales and marketing messaging for specific email templates or campaigns.
Sales engagement software: Sales engagement platforms can leverage the sales content within sales enablement tools to assist in the automation of sales outreach and identify the right content to provide prospects in follow-ups or other workflows.
Challenges with Sales Enablement Software
Sales enablement solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Up-to-date content: Organizations frequently change their sales enablement strategy and content to stay competitive and up-to-date with product enhancements and the competitive landscape. Sales content management can be complex for organizations that serve a variety of personas or solve multiple pain points. Ensuring that sales content is relevant is a continual difficulty faced by marketing and sales enablement teams.
Training and on-ramping inefficiencies: Sales enablement tools seek to reduce the time it takes to onramp salespeople by providing a centralized location with resources. However, if sales reps are unable to find the right content easily, it can hinder their training and result in decreased sales performance.
Misaligned between departments: A problem that can be faced with sales enablement is a misalignment between marketing and sales departments. Marketing may seek to drive narratives or collateral that is not useful to sellers and customers. It is critical that content is optimized and both departments agree on positioning and messaging to make the sales enablement strategy most effective.
How to Buy Sales Enablement Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Sales Enablement Software
Requirements gathering for sales enablement tools is critical to ensure that the business is leveraging a product that meets its needs. To do so, companies must evaluate the software based on their critical needs, as provided below.
Compare Sales Enablement Products
Create a long list
Long lists are created by eliminating software solutions that do not provide critical functionality. To make a long list for a sales enablement tool, a buyer should evaluate the essential functions and analyze which product provides the necessary functionality. A typical long list should not contain more than 10 products unless there are many similar options. In this case, buyers should consider a product’s ability to integrate with existing software, customization, mobile accessibility, and ease of use.
Create a short list
From the long list of sales enablement vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list and develop a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the various offerings’ features, compatibility, and pricing.
Conduct demos
To ensure the comparison is thoroughgoing, businesses should try a demo or free trial for each software solution on the shortlist with the same use cases and criteria. This will allow the business to evaluate like for like and see how each product stacks up against the competition.
Selection of Sales Enablement Software
Choose a selection team
Sales enablement software is a critical part of the sales tech stack that impacts various parts of the sales and marketing departments. It is critical to consider input and qualification criteria from each department that will leverage the software, as needs and use cases may vary. The selection committee for a sales enablement solution may consist of a member from each department impacted by the software, such as a sales leader, a sales enablement manager, a marketing representative, a customer success manager, and an IT professional to ensure software compatibility. The selection committee will be responsible for assessing each use case and ensuring it meets the agreed-upon criteria.
Negotiation
When negotiating a software purchase, buyers should seek the best price and ask about any discounts for which their business may qualify. It is critical to ensure all aspects of support that will be required, such as potential storage capacities, implementation fees, ongoing support fees, additional integrations, among others.
Final decision
After the negotiation stage is conducted, the final decision requires buy-in from everyone on the selection committee. It’s important to ensure that everyone is aligned and all requirements are met.
