Looking at the average of most businesses, you’ll find that your top performers are the ones that bring in the lion’s share of the sales. Imagine a world where every salesperson was delivering at that level. The landscape, the growth, and certainly the profits would look very different.
So, what steps can we take the bring performance in line with the highest performers? How can we find new and efficient methods to drive engagement? What can we put in place to help the team close more deals and enhance performance? How can we achieve our growth strategy? The answer to many of these questions comes in the form of sales enablement tools.
This software helps to build a relationship between your business’s marketing strategies and sales process. In this article, we’re going to share what these tools look like and why you should consider using them. We’ll also share some examples of the best tools on the market so that you can begin to consider which one best suits you and your business.
- What Are Sales Enablement Tools?
- The Need For Sales Enablement Tools
- Sales Enablement Tools: Key Features
- The 4 Best Sales Enablement Tools Of 2024
What Are Sales Enablement Tools?
Your salespeople are there to guide prospective customers toward a conversion. They use their knowledge of the products, information about the business, and their understanding of the customer. They use this all to weave together the fabric of a sale. A sales enablement tool aims to provide the sales team with all of that in one succinct, easy-to-access place. That means they have access to all of the information, content, knowledge, and tools that they might need to close a sale.
They’re akin to a Swiss army knife. They allow your sales team to easily access marketing content. They track the customer throughout their sales journey, sharing insights into their actions. They offer insight and analytics on sales strategy. They are, essentially, a place to keep everything together neatly. Removing the need to subscribe to multiple tools and then juggle them.
The Need For Sales Enablement Tools
As digital marketing has expanded, so too has the number of plates that you need to spin. There’s an ever-growing variety of channels and methods to deliver your message, market your products and services, and garner sales. Within moments, you can engage with your audience around the world. You can collect and interpret data. You can gain oversight across your entire strategy. The issue is, accessing all of this information can come with a significant amount of complexity. Navigating your way to it takes considerable time and effort, time and effort that could be spent on customer engagement and sales.
Sales enablement tools aim to reduce that time and effort. They allow teams to have everything they need at the tip of their fingers. That includes specific audience demographic, segmentation information, pain points, and aligned solutions.
Often these tools also include the ability to send tailored marketing information to customers. That could be an email campaign with personalization. It could be tailor-made messaging. The key is that this level of dedicated communication is available quickly and easily.
Sales Enablement Tools: Key Features
It’s little surprise that sales enablement tools come chockfull of tools and a huge array of features to best help your sales team. Typically, you can expect to see these features:
- Content Management: Sales enablement tools will create libraries of your content. Making them easily accessible within a few clicks. This includes your public-facing content, FAQs, internal policies, documentation, specifications, and the list continues.
- Lead Management: As leads come into your system, you’ll be able to tag them, organize them, and even score them. We all know that some leads are hotter than others. This is a convenient way of flagging your strongest leads so that your sales team can react quickly.
- Onboarding Tools: Bringing on new people is exciting, but it’s also a lot of work. Some tools will offer onboarding tools. These allow people to effectively train themselves, giving all of the information they need in one place. Some offer digital training, workbooks, and employee handbooks.
- Analytics: The system is going to be handling a great deal of data. Analytics and reporting should be a standard feature in all sales enablement tools. They allow you to see how the business is progressing.
- Seamless Integrations: You’ll likely still have a CRM in place, and whichever tool you select should seamlessly integrate with it. Some tool providers also offer CRMs that could be integrated naturally.
- Internal Communication: Your team needs to work as just that, a team. Offering in-built communication and collaboration tools means that you’re all able to work from the same plan at the same time.
- Automation: Many tools now offer automation as a standard. Some are embracing AI-powered tools that can deliver quality automation too.
The 4 Best Sales Enablement Tools Of 2024
HubSpot Sales Hub
The digital tool giant, HubSpot. They are an unsurprising addition to this list, and for good reason. The Sales Hub makes up just one part of the HubSpot ecosystem. It aims to pull together your whole inbound marketing, sales process, and even customer service into one accessible place.
HubSpot has always been renowned for its friendly UI, easy accessibility, and impressive feature list. The Sales Hub section is no different. It combines the base of sales operations into one streamlined process making daily tasks for you and your team quick and easy. When combined with the classic HubSpot CRM, it’s a powerful addition to your business’s stack.
There’s a real focus on inbound sales here. The user gets immediate access to a library of content, wide integrations with third-party tools, and customer information.
Pricing
The Sales Hub comes in two distinct pricing options. The Professional level starts at $450 a month for a 5-user minimum. Enterprise level starts at $1,200 a month with a 10-user minimum. It’s interesting that HubSpot pushes these levels first. There are also free versions for individuals (with very limited access), then a starter version from $18 a month. The starter version begins to add features such as conversation routing and simple automation.
Unique Selling Points
- HubSpot Sales Hub focuses on inbound sales, so if you’re focused on inbound as a strategy, it’s a good bet.
- The integrated connection to HubSpot’s base CRM makes a seamless link between sales and marketing.
- It’s an incredibly accessible and easy-to-use platform, which isn’t always the case in this world.
- There are clear options for scaling in HubSpot’s pricing structure.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
The Sales Cloud is just one of the modules that make up Salesforce software. Unsurprisingly, given the name, Salesforce is focused on sales. It is respected as one of the most established members of the cloud-based CRM family. It prides itself as a data-driven, sales productivity-boosting, feature-packed piece of kit.
Those that use Sales Cloud report that they are able to easily stay connected with their team and their customers. The platform is able to “predict” what they’ll need through an established database of company information. Armed with better communication and knowledge, salespeople are able to close deals more effectively and efficiently.
Leads themselves can be managed within the system. That, combined with effective forecasting and AI-driven insights, allows your sales reps to make data-driven decisions on how best to close a deal.
The AI itself is known as Einstein GPT and is built on the famous OpenAI API. It enables completely personalized experiences, including AI-generated emails, productivity-boosting insights, and low-code tool building.
It’s a big-picture piece of kit. A more holistic approach to sales that brings the entire company's view into the game.
Pricing
There’s a similar pricing structure here versus what we’ve seen before. The Sales Cloud starts from $25 per user per month and rises from there until you reach the Unlimited level, which costs $300 a month.
The Starter level only has the account, contact, lead, and opportunity management system alongside email integration. If you’re after automation (such as sales follow-up emails), advanced pipeline management, and built-in AI, then you need to consider the pricier tiers.
Unique Selling Points
- At higher price points, the AI-driven insights delivered by Einstein are useful and can bring benefits to sales strategy.
- Sales Cloud delivers a 360 customer view with detailed personalization options.
- It’s accessible on the road via portable devices, making it a great choice for those with sales reps working outside the office.
Seismic
Seismic touts itself as the number one sales enablement platform that the market has to offer. That’s a lofty accolade to bestow upon one’s self, but it is as reported by G2. Seismic brings a focus on content distribution with a view to sales team empowerment. The aim is for salespeople to have what they need, at their fingertips, at exactly the time that they need it.
Seismic achieves this through AI integration. It delivers real-time suggestions and information on precisely what content your team needs to be most effective. That content is customized depending on where the customer is in their sales journey. The majority of this system is built on Seismic’s LiveDocs. LiveDocs curates your content and generates dynamic information based on customer data. It pairs this with analytics and then delivers data-driven insights.
Pricing
At the time of writing, Seismic offers no publicly available pricing information. They say this is because they tailor their pricing depending on what the company needs. If you’d like to know more, it would be prudent to contact them directly.
Unique Selling Points
- LiveDocs is a unique system that delivers impressively tailored content in real-time.
- The content performance metrics deliver in-depth content analytics.
- There are plenty of integrations as standard with many leading CRMs.
Showpad
Showpad is a slightly different style of sales enablement tool with a focus on content management as well as training and coaching. Rather than being based solely on the buyer’s journey, it also takes into account the experience of the sales representative. That said, it still works to merge sales and marketing efforts for a more streamlined sales process.
The content experience that Showpad creates is entirely interactive and presents dynamic sales information in impressively engaging ways. This makes the sales process more efficient for the team and more immersive for the customer. Alongside that, as new members join the team or a current team member takes on a new account, the system is able to quickly bring them up to speed.
There’s also extensive sales rep coaching through an extensive sales training system. If you’re keen to improve and grow your team members’ skills as well as your profits, this is worth consideration.
Pricing
At the time of writing, Showpad only offered pricing on request. You should be able to get information on this by sharing personal data and company information.
Unique Selling Points
- The interactive content makes for a far more engaging experience for the sales team and your customers.
- New members of the team can quickly get up to speed thanks to comprehensive training suites.
- Using the system, you could even train your team to perfect their elevator pitches.
Key Takeaways
There are many different sales enablement platforms available for you to choose from. The best choice will always be the one that best suits your business and integrates with your stack with as little friction as possible.
- Budget will play a large part in your decision, but be prepared for limited features at lower tiers.
- Sales enablement, at its core, aims to make the sales process more effective and efficient.
- They are certainly an investment, but often an investment that will pay dividends when integrated.
To get the most out of a sales enablement tool, you’ll need to have a steady flow of leads for your sales team to engage with. Email outreach is a great source of leads, and the perfect complimentary tool for that is Instantly. See for yourself and get started for free today.