Sales is rarely easy or straightforward. Reps must find prospects (in case of outbound function), modify the solution according to the prospect’s need, follow up multiple times (80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting, whereas 44% of sales reps give up after only 1 follow-up), handle objections, and more to make a sale. On top of that, over 50% of their time is spent on the wrong prospects.
Thankfully, today we have technology and tools to make selling easier.
We have compiled a list of the 17 best sales enablement tools to empower your teams. But first, a quick look at the basics.
What is Sales Enablement?
According to Gartner, sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.
Having active interactions with prospects is crucial for making sales. Sales enablement makes the execution of sales-related activities more effective through:
- Content
- Training
- Tools
Content is at the core of digital marketing and sales. Sales enablement content includes product demos, video reviews, case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, and other related collateral. Good content helps convince the prospect to move forward in the sales pipeline.
The next critical element for sales enablement is training. Without proper training, salespeople cannot succeed consistently. Besides essential sales skills, they must also understand the product or the service they are selling.
Finally, you will need software tools to automate mundane tasks and increase productivity. Sales enablement tools simplify a lot of tasks associated with sales. For instance, they can centralize information and make them more accessible. Let’s look at this in detail.
What are Sales Enablement Tools?
Sales Enablement Tools are intelligent data analytics programs that make it easier for sales reps to create and access content across the sales lifecycle. They unify content analytics, business intelligence, data from CRM, customer experience data, automation, sales analytics, and more. In short, sales enablement tools play a crucial role in aligning sales and marketing, and relevant departments.
There are several software available for sales enablement. We have shortlisted 17 for you.
17 Best Sales Enablement Tools
1. LevelEleven
LevelEleven provides a performance management platform for customer-facing teams. It motivates reps through contests and gamification to publicly recognize their performances. With real-time KPI tracking, it identifies if the reps are falling off the pace. This way, you can coach and support them and help them stay on top of their game.
2. Membrain
Membrain is a sales enablement CRM for B2B sales. It is a great platform for training, content management, sales process execution and automation. For instance, it can automatically analyze the performance of team members and inform who needs coaching on what aspect. It also comes with a Story Stream feature where you can review an entire project or activity from start to end.
3. LeadSquared Sales Execution CRM
LeadSquared is one of the world’s fastest-growing CRM tools for high-velocity sales. It comes with a host of features that are not present at this price point.
It includes lead management, sales management, mobile CRM, sales communication, workflow automation, marketing automation, and more. LeadSquared is a highly versatile solution to manage your sales and can be customized based on changing needs of your business. It allows managing people, processes, and products in real-time and seamlessly integrates with numerous other platforms.
4. Whatfix
Whatfix is a training and digital adoption platform. It provides contextual, interactive, and real-time guidance on the digital adoption of enterprise apps. The platform also helps with change and release management to keep employees aware of changes and train them on app and process changes.
5. Reply.io
Reply.io is an all-in-one sales automation platform that helps businesses generate targeted leads, personalize multichannel outreach at scale with AI, and book more meetings on autopilot.
Reply is equipped with an AI Sales Agent that generates tailored messages and handles responses on your behalf, as well as a Sales AI Chatbot that captures, qualifies, and nurtures inbound leads. This all-in-one sales automation suite also has a B2B contact database, LinkedIn automation, reports & analytics, and more.
6. Uniqode
Uniqode’s Digital Business Card helps the sales team efficiently network with prospects at physical and virtual events. You can share your contact details with just a scan or a link.
With Two-Way Contact Sharing enabled, your recipients can share their contact details with you at their discretion.
All the leads collected through your digital business card are stored in a digital address book. Moreover, you can export this list of contacts to your CRM through native integrations or Zapier.
7. EmailAnalytics
Emails are one of the most effective methods for prospecting and lead nurturing. Salespeople spend 21% of their day sending emails. Therefore, analyzing the outcome of your email marketing efforts and tracking related KPIs is crucial. EmailAnalytics makes it easy to measure email campaigns and provides additional metrics to optimize your sales pipeline.
8. Highspot
At its core, Highspot is an AI-powered search tool. But it can also contextualize employee training and comes with a guided selling platform to help your reps perform better.
Highspot’s dynamic content management feature makes it easy for sales reps to create content, share them, and find the content they need to close a deal. It also comes with advanced analytics to analyze the content performance across the sales pipeline.
9. Seismic
Seismic allows you to collect all sales-related data and review all resources. It calls itself a storytelling platform. Seismic supports predictive content recommendations to help sales reps create an engaging buying experience for the customers. In simple words, it suggests relevant content to use during each stage of the selling process.
10. Showpad
Showpad is both a content management and a sales enablement tool. It allows your salespeople to discover the content they need to share with prospects.
Surprisingly, 65% of salespeople struggle with finding the right content to send even though brands usually have the resources ready for almost every situation.
Therefore, tools like Showpad are helpful as sales reps can get access to relevant content exactly when needed. Showpad uses machine learning for analyzing requirements and recommends accordingly.
11. Attach by Cirrus Insights
Attach is a sales enablement tool that helps businesses understand how their prospects are interacting with the content. Sharing marketing collateral with potential customers is one part of the job. How they interact with that content is what matters more. Attach gives brands a deep insight into how marketing content is being consumed. This data can help sales reps to focus on the right prospects and improve conversion rates.
12. Unboxed Advisor
Unboxed Advisor focuses on reducing training times for sales teams for enterprises. It comes with five sales enablement services:
- Interactive demos
- Guided selling
- Content library
- Account management
- Comprehensive reporting
You can use their services on mobile devices and use the tool offline as well.
13. Ambition
The primary goal of Ambition as a sales enablement tool is to introduce healthy competition amongst sales reps. The software relies on CRM data solely. It also means that the software will not be effective unless your sales reps log everything into CRM. Therefore, if your sales reps want to make it to the leaderboard, they cannot skip the data updating process.
14. Hoopla
Hoopla allows gamification of your CRM metrics. One can create contests, competitions, and leaderboards with CRM data or metrics relevant to the business. The platform makes it easy for managers to motivate teams and score more sales. Hoopla can easily integrate with CRM tools. It can also work with apps like Google Sheets, Slack, and more.
15. ProProfs Knowledge Base
ProProfs Knowledge Base is a simple tool that helps you create sales documentation for your sales team. This documentation is mobile-friendly and can be accessed on the go by your sales folks every time they interact with prospects.
Deploying this sales enablement tool gives you access to pre-designed documentation templates that expedite the content creation process, saving you tremendous time and effort. You can also set advanced roles and permissions to control user access and ensure that the right team members have access to the right content.
16. Outreach
Outreach is a sales enablement platform that allows sales teams to communicate better. It can help create a more efficient sales pipeline or optimize the current workflow. It has a feature called “sequences” that help sales reps identify how and when a customer interaction will happen. Outreach uses AI-powered algorithms to discover key customer insights and make informed decisions.
17. Storylane
Storylane helps marketing and sales teams build interactive product demos in 10 min.
This web-based tool allows users to build demos in minutes– without requiring any prior coding knowledge.
Product marketers, growth marketers, and demand generation specialists use Storylane to create engaging demos. These demos are embedded on landing pages to showcase products, generate demand, and attract high-intent leads.
We hope you find these tools helpful. Before we wrap up, let’s see the features you must look for in your sales enablement platform.
Key benefits:
- Boost Conversions: Storylane lets prospects explore the product at their own pace, uncovering the “wow factor” themselves and driving higher conversion rates.
- Personalized Demos: Personalize each demo with interactive elements and branching narratives that cater to specific needs and pain points.
- Real-time Insights: Track engagement metrics to see what resonates with prospects and refine your demo strategy for maximum impact.
This approach empowers marketing and sales teams to effectively communicate product value, shorten sales cycles, and ultimately close more deals.
Essential Features of Sales Enablement Platforms
- Customer Relationship Management. CRMs are essential for any business, big or small. CRM helps brands collect relevant customer data, share that with other departments and access prospects’ information.
- Content creation. Sales tools with built-in templates for certain use cases are very beneficial. For example, landing pages, email templates, SMS templates, phone call scripts, comparison documents, etc. Having ready-to-use templates will save that last-minute hustle to create content.
- Analytics. Tools that provide extensive analytics and reporting features are essential for sales management. Managers must be able to see their team members’ activities and performances. This data will help them figure out if they need to train the reps further.
- Sales training. Sales enablement tools with training modules/guides and resources can help your reps resolve the hurdle instantly and work more effectively.
- Workflow management. Established workflows or guided selling procedures can help new employees sell more efficiently.
- Automation. Sales automation can take care of repetitive and mundane tasks. You can let the algorithms handle the data entry and the number-crunching and let salespeople focus on selling.
- Communication and collaboration. Tools for both internal and external communication are a great aid to streamline the sales process. It is often possible to integrate tools to prevent siloed tech infrastructure. For example, you can integrate your CRM software with Zoom for setting up virtual meetings on the go. Or you can integrate CRM with cloud calling tools such as RingCentral to simplify calling.
Closing thoughts
Overall, The market for sales performance management software is anticipated to grow from USD 5.4 billion in 2022 to USD 16.3 billion by 2032, at a CAGR of 11.6%. When it comes to sales enablement tools, each has unique features, and their adoption will depend on your business use cases. However, all of them can make your sales reps more productive and improve your conversion rates.
If you’re looking for sales execution software to run high-velocity sales, go for LeadSquared. It follows a vertical-centric, use-case first approach and aims at building truly connected, empowered, and self-reliant sales organizations with the power of automation. Book a free 30-minute demo to see LeadSquared in action.
FAQs
CRM software help in sales enablement as it helps track customer interactions, sales pipeline and provides data and insights to improve your sales process.
Sales enablement requires company-wide effort; it isn’t restricted to your sales teams alone. While creating a sales enablement strategy, first identify your organizational inefficiencies. Then coordinate with the product, operations, sales, and marketing teams to overcome them. A successful enablement strategy requires the right tools to help increase efficiency and decrease manual effort.