The Best Sales Enablement Tools for Your Team in 2022
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Most marketing or sales leaders we talk to are familiar with the term “sales enablement,” but they’re not exactly sure how to get it right.
The idea is simple: to provide your sales team with content, tools, and information to answer buyer questions and speed up the sales process.
But how?
Without the proper tools to close deals faster, their sales reps are frustrated — and the roadmap on how to fix holes in a weak sales enablement strategy is unclear.
If you don't know which steps you should take to guarantee better sales enablement results and grow your business, you’re not alone.
We’ve helped hundreds of companies implement sales enablement programs and adopt tools that improve closing rates, reduce the time sales reps had to spend with prospects, and increase the overall number of new deals closed — so we certainly have a lot to say on this topic.
In this article, we’re going to cover three things:
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing resources to your sales team to help them close deals faster.
Think about it like this: A salesperson meets with a dozen potential customers over the course of a week. Some are good-fit prospects. Some are not.
That salesperson gets asked many of the same questions in meeting after meeting:
And so on.
Many of these questions are not specific to the unique needs of one particular prospect. They’re general questions about the buying process, your products or services, or how different options compare.
Sales enablement materials (in this case, what we call an 80% video) are created by marketing teams to reduce friction in the sales process. They help answer these customer questions so that each prospect feels better informed and educated.
Sales teams can either share them after a call to provide a more thorough answer than what was provided during the conversation, or they can share ahead of a call to get major questions out of the way beforehand.
Content is the best sales enablement tool you can use
Tools, platforms, and other software are great for tracking and measuring sales enablement, but content trumps all. Sales teams need actual assets that can be handed to prospects at different stages of the sales cycle before any tools can be added into the mix.
But for this to work, your sales and marketing teams need to be in lockstep. Both teams will be discouraged if marketing works hard to produce something that sales says misses the mark or sales doesn't use the resources put in front of them correctly.
Sales reps want a library of thorough, vetted content that they can trust. They want to be able to hand out the right piece of content for every stage of their sales pipeline.
What types of content are they looking for?
Types of sales enablement content
Sales enablement content can take any form that suits your team and your customers. For most of our clients, the most common types of sales enablement materials include:
What topics are covered in these?
Sales enablement content topics
What do your buyers want to know? What concerns do they have that you could address to put them at ease?
Your marketing team should ask these questions directly to your sales reps and sales managers. Regular brainstorms with sales and marketing teams (we call this a Revenue Team meeting) will help you develop a backlog of topics.
In addition, every marketing team member should watch sales call recordings every week to hear questions and concerns directly from the mouths of your buyers. This could help you discover new topics to write about and prepare your sales team for in the future.
When we work with clients, we find that most of the sales enablement content they create falls into the same few categories:
Common topics covered in sales enablement material include what we call The Big 5:
These same topics could be covered in any of the formats listed above. For example, a video that explains price — or an article outlining the drawbacks of a particular product you sell.
Remember, unless you’re creating content for your sales team to use in their process and properly set up the strategy we’ve outlined for you above, software tools can’t do much to help your sales team.
Only after you’ve taken these first steps and laid the proper groundwork will the sales enablement tools be most effective.
Sales enablement tools we love
When we teach our clients at IMPACT which sales automation tools to use, there are a few clear winners — intuitive and easy to train your team on quickly and use.
Most also have free versions you can implement until you’re ready to upgrade for a broader experience. Here are our choices for the top sales enablement tools.
HubSpot Sales Hub: Keep tabs on your sales activity
HubSpot is one of the most powerful marketing, sales, and service automation platforms on the market today. Ask any HubSpot user and they can tell you it’s a game-changer. Plus, it’s free to start, and you can work your way up the different packages as you go:
Even with the free version, there is a lot you can accomplish with the software. For example, whenever prospects fill out a form on your website (contact form, ebook download form, etc.), you have the ability to track that person and see major data points about their behavior.
This includes what pages they’ve visited, how much time they spend on your site, and what emails they’ve received, opened, and read. This is how you can track engagement with your sales enablement content.
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This kind of customer data is essential for long-term revenue growth.
Your sales team will also benefit from HubSpot’s automated tasks, such as:
The platform allows sales representatives to target specific prospects so they can spend more time with qualified leads, and the dashboard helps your sales reps access real-time data (such as sales leads by sales representatives, how many calls their team has made each day, and revenue made).
Your sales reps and marketers can collaborate on projects together directly in the platform by sharing access to files, documents, and reports.
HubSpot also offers marketing automation and customer service software so you can deliver a seamless experience to your customers.
To learn more about how HubSpot can help your sales team, you can check out our course: Sales reporting and dashboards in HubSpot. You can also talk to an IMPACT advisor about using HubSpot in your sales process.
Vidyard: Record and share videos
Vidyard is a video creation tool you can access from your Chrome browser so you can record, post, and share videos effortlessly.
This makes it easy for your sales team to personalize correspondence with prospects in email. Research shows that just including a video in your email (and mentioning the video in your subject line) can increase open rates by 20%.
The easier to make and share the video, the better.
When your email gets opened, your prospects engage with your content, which is a win for everyone.
Vidyard also offers a range of analytics — such as how your viewers are interacting with your content and who they are — and it integrates with other popular platforms, such as HubSpot, LinkedIn, Slack, and Salesforce.
With different versions of the platform, you can split-test thumbnail images, customize calls-to-action, and use heat maps to see where users are clicking.
Like HubSpot, Vidyard's free version is pretty robust, so you don’t have to go all-in and spend too much at first. But the added features at higher tiers are pretty great.
Paperflite: Share sales enablement content
Paperflite is a content management platform that can help your sales team consolidate its sales enablement content in one place.
This makes it easier for your team to access the content they’re looking for by organizing it into different collections and categories. With these, no one has to go rummaging through desktop folders or request that a team member send them files.
Paperflite helps your sales team share content in a way that is visually appealing, rather than sending prospects a bunch of bulky attachments.
You’ll also get analytics about open rates, dwell time, shares, and other info so you can see how well your content is working.
Paperflite is most helpful for your sales team if they work with a lot of content and need help organizing and sharing that content in a more visually appealing way.
Intercom: Connect with customers, regardless of stage
Intercom is a conversational tool that makes it easy to use live chat and provide chatbots on your site so you can keep communicating with customers before, during, and after they buy from you.
You can set the Intercom software up to help your customers choose their own path through your sales process or easily access someone on your team.
Drift: Engage in real-time
Drift is a platform that helps businesses engage with prospects in real-time via live chat, video, voicemail, and email. The software allows you to track when prospects are on your site and how engaged they are. This helps your sales team focus on prospects further down the pipeline:
You can also set it up so prospects get a personalized notification while they’re searching for information on your website. That notification might look something like this:
Drift is a great tool for making sure your sales team isn’t wasting time chasing bad-fit leads.
To learn more about how to use these programs to support your sales team, schedule a free consultation with an IMPACT advisor.
Start building a winning sales enablement strategy today
Remember, there is no sales enablement software that can succeed without a good strategy and a library of sales content.
At IMPACT, we teach our clients the They Ask, You Answer framework. They learn that their primary focus should always be on answering customer questions.
When a prospect enters your sales cycle, they want information. Whatever you sell, your buyers probably have the same core questions that we listed above.
Now, these answers could come in many forms, depending on what your buyers most want: web pages, blog articles, videos, or case studies.
Then, sales enablement software will help you organize, track, share, and analyze this content. Remember: they are tools, not a strategy.
To take the first step to implement a full-fledged sales enablement strategy, learn more about our They Ask, You Answer approach. We work with companies around the world to boost sales with customer-focused content.
To see what this would look like at your business, set up a time to talk to one of our advisors, and we’ll show you how to alleviate your sales challenges so you can celebrate incredible results.