Sales enablement tools can increase company sales and sustainably improve the customer buying experience.

This article explains what sales enablement means and what purpose sales enablement tools serve. Most importantly, you will get to know 6 of the most popular sales enablement tools.

As a team leader, you have to make sure that the salespeople can sell well.

To support this, the marketing department creates content that can be used in sales. These include product presentations, videos, infographics, and more.

These marketing documents, but also the right training or other information that are essential for a sale, should be available to a salesperson without a lot of chaos - and ideally in a time-saving manner.

This is where sales enablement tools can help. Sales enablement ensures efficient and successful sales operations and can be a competitive advantage. The goal of the tools is to enable salespeople to optimize sales methods/processes that create the best possible customer experience - for example, by providing salespeople with relevant content so they can successfully guide a buyer through the buying process.

The way buyers inform themselves and make decisions has changed. Experience has shown that up to 70% of decision-makers make a decision before the first customer contact. This results in a subconscious desire on the part of the buyer for a special purchasing experience.

Typical questions that buyers have already dealt with are:

• Will the product I buy work the way I need it to?
  
  
• Is it worth the money?
  
  
• Can I get a better price somewhere else?

If your salesperson doesn't know the market, its products and customers correctly, then he can't sell the product and customers bounce.

Sales enablement platforms promote the alignment of marketing and sales activities. For example, they enable marketing experts to provide sales staff with relevant content so they can better prepare for customer meetings and presentations.

To get the most out of your investment, your sales enablement platform should include the following features.

1. Customizable content for different sales interactions
   
2. User-friendly search functions
   
3. Pre-built workflows for sales and marketing
   
4. Performance metrics for sales material

Sales enablement tools should relieve Sales employees and help them understand potential customers and products better.

Digital coaching and learning modules enable employees to learn the content independently and from any location - saving sales managers time and stress.

In the following, we present you the sales enablement tools with which you can avoid the mentioned problems.

Depending on which area or process you want to optimize your sales process, there are suitable sales enablement tools to support you. We have listed one popular tool per category for you.

Showpad is an online sales platform with revenue enablement solutions that enables you to meet your modern customers at an eye level. Showpad's features help sales teams to always be optimally prepared, create special buying experiences and thus generate more revenue for your company.

A typical scenario for Showpad is that a salesperson has his iPad with him. On his iPad he can access all the important documents that have been compiled for the sale via app.

A particular advantage of the Showpad system is the usage rates of the documents. Marketing can see how often a document has been used or sent. This allows the team to see what content is working well and based on this, the content can be improved and created more targeted.

Showpad is one of the most popular sales enablement tools in the world. It offers document management for distribution, even digitally with additional benefits through monitoring and analysis.

• dynamic content for different call progressions
  
• simple user interface
  
• analysis and monitoring functions for sales materials
  

empower® is a holistic MS Office add-in suite that facilitates working in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Often times product or other important information is provided in the form of PowerPoint presentations. With empower® you can provide your sales employees or trainers with for example up-to-date product presentations at any time. This means that training courses and customer discussions are always based on the latest product information.

The basic idea for the use of empower® was to offer all sales employees and trainers access to all current documents via the empower® library - even on mobile iPads. A central library for all documents and templates is just one of many features included in empower®.

In addition, the empower® library contains master and slide templates that every employee can use to create a new presentation. This saves time and effort and ensures compliance with the corporate design.

This is what the empower® customer Torsten Mühlhoff (Corporate Projects, ABUS) had to say about empower®:

"With the empower® PIM interface we were able to almost completely avoid the enormous manual effort of creating and updating numerous product presentations".

Here you can see the whole Success Story from ABUS using empower®.


Advantages:

• Important presentations, documents, or tables can be retrieved centrally and up-to-date at any time and from any location
  
  
• Extensions like empower® integrations let you integrate all your existing content management applications like DAM, PIM, and SharePoint with empower®. It allows new information from the system to be automatically imported into the empower® library.
  
  
• Central access to images, icons, and other important assets directly in Office applications
  
  

Artesian gives you access to an extensive database through a convenient user interface, allowing you to find out everything you need to know about a prospect, company, or industry and deliver it to specific audiences. Artesian creates lists of leads for you based on extensive data about millions of companies.

Advantages:

• Reduce research time by filtering for employees, directors, SIC codes, financial and credit data, and export lists for acquisitions
  
• Automatic analysis of potential customers and reduced time spent on manual research
  
  

Lessonly is a sales training platform that helps you create, store, and distribute training content while tracking key success metrics, such as whether employees attended and engaged with the training.

Training on how to sell in a new role or on key personas is critical to onboarding and retaining employees, empowering them to succeed, and motivating them with more commissions.

Advantages:

• Easy digitization of training for sales staff
  
• Participation and activity reports
  
• A solid knowledge base for new employees and existing employees
  
  

Outreach is used for sales automation with call intelligence, buyer sentiment analysis, team performance reporting, and more. With Outreach, you can create email sequences for sales. This allows your team to automate manual workaround emails.

Advantages:

• Automatic reminder for follow-up emails after a customer interaction
  
• Notification to send the right content to the right customer
  
• High productivity
  

DocSend is a contract management tool for sales support materials. It helps salespeople view and organizes settlement sheets, white papers, and other content needed to close deals. As documents are distributed through an app, you can use DocSend's analytics to organize content and make optimizations.

Advantages:

• Digital access to important contract documents
  
• High-security standards
  
• Good overview and organization of documents
  
  

Maybe one of the presented tools offers the solution for your challenges in the sales process.

In any case, it is worth considering investing in a suitable sales enablement tool to increase the efficiency of sales processes and at the same time increase employee satisfaction.

After all, if the sales department has the backup it needs, it can concentrate more on its actual task: selling.