When sales teams have the tools they need to do their jobs, everyone wins.

But here’s the problem. As the tech stack gets more complicated, which tools are you supposed to buy?

CRM, CMS, dialers, bots, conversational intelligence, LMS, LEP, SRE – the list isn’t quite as endless as the MarTech landscape, but it’s definitely getting more and more bamboozling.

So today, we’re going to narrow in on just one part of the sales ecosystem – sales enablement, and what sales enablement tool your team needs to sell more, faster, and better. 

What is a sales enablement tool?

We need to take half a step back and first understand: what is sales enablement?

According to TOPO, sales enablement is: “the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.”

In other words, enablement is about getting the right stuff to salespeople – content, processes, systems, playbooks, data, and more – so they can sell faster and more effectively, in such a way that increases revenue for the company.

With that in mind, a sales enablement tool is a tool that does those things. Usually, a sales enablement tool will:

• Provide content to the sales reps
• Provide best practices / plays to reps at just the moment they need it
• Educate reps in product knowledge
• Facilitate peer to peer learning
• Provide a platform for digital sales coaching and training

The idea of a sales enablement tool is that all of this functionality leads up to driving better engagements between your sales reps and prospects to ultimately drive your top-line revenue. 

And, for the most part, a sales enablement tool will do this in 1 of 4 main ways:

1. Make content easier to find and access

The most valuable resource a rep has is their time. Sales enablement software allows them to use it more effectively. If content can be created and stored in a modular way, it can be recombined again and again to create a personalized experience. By making it easier for reps to follow up in a personalized way, sales enablement software frees up time to generate additional leads and pipeline.

2. Track how content is consumed

As any marketer can attest, there’s nothing worse than pouring your blood and tears into a piece of collateral...

...only to have it gather dust on the shelf.

The problem is, marketing tends to create content for reps without knowing what they actually need.

Sales enablement software provides insight into what’s used, when, and how. This, in turn, drives the creation of the right content -- content that’s used to accelerate cycles and close deals.

3. A sales enablement tool drives sales & marketing alignment

Sales and marketing misalignment isn’t a new problem, and it’s hardly something that any single software product can solve. But sales enablement software can help.

For instance, your marketing team has oodles of data and insights about your target customers. If that data can be leveraged by sales to identify potential leads and get a better sense of what makes a good customer, you can both increase your close rates and decrease your sales cycle.

Using sales enablement technology as the bridge between sales and marketing means you can distill research so the data can be used effectively.

4. Move your sales reps from good to great

Every sales team has roughly the same distribution of quality reps.

There are some bad reps, some great reps, and most are in the middle.

Using your CRM data as a base, sales enablement software helps identify which reps need extra help and deliver programs that will kick them up to that high-performance gear.

The easiest way to get started is to go talk to your top salespeople. Determine their secret sauce to closing deals. Then,  pump that info into your sales enablement software for other reps to consume. This sort of direct peer-to-peer learning can drive huge results for your organization.

Wrap up

Sales enablement software is almost guaranteed to help your team sell better. By creating a systematic, organized platform to store and consume content, drive marketing, and sales alignment, and provide the tools and content for reps to be ready for anything, sales enablement software can truly transform your revenue team.