While there is some discussion about what sales enablement entails, it's generally understood that it's intended to help sales teams be more efficient and effective in their jobs. By equipping sales teams with the necessary knowledge, processes, and tools, they can deliver consistent messaging and provide a value proposition throughout the customer journey and sales cycle.
According to a study by CSO Insights, 62% of organizations look to sales enablement software tools first and foremost to help them deliver consistent communications to customers. Consistency is key because it leads to better customer experiences over time, which then ultimately leads to more sales.
Key Elements for Successful Sales Enablement
In the past few years, the demand for a dedicated sales enablement person and sales enablement teams has grown dramatically. In fact, according to a study by Aberdeen, 75% of teams that use sales enablement tools reported higher sales and growth.
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There are several key components to creating a winning sales enablement strategy including:
Training
To start, a successful sales enablement strategy begins with product knowledge training. While onboarding new employees is the most obvious starting point in the training journey, providing continuous professional employee training and development is key to continued growth and success.
Why?
Because as your sales team takes on new products and services, they need ongoing support to guide their strategy and decision-making to close clients.
Content
Content geared towards sales enablement allows sales teams to prepare and successfully deal with any interaction with prospects and customers, regardless of where they are in their journey.
Some of the most common types of sales enablement content include:
- Technical documentation such as case studies, white papers, and RFPs
- Sales scripts
- Product sell sheets / one-sheets
- E-books
- Competitive analysis decks
- Video demos
- Blog posts
How do you choose which content to create?
A lot of it depends on the product and service you are selling, who the buyer is, and whether they are at the top or bottom of the sales funnel.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Part of what makes sales enablement so impactful is that it enables alignment between sales and marketing teams. This alignment ensures that strategies and objectives are clearly communicated and shared, leading to a consistent approach in all customer interactions. By ensuring both departments are working in tandem, organizations can fully harness their sales enablement tools, resulting in:
- Unified messaging
- Optimized resource allocation
- Data-driven insights
- Enhanced lead management
Buyer Journey Optimization
No sales enablement strategy would be complete without understanding the buyer’s journey. Buyer journey optimization helps salespeople know the best time, person, and type of content to deliver depending on where the prospect or existing customer is in their journey.
Tools such as CRMs, analytics tools, mapping tools and more can all provide significant insights into who your customers are, what they value, and how to better communicate with them.
The Role of Technology in Enabling Sales
Not so long ago, salespeople mainly relied on one technology to close the deal--the telephone. And while the days of Jerry McGuire “Show me the money!” are long gone, the emergence of sophisticated sales enablement tools has become crucial in enabling sales teams to achieve their objectives. They do this by enhancing the entire sales process to ensure it's more efficient, effective, and aligned with today’s customer expectations.
How to Choose the Right Sales Enablement Tool
So, how do you choose the most effective sales enablement software?
In today's competitive landscape, where 51% of sales and marketing teams prioritize retention by forming deeper relationships with customers, as highlighted in the Second Annual State of Sales report from Salesforce, the stakes are higher than ever.
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The above statistic underscores the importance of selecting a tool that not only streamlines your sales process but also strengthens your customer engagement and retention strategies. With the right software, your team can enhance its approach to sales by:
- Developing consistent and personalized customer interactions
- Leveraging data-driven insights to tailor sales strategies
- Providing the sales team with the tools and information they need to succeed
To help with choosing the right sales enablement tools that best serve your business, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- What business problems do we want to solve and how does it help sales?
- Does it help with key elements discussed in key elements of successful sales enablement?
- How does the tool fit into the overall sales and marketing tech stacks?
- How does the tool empower sales teams to provide better customer experiences?
As you begin to vet different sales enablement tools, you should create a workflow that best assesses them. The process should involve the following steps:
- Gather your team’s feedback on the current sales process and what can be improved.
- Analyze your business needs and think about how the tools you're looking at can help support you with contributing to meeting those needs.
- Research and compare (which is where our list can come handy).
- Evaluate how each tool organizes and provides access to sales content as well as how easy it is to use.
Remember, the right tool should not only meet your current needs but also adapt to future challenges and opportunities.
The Best Sales Enablement Tools [2024]
Below is our list of the best sales enablement software available for 2024 (in no particular order) to help equip your sales force with the essential resources, materials, and insights they need for meaningful interactions with customers.
1. Customer.io
Customer.io is an intuitive sales enablement software that sends targeted messages to customers. By organizing messaging workflows with direct integrations to multiple language libraries (Ruby, Python, Go, etc.), you can have more specialized access and control to your contacts.
Because its data collection is so robust, there are nearly infinite ways to segment and target lists with real time feedback on SMS, push notifications, emails, and more.
Highlights:
- Direct integrations that allow you to send data from multiple language libraries with an API that sends real-time data.
- Limitless third-party integrations. If you currently use Segment, mParticle, Zapier, and Rudderstack, any third-party integrations can be completed in minutes.
- Customizable workflows and real-time segmentation that allows you to turn segments into customer audiences.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot Sales Hub is the gold standard for sales enablement and for good reason. Not only does it offer a powerful CRM platform that allows sales reps to get a real-time view of their entire sales funnel, but it also offers email templates and even call tracking.
There’s also 24/7 support as well as a robust knowledge base library to help you with any troubleshooting.
Highlights:
- Free CRM and tools such as email tracking and call tracking.
- Subscription-based email sequencing, data-driven deal pipelines, customizable reports and more.
3. Seismic
Seismic is a storytelling platform that helps you create engaging experiences for customers. By providing insights on your target audience, you can craft messaging that speaks to their needs.
By personalizing content, Seismic’s centralized hub allows you to leverage its competitive intelligence for faster lead times to close buyers.
Highlights:
- Personalizes all communications with data-driven storytelling
- Award-winning, including Forbes Cloud 100
- Centralized hub for content, competitive intel, product news and more to help empower sales teams
4. Highspot
With Highspot, onboarding, coaching, training, and analytics are unified across one platform. You are better able to organize your marketing content with metrics that prepare you to go-to-market.
This sales enablement software is a powerful training and onboarding tool because it empowers sales reps to learn and adapt.
5. Helpjuice
Helpjuice is a powerful, easy-to-use knowledge base software solution that is an essential sales enablement tool that serves as a 'single source of truth' for your sales reps. With Helpjuice, you can easily create a knowledge base to capture, organize, and share important information from one centralized location. In turn, your sales reps will be able to quickly find the knowledge they need to effectively bring prospects closer to conversion.
It’s easy to create content with Helpjuice, search for information, and integrate it with your existing platforms.
Highlights:
- Extremely customizable
- In-depth analytics that can help you understand what type of content you need to create to help your sales reps
- Easy-to-use and quick
6. Hunter
Hunter makes it incredibly easy for sales and marketers to reach out to other professionals with simple but powerful tools.
Hunter crawls the web and indexes publicly available professional email addresses. The data is easily accessible via a simple user interface to find the right person in a company or find how to contact already identified professionals.
Besides that, you can easily automate the whole outreach process with Hunter by verifying the emails you found in the app and setting up simple and powerful cold outreach campaigns.
Highlights
- Fast and precise email lookup
- Email verifications made on multiple levels
- Cold outreach personalization and automation
7. Gong
Gong is a well-known and respected RevOps platform that improves the way sales teams operate by capturing and analyzing every customer interaction. Gong's AI is fine-tuned on an extensive dataset of high-quality sales interactions which allows it to provide precise insights. Moreoer, this specialized focus means Gong is able to grasp the contextual gist of sales dialogues, enabling teams to track overarching concepts and gain a nuanced understanding of customer engagements.
Gong also offers strong analytics in their backend that can be used for identifying deal risks, understanding market reactions, and coaching sales teams to success, ensuring that strategies are always aligned with actual customer feedback.
Highlights:
- AI platform that captures and analyzes sales calls, emails, and meetings to provide comprehensive insights
- Offers recommendations for action based on data, helping teams close more deals
- Transcription, tagging, and pattern recognition enable you to get a detailed analysis of your sales calls and identify winning plays
8. Chorus.ai
Chorus.ai, which was acquired by ZoomInfo, bills itself as a conversation intelligence platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes business conversations. Their platform is backed by 14 technology patents that leverage proprietary machine-learning to help provide actionable insights into sales meetings, coaching opportunities, and customer feedback.
With Chorus.ai, your sales team will be able to uncover trends, track the progress of deals, and ramp up new sales hires faster.
Highlights:
- AI-driven insights from recorded sales calls and meetings
- Enhances sales coaching through detailed analysis and feedback
- Identifies key topics, trends, and competitor mentions during sales conversations
9. OnePageCRM
OnePageCRM is a unique sales tool that transforms a static database into a dynamic to-do list with tasks and reminders next to every lead. This action-focused approach will make your follow-up routine much easier.
OnePageCRM has all the features of a standard sales CRM, plus several free and unique apps for efficient lead generation.
Highlights:
- A dynamic Action Stream with due dates, tasks, and reminders next to every contact
- One scrollable page for every lead with all relevant details: contact information, calls, notes, deals, previous and upcoming interactions
- Super quick onboarding and a simple interface
10. Showpad Content
This content creation tool connects with your existing CRM and DAM systems to help you synchronize your entire content library. By automating this synchronization with metadata, sellers can more easily gather feedback and present information.
One especially helpful feature is the AI-driven search tool that directs sellers to the most pertinent information in their content libraries.
Highlights:
- Powered by AI
- Centralized sales enablement platform
- Automatically syncs and updates
11. Dealhub.io
For a one-stop CLM and CPQ, Dealhub is a unified platform that can push your sales team to the next level. From generating quotes to contracts all while creating dynamic data reports with buyer insights, Dealhub helps you streamline your revenue and make actionable decisions with better-performing pipelines.
One of its best features is its ability to generate automated sales collateral, which helps you better personalize communications to buyers.
Highlights:
- Automated sales collateral
- CLM & CLQ
- Generated quotes and data reports
12. Klue
With Klue, its sales enablement solutions allow you to track competitors, centralize your content, and arm your sales team with collateral that converts. It’s intuitive UI and UX empowers teams to collaborate with better decision-making because its internal resources integrate seamlessly with other applications.
One unique feature is its sales battlecards, which keep teams driven to close and convert.
Highlights:
- Robust integration capacity
- Centralized content library
- Powerful collaboration features
13. Mediafly
An end-to-end sales enablement tool, Mediafly empowers teams to create, share, and improve sales content. From creating engaging content to analytics on its performance, this sales enablement tool keeps teams aligned on their sales KPIs.
Mediafly has an API that can handle any integrations, which means that its technology can evolve along with your business’s growth.
Highlights:
- Creates immersive buying experiences
- Centralized content hub
- Integrates with many other software platforms
14. SalesHood
SalesHood is an all-inclusive sales enablement platform that includes learning and tools to help sales reps close and convert at higher rates. From webinars to expert tips to comprehensive ebook guides, Saleshood prepares sales teams with as many resources as possible.
One distinctive resource is their courses, which provide actionable advice for sales enablement strategies.
Highlights:
- Robust sales learning platform
- Coaching resources
- Data-driven outcomes
15. OneMob
OneMob is unique in that it allows you to send personalized videos that integrate into your CRM. An astounding 96% of emails have improved click-through rates when there is embedded video, and OneMob’s easy-to-use features make it the perfect tool for converting customers.
Highlights:
- Easy-to-use video content creation
- Integrates with most CRMs
- Intuitive performance tracking
16. ClearSlide
Sales intelligence is at the cutting-edge with ClearSlide’s AI-powered sales enablement tools. From sales teams to marketing teams to customer success, ClearSlide’s many features allow you to pick and choose what content works best for your company’s sales goals.
Web conferencing, video mail, email templates, and more are all features of this robust sales platform, which is perfect for companies looking to scale quickly.
Highlights:
- Powered by AI
- Easily organizable
- Centralized content hub
17. Paperflite
Paperflite is a content management software that will take your sales enablement goals to the next level. It helps you create, manage, pair, and track content across platforms, so that you can iterate quickly on what’s landing with your audience--and what isn’t.
One of their best resources is their blog, which is free for content marketers to use as a resource for great ideas and ways to connect with target audiences.
Highlights
- Centralized sales enablement content hub
- Data-driven content pairing feature
- Helpful knowledge base resources and customer-facing blog
18. Showell
Showell does exactly what its name implies--it helps sales teams show their content at its best and most relevant across devices. The centralized content library automatically updates to ensure that only the most up-to-date sales, branding, and marketing materials are at everyone’s fingertips.
Another great reason to try Showell is that you can for free if you are a small team or company.
Highlights:
- Intuitive UX design
- Centralized content library that updates automatically
- Free to try
19. Relayto
Ever wanted to turn a stale marketing doc into something more interactive? Relayto lets your sales imagination run wild with its “instant branding” features. From files to web links, almost anything can be converted into a dynamic sales document.
Highlights:
- Makes slow, time-consuming content workflows fast and interactive.
- Reduces content creation costs significantly
- Centralizes branding assets for easy access and content creation
20. Enablix
Perfect for B2B marketing, Enablix is a sales enablement tool to find and share content that is relevant to their sales goals and audiences. By streamlining the communications between individuals and teams, the content choices are data-driven and more effective.
An awesome feature is its ability to allow users to create microsites and content hubs that enable buyers and engage customers.
Highlights:
- Perfect for B2B marketers
- Robust data analytics
- Scalable content creation workflows
21. Tiled
This no-code platform is perfect for sales and marketing teams looking to take their content to the next level. Tiled lets your sales teams create micro-apps that they can share with customers about products and services. Its analytics tool gives insight into the content’s impact and helps sales teams create content that converts better at scale.
Perfect for enterprise teams, Tiled’s most unique feature is its drag-and-drop design capabilities, which allow you to create professional, engaging content in minutes.
Highlights:
- Great for teams with significant content creation goals
- Easy-to-use
- Provides data-driven insights on content performance
22. Sembly.ai
Sembly.ai is an innovative AI-powered meeting assistant designed to transform the way professionals handle their meetings. It automates the process of note-taking, highlights action items, and generates summaries, ensuring that teams can focus on the conversation rather than capturing details. Sembly.ai is particularly useful for sales teams, offering integrations with CRM systems and providing insights that help streamline follow-ups and drive meaningful engagement.
Highlights:
- Automatic transcription of meetings with actionable insights and summaries
- CRM integration to streamline workflows and enhance customer relationship management
- Smart highlights and action items to ensure critical information is captured and acted upon
Wrap Up
As you consider the various options available, remember that the essence of sales enablement lies in providing your team with the right information, training, and tools at the right time.
This is where Helpjuice shines.
Our software is designed to streamline your knowledge management efforts, allowing your sales team to have access to up-to-date, relevant information instantly, enabling them to engage effectively with prospects and customers. Discover how using Helpjuice to create your sales knowledge base can transform your sales enablement strategy and help you build stronger, more profitable customer relationships with a free 14-day trial.