What Is Sales Enablement Software?

As the VP of Global Content and Curriculum at Salesforce, I see first-hand how a strong sales enablement programme can drive company growth. After all, sales enablement is not only about serving the right content to salespeople and customers. It's also about empowering our salespeople with the training, coaching and materials they need to excel.

In our State of Sales report, we found that just 26% of sales professionals get useful coaching from their manager at least weekly. And only 53% of sales leaders use coaching technology solutions to make up for that gap. That's where sales enablement software comes in.

What you'll learn

• What is sales enablement software?
• Why is a sales enablement platform important?
• The key benefits of sales enablement software
• Sales enablement platform best practices
• How to choose the best sales enablement software
• Important features to look for in sales enablement
• Enable your sales team to go higher than ever

Sales enablement software is the tools and technology that help salespeople train, give and receive coaching and find the sales materials necessary to serve their leads. Most sales enablement apps include training through a learning management system (LMS), storing and serving sales materials through a content management system (CMS) and tracking the use of that training and content through customer relationship management (CRM) functions.

Basically, it's a lot of three-letter acronyms that lead to ROI for sales teams.

Sales enablement means what it says on the box — people, processes, policies and tools that serve the sellers who bring in the revenue to make a business viable. Sales enablement teams ask and answer the important questions, such as:

• Do our reps have content — playbooks, videos, case studies, infographics and more — to help them to convert leads?
• Does our sales team actually use the sales content that our marketing team has created? Why or why not?
• Which content is most effective and which isn't? What part of the sales pipeline needs help?
• Why do some sales reps perform well and how can we help the others succeed, too?

Are we losing customers at certain points? How can we claim a greater share of recurring revenue?

Sales enablement platforms are employed by three primary groups:

• Sales representatives depend on this tool to find and customise sales material just in time for prospects. They also train on new sales plans, products, tools, services and campaigns so they can truly know their stuff.
• Marketing teams build much of the content that the sales teams will use, like new campaign materials, ebooks and more. Sales teams' ability to bring in revenue with that content is partly a reflection of the marketing team's performance.
• Sales enablement leaders work towards the sales strategy and co-ordinate sales enablement efforts. They check key metrics for sellers, such as training completion and sales content usage and track it against actual sales to see what's performing well.

Every piece of content and every training programme is an investment--if you don't track it, you can't know if it's working.

Sales enablement platforms bring everything into one place with trackable metrics, including:

• Ramp time: The length of time for a new rep to get fully onboarded. With the right enablement tools, this should decrease with each hire.
• Win rate: The percentage of deals won in a sales pipeline. Reps who are well trained and constantly practice through enablement tools close more.
• Deal size: The average closed deal value. Sales enablement helps reps learn how to upsell and bundle by making them more familiar with products and tactics in the organisation.
• Sales cycle length: The time it takes to turn a cold lead into a won deal. Enablement tools combined with CRMs help highlight the right content at the right stage of the funnel to help move leads.

This means that leaders and users alike get actual data that enables continuous improvement. Learning, doing and reinforcement — all in a single interface.

Sales enablement software is a force multiplier on everything you're trying to do with your sales team.

Digging through a disorganised cloud drive trying to find a pitch deck for channel sales is outdated. With all approved content in one place and easy to search through, sales reps can give a unified message and take a unified approach that helps the lead and customer experience stay consistent. Types of content you might upload are customer stories, product slide decks, ebooks and product demo videos. Sales enablement tools are a great way to push out new content and training on the content as well.

Teams can spend less time looking for content and more time connecting with customers. The best sales enablement platforms use AI to figure out the context of sales conversations and surface relevant articles, videos and more that the sales rep might need. Connecting enablement software with your CRM is the way you know if your content and training investment works. That’s because it’s where the outcome data is: pipeline generated, pipeline progression, sales activities and so on. This can increase revenue operations metrics, such as total contract value and decrease cost per acquisition because less time is required to produce and find content so sales reps can work on additional leads.

With easy-to-find personalised content and training tailored to each salesperson's needs, sales performance and closing rates can increase. For example, sales managers can identify individual sales reps who are underperforming with a given product and assign them content that the enablement software has associated with increased sales of that product.

The best way to use a sales enablement platform is to identify your sellers' pain points in the sales and training process, then customise the platform's features around overcoming them. Establish trackable goals in the system and educate the sellers around those goals. Continuously track their usage and performance and aggregate the data to find out why some things work and some things don't. And of course, keep iterating.

I always like to start with the end in mind, i.e.: what's the business impact we're trying to achieve? Here's how I'd approach a brand new sales enablement initiative:

• Decide on the key builders of your sales enablement programme: Gather a team of leaders and subject-matter experts based on their experience and availability. This could be sales leaders, marketing leaders and some salespeople to provide the ground-floor perspective. Find out their biggest issues with the way things are and what they recommend instead.
• Determine goals and prototype: Choose the most important outcomes, like increasing deal size, decreasing sales cycles or reducing turnover. Next, determine what new behaviours your salespeople need and what is in the way. What can't they do, don't know or won't do? Finally, share your prototypes with sales leaders and sales people.
• Set a turnaround time: Commit to a timeline and checkpoints, plus a method for tracking progress and analysing the success of the project.

In the design phase above, we mentioned technology. Here's how I would go about evaluating any sales enablement software I was considering for my team:

1. Consult a cross-functional team: Gather the thoughts of sales and marketing leaders, sales strategy, sales operations and IT staff on needed functions, possible roadblocks and success metrics.
2. Decide requirements: Figure out your core feature set, the types of integrations needed, how much customisation is required and what the budget is, based on your ROI goals.
3. Create an RFP: Draught everything into a request for proposal (RFP) that can be sent to various software vendors.
4. Narrow down to a short list: Evaluate the responses for disqualifying factors and identify the common denominators of top performers. Use online user reviews to get down to five or 10 choices.
5. Demo thoroughly: Sit in on demos from each of your shortlist options with a team made up of representatives from each department. Compare apples to apples by giving them a handful of typical scenarios to run through with you.
6. Plan implementation: Decide on a timeline to get your sales enablement software implemented, using feedback from the cross-functional teams who will be affected. Plan on a period of overlap if you're migrating from an old system; it's better to have double coverage than none.
7. Buy: Start implementing.

If you want the best sales enablement platform, you need to investigate its features thoroughly.

• Content management, discovery and delivery: The content library and CMS need to be robust, with advanced search and predictive surfacing of content based on what modules the sales rep has already gone through and opportunities for improvement their manager has identified.
• Guidance centre: Marketing teams need to easily be able to create content and sales teams need to be able to customise it to fit the specific situation.
• Conversation insights: AI can help managers automatically get dashboards to find coaching opportunities by identifying keywords within calls and other sales communications, such as product names or competitors. Then they can listen to recordings or hop into calls live.
• AI-powered coaching and feedback: Save sales leaders time and coach at scale with AI coaching. Lead sales reps through their pitches and allow managers and colleagues to rate them.
• Analytics and forecasting: Built-in analytics and reporting helps teams determine what works using real-time insights from the sales pipeline, machine learning of processes and improved visibility for sales leaders.

While the above features are the basics, the items below can take your team to the next level:

• Integrate with your CRM: Integrating with your CRM and other sales software lets you connect content and training investment to outcomes. Save time by tying all sales activity in your automation software to the content and training your team uses. Go even further by tying it to your revenue lifecycle management tools so quotes, contracts and billing all stay connected to sales enablement.
• Scale with automation and AI: Focus on AI features, such as contextual discovery that supplies your sales reps with the content they need only when they need it and those which make customising your sales material easier.
• Personalise each rep's experience: Machine learning features also make the learning material better. The platform can recognise products that sales reps commonly have low sell-through rates on and recommend training that have been found to increase that metric, for example.

Host content and make it easy to discover to help teams grow and learn whether they're new or seasoned. Track metrics and keep mentors and coaches engaged so nobody feels left behind. Unlock their talent, free up their time from busywork and help them to hit the pavement. That's sales enablement.