What are sales enablement tools? A comprehensive guide to get started
- What is sales enablement?
- Who owns sales enablement?
- What are sales enablement tools?
- Categories of sales enablement tools
- Sales enablement best practices
- Zoho Bookings as a sales enablement tool
- Is your business sales enabled?
For closed-won and closed-lost deals, there are multiple factors that lead to the outcome. Some sales processes would’ve worked, and a few would’ve fallen flat. So, how will sales personnel know if they're pushing the right buttons to close more deals?
If we're being honest, sales processes are iterative. The playbook keeps changing with new data, tech advancements, market shifts, and the like. In this constantly changing landscape, sales teams thrive when they are enabled with a great content repository, sales training, insights about the industry or the ideal customer profile, and efficient apps to manage their tasks.
Instead of relying on guesswork and chasing wrong leads, sales enablement provides data-backed insights and valuable resources for reps to close more deals.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a continuous process of empowering your sales teams with content, tools, training, and information needed to engage and convert interested buyers into customers.
Who owns sales enablement?
Sales enablement is at the intersection of sales and marketing teams. Marketing readies the resources the sales team might require, and reps use these resources when talking to customers. If both these teams are siloed, imagine having prospects listen to two different messages for your product or service offering—this simply creates chaos and fewer conversions.
Some organizations, depending on their size, might also have a separate sales enablement team. This team collaborates closely with the sales and marketing teams to help drive more sales.
What are sales enablement tools?
Sales enablement tools are apps that help sales teams close more deals. These tools can cater to a specific category (content, scheduling, and more) or be a single platform offering everything sales teams require to close deals effectively.
What are the different categories of sales enablement tools?
Sales enablement tools can be classified into various categories based on their solutions. Here are a few popular categories that businesses opt for:
- CRM
- Sales scheduling software
- Sales intelligence platform
- Sales content management
- Sales engagement apps
- Conversation intelligence
CRM
CRM systems are invaluable assets to your sales teams. Sales reps get all the information about a prospect and effectively engage with them. It's an added advantage if all the other sales enablement tools are connected with your CRM so information resides centrally in your CRM and reps can benefit from more insights. They can check prospects’ interactions so far, engagement on resources shared, win/loss sentiment based on their journey, and more.
Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Monday.com are a few examples of sales CRM.
Sales scheduling software
Scheduling software enables reps to schedule meetings without delay. It eliminates all the back-and-forth conversations that reps engage in and allows leads to self-schedule for their preferred time slot in no time. Since scheduling software automates tasks like sending emails, calendar invites, and updating data to CRMs, reps can focus more on managing leads and closing deals in the pipeline.
Zoho Bookings, Calendly, and Setmore are a few sales scheduling software.
Sales intelligence platform
Think of sales intelligence tools as your trusted informant. Sales intelligence platforms are extensive databases where in reps can get contact details, insights on companies or ICPs in a particular demographic, tech stack, management or hierarchy changes, buying trends or intent, and more. Some apps also come with AI analytics and emails to engage with prospects.
Zoominfo, Apollo.ai, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and 6sense are a few examples of sales intelligence tools.
Sales content management
A crucial case study lost in cold storage or a Slack thread is of no help. Sales teams often require the right content to share with prospects and close deals. Content management tools help you create, organize, and track content pieces for sales and other customer-facing teams. For example, you can share a slide deck, e-book, or case study with prospects and gain insights on the best resource. Some apps allow you to create coaching or training programs for your teams.
Seismic, Highspot, and Paperflite are a few examples of sales content management tools.
Sales engagement apps
Sales teams lose time when switching between multiple communication channels to engage with prospects. Regardless of which channels (emails, webchats, instant messaging, etc.) the prospect reaches out through, sales engagement apps help reps prospect, respond, and centralize communications to close more deals.
Zoho CRM Plus, SalesLoft, Outreach, and Reach.io are a few examples of sales engagement apps.
Conversation intelligence
Conversation intelligence tools use AI to transcribe and analyze sales calls, providing multiple insights for sales teams to leverage. Sales teams can look at why a deal was lost, understand pain points, and train sales reps based on the data.
Gong.io and Chorus.ai are a few examples of conversation intelligence.
Sales enablement best practices
1) Centralize all data to your CRM
When data from all other sales enablement tools is synced to your CRM, sales reps can immediately increase their engagement. This provides real-time visibility of your pipeline, enablement, and sales reps' performances.
2) Use booking links across different channels
Meetings are key to any sale. Sales teams engage with prospects across different channels and must be equipped to schedule meetings without delay. Scheduling software like Zoho Bookings can help sales teams share booking links across different sales enablement tools to streamline meetings with prospects.
3) Track the right metric
Sales enablement practices are an iterative process, and tracking the right KPIs helps understand what works and what changes can be made.
- Deal conversion time: Conversion rates help determine whether the time it takes to convert a prospect into a customer has shortened.
- Deal size The average deal size is a good metric for tracking the effectiveness of your sales enablement activities. If deal sizes have declined, reps can use resources to bring larger deals into the pipeline.
- Sales content engagement Some prospects might need a case study relevant to their industry or a whitepaper to understand your offering better. Tracking the engagement and usage of your content resources helps you optimize and add new resources for better conversions.
- Time taken to schedule meetings Sales reps can keep the pipeline moving with prompt meetings without delays. Scheduling software like Zoho Bookings can help sales reps schedule meetings quickly with prospects at any stage of their journey.
- Sales rep performance Looking at sales reps' performance in terms of revenue brought in or average deal sizes in their pipeline is a good indicator of your sales enablement processes. Based on the data, you can infer if any changes are required or if you must train sales reps to optimize their performance.
4) Cross-functional collaboration
Sales success depends on collaboration with other teams in an organization. Salespeople must be able to communicate and work in tandem with all other customer-facing departments to gain visibility into the market and better understand their ICPs. Teams working in silos will become counterproductive and not help close deals and bring in revenue.
5) Maintain a common content repository
Imagine a sales rep searching for a specific document in a Slack thread or in multiple cloud folders; it slows down their momentum. Having a common tool or folder where teams collaborate to maintain and update content resourced would be simple and beneficial for sales reps.
6) Optimize training programs for changing times
Sales is constantly evolving, and so should the training you provide for your reps. Whether it's a new framework or a tool, businesses must ensure it's relevant to today's context and train reps accordingly. For example, AI is new, and businesses can train reps to leverage AI-powered apps or handle questions regarding AI.
Zoho Bookings as a sales enablement tool
There are no sales without meetings. While emails, phone calls, or sending calendar invites can help sales teams schedule meetings, it certainly isn't the fastest or most efficient way to meet with prospects.
Zoho Bookings automates all tasks around meetings and helps sales reps hold deal-closing meetings quicker without having to follow up and lose time in the process.
With Zoho Bookings, you can:
- Offer multiple meeting types to engage with prospects via booking links or by adding a booking widget on your website.
- Sync your schedules with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Zoho Calendar.
- Meet prospects virtually by connecting with MS Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and Zoho Meeting.
- Manage and access your sales reps' meetings from a central dashboard.
- Integrate and schedule appointments directly from Zoho CRM or Bigin by Zoho CRM, web chats via Zoho SalesIQ, and desk tickets via Zoho Desk.
- Create custom workflows to follow up with leads after a meeting.
- Host sales trainings or workshops with group and recurring meeting types.
- Share preferred time slots directly to your email or share booking links to LinkedIn messages with the Zoho Bookings browser extension.
- Share relevant sales content through email notifications sent to prospects once a meeting is scheduled.
- Generate reports for your meetings and sales reps to gather insights and optimize your sales process.
- Make Zoho Bookings work with other sales enablement tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Outreach via Zapier or Zoho Flow.
Is your business sales enabled?
Think of sales enablement as an investment; in the long run, the returns your business would get would be tenfold. If you’re just getting started with implementing sales enablement for your business, then it’s important to understand that you needn’t do it all at once.
Start with tools or practices that can work with your existing sales process and make progress accordingly. Getting started with scheduling software like Zoho Bookings can be the first step that can immensely benefit your sales team.