Sales enablement tools can have a major impact on sales performance and productivity, but also on how you sell and how effective you are in meeting sales numbers.
With no exaggeration – today’s sales enablement software solutions can give sales reps superpowers, letting them move faster, know more and make smarter decisions than any sales rep could have done in the year 1960, or even 1990.
What is Sales Enablement software?
A sales enablement software is anything that takes a burden off the sales team and gives them materials they need to succeed, without additional effort. A huge range of technologies exists today to automate and improve sales performance, and virtually every part of the sales process:
- Reporting and analysis – supporting sales teams by standardizing and automating reporting, and providing more visibility into individual and team performance.
- Lead qualification and enrichment – helping decide automatically if a lead is relevant for the business and obtaining critical data to make the right approach.
- Sales content optimization – salespeople rely on words and images, in the form of emails, documents, presentations and audio-visual materials. Automating the creation and distribution of these materials makes a big difference.
- Sales email automation and interaction assistance – sales processes are interaction-heavy, with hundreds of emails and phone calls commonly exchanged in a single enterprise sales cycle. Automating this interaction can dramatically improve sales effectiveness.
While there are hundreds of great tools out there, to save you time and help you focus your search, we’ve selected eight tools covering all the automation categories above. These are robust platforms that not only sound good but actually deliver.
Sales Reporting and Analytics Tools
InsightSquared
InsightSquared turns CRM data, which can be cryptic and complex at times, into decision-quality reports, sales performance metrics and visuals. It provides a library of 80+ sales reports that let you manage pipeline, perform sales pipeline analysis, optimize the funnel, forecast sales, and persuade leadership to make effective decisions. InsightSquare also provides a custom reporting engine with BI capabilities that lets you connect to any data source, slice and dice data to derive additional insights.
Pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
Upsales
Upsales is a marketing automation, sales automation and CRM platform. It provides a “salesboard” that promises to answer the question, “how close are we to sealing this deal?” The board helps enforce a clear process with your sales team, provides next steps for prospects, and makes accurate sales forecasts for the next month, quarter and year.
Pricing: Starts from 4,900 Euro / year for 5 users.
Lead Enrichment and Qualification Platforms
Lusha
Sales teams can’t operate without good, accurate data on leads. Modern marketing campaigns leave many data fields as optional or don’t ask for them at all, placing the burden of contact finding on sales. Our very own tool (named after me ?) can help: Lusha offers a database of hundreds of millions of business profiles and can support SDR reps by enriching leads with emails and direct phone numbers. I can find contact details for over 90% of contacts in most industries.
Lusha provides a Chrome Extension – which can get you started in literally a minute. We also offer contact and company APIs and a SalesForce CRM integration.
Pricing: Free plan includes 5 emails and mobile phone numbers per month. Paid plans start at $75 per month for 200 credits.
DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg provides background information about prospects and the organizations they work at. It provides organizational charts, direct dial numbers verified by human representatives to be correct and up to date, the technology used by the company, and even triggers that might cause a prospect to buy – an acquisition, vendor switch, leadership change, etc. DiscoverOrg integrates with Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, SalesLoft, Gmail and many other tools in the modern marketing stack.
Pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
Content Management and Sales Analytics Tools
Attach
When sales teams reach out, they must have an effective way to track interest and response. Attach allows you to link to a document from an email or social media message, and track the recipient’s engagement. It reports what the recipient read, when and for how long they engaged with the document.
Pricing: Free plan includes three documents per month. Paid plans start at $10 / User / Month for unlimited documents.
CustomShow
CustomShow is a business presentation platform that offers a design-focused presentation builder, presentation library management, and a delivery platform. CustomShow helps you create beautiful presentations with videos, visuals and beautiful layouts, and save slides in a corporate slide library which you can use to build future presentations. No more copy-pasting from last month’s deck – slides covering important aspects of the sales process are saved in one place and can be dragged and dropped to create new presentations.
Pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
Sales Email Automation and Interaction Assistance software
YesWare
YesWare automates your sales team’s follow up strategy. We all know how tedious regular follow-ups can be, and what happens to your leads and pipeline when regular follow ups are missed. YesWare helps with email scheduling (send in the future), one-click meeting scheduling, and email tracking. It defines steps in the sales process and lets you build drip campaigns, with manual stages that let a sales rep contact the prospect with a personal email or phone call.
Pricing: Paid plans start from $12 / user / month for basic features.
SAVO
SAVO claims it is the most widely used sales enablement platform in the world, with over a million users. It offers three areas of functionality: “Smarter content” automatically provides content that prospects need, from marketing assets to product stats and competitive battle cards. “Smarter execution” helps get new sellers up to speed and facilitates sharing of “tribal knowledge” between sales teams. “Smarter engagement” helps customize sales materials – presentations, proposals, sales documents, using CRM data.
Pricing: Enterprise pricing on request.
Sales Enablement Tools: Be a Better Sales Team
In the title of this post, I promised that sales enablement tools can give sales reps super powers. I’m sure that after seeing the capabilities of some of the tools, you agree that there are things you simply couldn’t do – at least not in a reasonable amount of time – which are now made effortless by the right technology.
There are many ways to improve and grow as a sales team. Sales coaching and mentoring can go a long way, industry knowledge is key, and sales-marketing alignment has been proven in many studies to have a major impact. But sales enablement tools are one of the quickest and easiest ways to remove tedious manual work and add data and insights that can help any sales team shine.
We’re confident these software solutions will bring quick wins and increase sales productivity drastically. Start implementing sales enablement today!
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