Remember that sales enablement is about buyer engagement and how the sales rep can use content to engage the buyer throughout. So when planning to buy a sales enablement solution, keep the buyer at the center and think about capabilities you need in the tool to cater to those needs. Both sales and marketing co-own the sales enablement program, they collaborate on what content needs to be created, marketing owning the content creation and sales own the content distribution and buyer engagement.
How do you want to enable your sales team?
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This depends on what is the nature of the problem your sales team is facing.
Do your reps struggle with finding the right content for their customers? Content management and knowledge management solutions would best fit the need. The biggest problem is finding and creating relevant content for your customers.
Do they struggle with establishing the value proposition of a product? Value selling solutions come in really handy when the product you are selling is expensive and users want more confidence before making a decision.
Do they help to stick to the sales process? If most of your sales reps follow different processes and lead leakage is a problem, then AI assistants, guided selling, and playbook solutions are designed to address these issues.
Do they need to establish a more personal connection with the buyer? Having a good relationship is what makes sales click and video engagement is on the rise. Video selling software leverages the benefits videos to make a deeper connection with the buyer.
Who should buy a sales enablement solution?
Size of the org/sales team? Usually, the larger sales teams in bigger companies are ideally suited to use enablement solutions where there are too many products/features or complicated products which have a high learning curve and they are being constantly updated and it's tough to be on top of all these changes. Also to leverage the tribal knowledge of sales guys, there has to be a large number of sales reps for the AI to do a good job of recommendations. The complexity of the product where the buyer needs to be educated more make more use of enablement solutions. Also, verticals, where products are complex like technology, manufacturing, life sciences, etc, are the top industries that use enablement solutions.
How do you want to use AI?
Enablement solutions leverage AI heavily, especially guided selling solutions. So if you want AI capabilities in your product, guided selling software or AI assistants do a good job of leveraging AI to give actionable recommendations to the sales rep.
Pointed vs Horizontal
Some solutions offer much more than sales enablements like sales engagement, prospecting, training, and coaching while others focus on solving just the content problem or video selling or value selling problems. So if your need is to buy an enablement solution that is the center of all content-related activities and integrates with a host of software for adjacent needs such as training and coaching, then a platform suits you best.
Integrations
They have integrations with all major software that help enablement of the sales reps
- Documents - google docs, dropbox, etc so that you can easily import all your existing documents to highspot and have them in one place.
- Web conferencing - zoom, uber conference, etc when you are talking to a customer online, you will need to show some content to answer some of his questions. Direct integration helps you access the content right there.
- Similarly for email and social media - when you are engaging with customers on email, social media or a sales engagement solution direct integration helps you get access to all the content right where you need it. You don't have to leave the platform to find content.
Finally, learning solutions -Mindtickle, Brainshark, Lessonly, etc as they have courses and material that help reps train and ramp up on existing product knowledge faster.
- CRM integrations for the AI-based guided selling, assistant solutions that need to crunch a lot of customer data to give tactical recommendations.
Mobile Ready
Being mobile-ready is a key part of sales enablement solutions as sales reps need to send mails / interact on social media etc on the go and demo presentations and videos to buyers when meeting them. All this means that mobile readiness is highly desirable.
Top challenges in adopting Sales Enablement software
Adoption
The tool should fit into their daily process and workflows else it becomes really hard to get good adoption by sales reps as they are usually resistant to new technology. To truly leverage the benefit of the enablement solution, it has to be adopted equally well by the marketing team so that they create content that actually helps close deals.
Superior Search
This is key to successful adoption. Users don't care about file structure or content management systems and don’t want to browse through them to get their content. They want superior search like google or amazon that looks through the content and returns relevant documents.