Before we tell you about the many sales enablement tools available, let’s just remind ourselves what sales enablement is. It comprises three focuses: marketing-sales alignment, continuing training of salespeople, and digital equipment of your team. It’s a genuine business strategy whose goal it is to improve sales performance.
Sales enablement tools support your sales actions in order to improve your performance. Nonetheless, given how many there are on the market, it’s often hard to know which tools you should provide your sales team with. Don’t panic, though! We’ll clarify everything by specifying which tools to use at each stage of the sales process.
Pre-appointment sales enablement tools
We’ve purposely excluded marketing automation tools here. They’re considered to be sales and marketing tools alike; they’re positioned upstream of the sales funnel and are most often used by marketing teams.
Sales prospecting tools
These tools are designed to save your team time in the all too time-consuming task of sales prospecting. Along with CRM, they’re among the most widely used. A prospecting tool enables you to generate targeted leads with minimum difficulty.
Examples: Corporama and Sparklane
Social network prospecting tools
Complementing Social Selling procedures, prospecting tools specific to social networks exploit their potential to the maximum. Such is the case in particular with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which targets the right decision-makers, puts you in contact with them easily and provides follow-up in your CRM. Sales Navigator and Kaspr plugins enable recovery and extraction of your prospects’ contact details and their addition to your contacts.
Sales Automation tools
Be careful not to confuse Marketing Automation tools and Sales Automation tools! Although they’re both designed to automate communications, types and goals differ. Sales Automation automates communications intended for prospects for commercial purposes. So it’s sales prospecting that’s automated here. They create email sequences designed to move potential customers forward in the sales funnel. They provide messages adapted to each of their prospects’ steps and so save time.
Example: Hubspot for Sales
During appointments: sales presentation tools
Whether you’re face to face or meeting remotely, the sales appointment is still the key step in your sales process. However, it’s the most neglected phase when it comes to sales teams’ digitisation.
Sales presentation tools have several advantages.
- Your salespeople have all the materials they need for the appointment immediately to hand. Materials are automatically updated and are available online and offline whatever their format (pdf, video, image, html, etc.).
- Salespeople adapt their sales pitches to their interlocutors. Presentation of your products and services is differentiating, valorised and engaging for the customer, who can interact directly with the device, which is often a tablet.
- All documents can be sent to your customer in real time. You can monitor their opening in your CRM in order to recontact him/her at the most opportune time.
- You have statistics on what content is opened, so you know which performs best during appointments.
After the appointment: facilitating signature
In order to facilitate signature and close the sale more quickly; why not implement electronic signature? Such secure and legally recognised tools shorten signature time and reduce the need for back-and-forthing. Furthermore, your interlocutors can sign on any device.
Example: DocuSign
Sales enablement tools crosscutting the sales function
CRM
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the best known and most widely used tool. It has become indispensable in managing the entire sales process, from prospecting to customer retention via signature and reminders. CRM centralises all data on your prospects and customers, sales and customer-relations follow-up in a single tool. As a result, you have greater visibility on your sales process.
Examples: Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics
Training and coaching your salespeople
To ensure that your salespeople are always informed of your sales techniques and latest product and service updates and that they remain fully engaged, you can use a tool such as Incenteev. This application enables you to challenge your salespeople and offer training sessions that you can monitor. They can also exchange with each other.
