Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

What are the best sales enablement tools for your business? They all sound the same, so how do you make the right decision?

In this article, we will:

• Background information to consider before you buy
• Share insights on what you want to do before buying sales enablement software.
• Give you an approach to think through your requirements for your sales enablement platforms.

Background information to consider before you buy

We always begin with WHY, WHO, and HOW.

Why buy? What problem are you solving?

What business problem are we trying to solve?

Are we looking to improve forecast accuracy?

Perhaps we want to improve win rates?

Who are you helping?

Are we attempting to answer the question for our inside sales reps or our outside sales team? The channel? Perhaps for our marketing teams, sales managers, or customer success?

How will you use the tool(s)?

Consider that not all Sales Enablement platforms offer all capabilities. You may be looking for tools for:

• Sales Operations
• Sales content management
• Content Creation
• Content curation
• Content delivery
• Sales training
• Sales coaching
• Social Selling
• Document automation
• Collaboration and communication
• Project Management

Many vendors create solutions in these areas, calling them all Sales Enablement solutions. Where do you start?

It doesn’t take long to determine the best sales enablement tool for your business might be a bit more complicated than you initially hoped.

Steps to take before you buy Sales Enablement Technology

If you are beginning your Enablement program or stepping back to reassess, do not rush into buying Sales Enablement platforms.

Yes, you will want one eventually, but it is far more important to first work through the following.

• Do you have a Sales Enablement Strategy in place?
• Have you analyzed your buyer’s journey? Customer’s journey? Your sales process?
• Have you identified pain points for prospects, customers, and your customer-facing teams?
• As a result of this strategy, have you pinpointed what teams you will initially focus on helping in the sales organization?
• Do you know where in the sales cycle you will focus?
• Do you have a clear picture of all sales tools used in the entire company, for what purpose, and how you want data to flow through each?
• Building on the last point, do you know where you want to pull reporting data, the correct information you require to guide your efforts, and align with IT, Operations, human resources, and other critical stakeholders on the technology teams?

Note: You are not ready at this point to evaluate potential sales enablement tools. Please read through the next section, complete it, and then you are prepared to begin your journey to identify the right Sales Enablement Software for your business.

How well is the existing technology stack working

As you consider this question, keep in mind that you have likely identified dozens of powerful tools that your sales department and sales leaders have access to use.

You may discover many selling tools used by a handful of sales professionals, one or two key sales leaders — a waste.

For each tool, determine and document the following:

• What problems is the tool helping the business solve?
• What is the current cost?
• What % of the team is using it?
• How is it impacting sales performance (ROI)?
• Does it integrate with other pieces of your tech stack?

You are likely to identify many tools that can be consolidated, tossed out, or optimized to take advantage of a broader set of features than you currently are using.

Too often, when we look across an entire organization, we find tool duplication, tool underutilization, and lack of integration across tools, meaning you are not optimizing your investment.

The result?

Dozens of tools lead to isolated sales data pockets from which you cannot make intelligent decisions – a recipe for sub-optimal performance.

This technology sprawl is a problem for businesses of all sizes; you are not alone.

Note: You should perform this analysis at least once a year to optimize your technology investment in selling platforms.

How do you determine the right Sales Enablement Technology for you?

There are dozens of example Enablement RFI templates available (consider using ours), many of which originate from vendors, slightly slanted towards their sales enablement platform.

Before rushing out to download one of those to determine what sales enablement software you want to buy, let’s use the information we gathered above to determine what your business needs in the sales enablement solution you choose.

In addition, consider:

• How much time are they currently selling versus entering data into the customer relationship management (CRM) platforms?
• How much time is your sales force spending searching for content or training?
• How much time are team members investing in creating custom decks?
• Are your sales managers spending sufficient time coaching their teams?

And, yes, this is but a small handful of questions to consider.

Are you looking for a list of sales enablement tools?

Sales Enablement Platforms To Consider

We just completed our report on the best Sales Content Management Systems as of March, 2021. You can read the details right here, and the summary is in this table.

If you are	You should evaluate
OVERALL WINNER	Data Dwell
a Technology company utilizing Salesforce CRM	Data Dwell
a Technology company utilizing Pipedrive or Microsoft Dynamics	Paperflite
a Technology company utilizing Hubspot	Paperflite, Enable.us, and Allego
looking for a complete sales content management, training, and coaching solution	Saleshood or Highspot
a Financial Services company	Allego, Highspot, and Seismic
a Manufacturing company	Showell and Saleshood
a Pharmaceutical Company	Pitcher, Saleshood, and Allego
just looking to add Product Enablement	monday.com
just looking to add Partner Enablement	Enable.us

Note: Our ongoing research and analysis of go-to-maket technologies can all be found under the Tech menu at the top of our site.