The 6 Best Sales Enablement Tools of 2024

Helen Waite on February 15, 2024

Only 43% of salespeople reach their quota. On top of that, without the proper tools, it’s hard to tell what problems make them miss their quota. But with sales enablement tools, you can understand the attitudes, content, and skills that help your sales reps reach their objectives.

With features like personalized skill development and user analytics, sales teams can improve closing rates, strengthen communication skills, sales coaching, and provide insights to enhance sales cycles.

What to look for in a sales enablement tool

Sales enablement tools help teams understand the health of a sales cycle, spot weaknesses, and manage content that reduces a company’s risk of falling behind its goals by 27%.

Understanding analytics and finding material should be easy. And, as sales reps are always on the go, opt for cloud-based and mobile-friendly tools that are always accessible.

You should be able to extract insights to perform better and points to improve on for future sales.

Merge contact information with the sales cycle so sales reps can personalize the right content and approach for each contact, depending on previous sales history.

Content distribution and storage is important for fast and accessible material. It is also important to track data to show which content performs the best depending on the user profile.

Insights on sales rep performance can spot weaknesses and strengths. These data points capture roadblocks in the sales process, and you can offer sales rep coaching and training when needed.

The following list goes over the best sales enablement tools of 2024. Each platform has strong features that offer support for your sales team.

  1. Mindtickle
  2. Seismic
  3. Highspot
  4. Showpad
  5.  Allego
  6.  Gong

Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a market-leading sales enablement platform that helps revenue leaders boost sales through analytics, skill development, and content management. The platform has proven to increase sales rep revenue by 64%.

Benefits of Mindtickle

The biggest benefit of Mindtickle is the integrated platform of sales enablement insights, content management, conversation intelligence, coaching, and training.

Here’s why.

The platform records each interaction with customers, the content used, and the sales courses that the sales rep has completed. Not only that, but Mindtickle also compares every sales rep’s behavior and tone through recorded calls and emails to find the winning strategy and improve its sales recommendations.

With all this data, Mindtickle gives a full understanding of weaknesses in the sales pipeline and what skills a sales rep should learn to improve their sales rate.

In turn, the continuous development of sales reps increases win rates whilst simultaneously improving sales strategy and learning pitches for future suggestions to other sales reps.

Lastly, Mindtickle sales training differentiates itself by using gamification and video to tap into personal motivation and encourage employees to develop their skills. The platform uses engagement tactics like quizzes and role plays to ensure learned skills are applied to everyday tasks.

This is especially helpful for new hires and developing managers. In fact, Mindtickle was able to cut Janssen India’s onboarding ramp time in half.

Features

  • Analyzes account interactions and sales rep negotiations to identify winning behavior.
  • Centralized content management accesses situation training, tools, and marketing content and provides insights on when and how to use each piece of content to suit the customer target.
  • AI engines give feedback on tone, keywords, and pace of conversations. Then, the conversation insights are used to create training programs and personal coaching.
  • AI-recommended next steps and deal risks are identified with health scores, calls, and email sentiments.
  • Predictive revenue models use real-world pipeline data to suggest training with role-plays and recommended content.
  • Integrates with CRMs, APIs, calendars, and most platforms to centralize the sales stack. This avoids lost information and reduces scheduling, account notes, and communication time.
  • Mobile experience for sales reps on the go.

Price

Schedule a demo to learn about Mindtickle’s offer and experience a personalized walkthrough of the platform.

Final thoughts

Mindtickle was ranked the highest-rated sales enablement platform by G2. The platform’s ability to translate sales rep performance into insights helps teams improve and integrate new skills in a way that is evident in their future sales interactions.

Additionally, the app has the best adoption and is rated the easiest to use by G2.

G2 rating: 4.7 

Seismic

Seismic equips sales teams with training and content to close deals. The biggest differentiator is the ability to pull data from CRMs and create personalized charts, presentations, and other sales material automatically.

Benefits

Seismic can personalize the buyer experience with customizable dashboards that give detailed buyer insight and recommend actions. The platform pulls data and content performance insights from CRM data.

It gives sellers ownership over the sales materials with centralized content management, where reps customize materials to add personalization to their deals.

Features

  • Content management for teams to create, organize, control, and take ownership over content.
  • Automate and personalize content with data integrations to deliver a customized workflow.
  • Learning and coaching courses to onboard and improve sales skills.
  • Integrates with all types of platforms, from analytics to CRM.

Price

Prices are unavailable.

Final thoughts

Seismic is helpful for teams looking to automate and customize their sales materials. And Seismic’s strong analytics helps sales reps improve their sales and onboarding.

G2 rating: 4.4

Highspot

Highspot focuses on coaching and measures seller behavior to give recommendations that improve sales.

Benefits

Highspot aligns sales templates with selling scenarios to suggest the appropriate approach. The training portal helps sellers follow role-specific courses to improve knowledge retention by engaging in virtual selling activities.

Highspot integrates with social media platforms to directly pitch to customers through their network.

Features

  • Content management stores personalized content and uses AI management to highlight resources relevant to existing workflows.
  • Integrates with over 100 platforms.
  • Reps have access to sales templates that are industry best practices.
  • Analytics on content usage, sales performance, and interactive data reports to pinpoint content performance.
  • Personalization of landing pages, emails, and micro-portals.
  • Sales performance using scoreboards and customer scenarios.

Price

Prices are unavailable.

Final thoughts

Highspot provides industry context recommendations which are helpful for teams learning different industries that need fast adaptation. ROI pinpoints successful content in the pipeline, which is helpful for companies who require high buyer engagement to invest in products.

However, Highspot doesn’t offer call monitoring and feedback.

G2 rating: 4.7

Showpad

Showpad improves B2B selling by giving reps guided experiences for each scenario. It has two main solutions that can be used separately or together. Showpad Coach is for sales training and coaching. Showpad Content is for content creation and distribution.

Benefits

For companies with many different industries and target audiences, Showpad’s sales plays help reps with new client relationships. Reps are given seller information, industry insights, and opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.

And to ensure each team member is working towards better selling behavior, Showpad uses quizzes and tests to identify any skill gaps for training.

Features

  • Tracks buyer interest to recommend which customers to invest time in.
  • Analytics to gather top performance and replicate behavior.
  • Content management identifies opportunities for cross-selling and recommends next steps.
  • Powerful integrations and collaboration features for content creation and management.
  • Sales forecast predictability.
  • Videos embedded for personal workflows.

Price

Prices are unavailable.

Final thoughts

Showpad continuously trains employees and has analytics to understand skill gaps. Its content management stores and distributes selling content easily. Although Showpad does identify winning sales behavior, it doesn’t offer an ideal rep profile for selling behavior reference.

G2 rating: 4.6

Allego

Allego’s platform is comprehensive with analytics, skill training, conversation monitoring, and content management. The differentiation comes with using video for learning and communication.

Benefits

Allego records pitches and asynchronous communication, and course creation are easy with content tools that publish new lessons onto the platform.

Analytics monitors conversations, gives sellers feedback, and gives written suggestions when reps feel stuck in customer interactions.

Features

  • Accessible content management and analytics show ROI, instructions, and peer examples.
  • AI-powered coaches recommend next steps and courses.
  • Conversation intelligence to improve the conversation.
  • Pre-board new hires with onboarding channels and virtually show good examples.
  • Insights on calls and deals to identify weaknesses in pipelines.
  • Score sales readiness to assess the probability of sales closing rates.

Price

Not available

Final thoughts

Allego has extensive AI-powered metrics for sales readiness, sales content, and courses. Although Allego analyzes words spoken, it doesn’t provide feedback on tone or presentation to improve sellers’ communication skills.

G2 rating: 4.6

Gong

Gong captures customer interactions and analyzes salesperson behavior for communication risks and improvement opportunities.

Benefits

The benefit of Gong is the amount of analysis and reports given to coaches from sales rep interactions.

Front-line managers receive insights on sales reps for improvement, but successful sales cycles record talk tracks so the next sales rep knows exactly what to say to close a deal.

And for busy sales reps, Gong ensures no actions are missed with real-time alerts when actions are required.

Features

  • Shares top-performing salespeople strategies.
  • Identifies weaknesses in sales rep interactions and provides insight for improvement.
  • Helps strategize buyer path from other successful reps.
  • Comprehensive integrations with every type of platform.
  • Centralizes the content for revenue teams to work together and collaborate on accounts.

Price

Not available.

Final thoughts

Gong’s platform transforms each interaction into insights. However, there’s little onboarding and educational training for sales reps to work and develop their skill set. And Gong doesn’t offer video role plays or practice situations to reinforce learned behaviors.

G2 rating: 4.7

Whatever you choose, your sales enablement tool should scale as your company grows

Your sales enablement tool choice should complement your team’s needs. As your company grows, your choice of sales enablement platform must scale with you. So it’s important to look for a solution that gives support to growing roles and content libraries.

When companies grow, their products and offers expand. It’s important to ensure your sales team feels supported with the tools to navigate growth and new clientele without losing the brand’s guidelines and company objectives. That’s why clear content management and analytics help sales teams keep content that performs and organize material that drives revenue.

And this can come in the form of courses and knowledge tests to onboard new hires into the company with clear expectations and ideal rep behavior. The insights from winning sales rep behavior ramp up the onboarding process and empower hires with knowledge and traits to reach their quota.

Mindtickle supports your team with its content management system, sales readiness, analytics, and courses to provide support and direction for your team to grow.

Sales Enablement in Mindtickle

Want to learn more about how Mindtickle can help revenue enablement teams build + scale programs that impact business outcomes? Let's see if we're a fit for one another. 

Request a Demo

This post was originally published in September 2022 and updated in February 2024. 

4 AI Sales Tools That Will Help Your Sales Team Close More Deals

Rahul Mathew on February 12, 2024

In the recent past, artificial intelligence (AI) was no more than an abstract concept for most people. But today, a large (and growing) portion of consumers leverage this technology on a daily basis – both in their personal and professional lives.

Sales professionals are no exception.

In fact, most revenue organizations recognize that AI has the potential to boost productivity – and transform the way they do business. Per our Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report, 24% of revenue organizations do not currently use AI tools. On the other hand, 76% expect AI to impact their day-to-day jobs in the next year significantly.

Furthermore, Gartner research found that over a third (35%) of Chief Revenue Officers plan to establish a generative AI operations team in their go-to-market organization by the end of next year.

You risk being left behind if your team isn’t using AI tools. Your competitors are already using AI to optimize their processes, work more efficiently, and equip their reps with more information before any sales interaction. So why aren’t you?

In this post, we’ll look closer at how winning revenue organizations leverage AI sales tools to boost effectiveness and efficiency. We’ll also explore some of the top AI sales tools teams use to make their jobs easier.

How are revenue organizations using AI sales tools?

These days, people are using AI tools to streamline and simplify many aspects of their lives. They’re tapping into AI for everything – from drafting business communications to writing code to finding recipes – and everything in between.

But how are revenue teams using sales tools?

Sales teams use AI tools in many different ways. The most obvious use case for AI is to complete mundane tasks that traditionally take up a lot of a sellers’ time. One example is call summarization.

Traditionally, sellers would have to take notes while on a sales call, which is tedious and makes it difficult to focus on the call itself. Increasingly, revenue teams are leveraging AI to analyze call recordings and compile summaries. These summaries are helpful for sales reps; they don’t have to worry about forgetting something that happened during a call. Sales managers can also use these AI-generated call summaries to understand how the call went and where the sales rep might need additional coaching to improve the outcome.

According to the Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report, the following are some of the most common ways revenue teams are using AI sales tools:

  • Serving up recommendations for training
  • Suggesting content reps should use
  • Helping reps get answers to customer questions in the flow of work
  • Gaining insight on seller performance

Getting started with simple AI use cases such as call summarization is relatively easy. However, the most innovative revenue organizations are looking beyond these obvious use cases to identify more strategic and sophisticated applications.

How can organizations measure the ROI of AI sales tools?

In the best of times, ensuring your technology investments deliver value is important. This is especially true in today’s economic environment when budgets are tight, and new spending is often met with scrutiny.

AI sales tools are no exception to this rule. Investing in AI for the sake of investing in AI doesn’t make sense. Instead it’s important to regularly measure to ensure you’re deriving value from your investment in AI sales tools.

Measuring ROI requires tracking a number of metrics. Some key metrics to track include:

How much revenue you generate in a given period and how this compares to a previous period. For example, you may track revenue for a period after incorporating an AI sales tool – and compare that to a period before you had the tool.

The percentage of sellers who are meeting quota. AI sales tools should improve seller effectiveness. As such, investing in AI sales tools should increase quota attainment.

This measures how many prospects go on to make a purchase. This metric should increase with the investment in AI sales tools.

The sales cycle is the stages a sales rep goes through when closing a deal, from initial contract to contract signing. AI tools can boost efficiency by streamlining time-consuming tasks. As a result, the length of the sales cycle should ideally decrease after implementing AI sales tools.

By automating mundane tasks, sales reps can spend more time engaging buyers and delivering value. Customer satisfaction will grow, increasing their likelihood of sticking around long-term. As a result, retention rates will increase, as well as customer lifetime value.

What are some of the top AI sales tools?

The right AI sales tools can boost sales effectiveness and efficiency. That means your sales reps can close more deals faster.

Which AI sales tools should you use? It depends on your goals for AI.

However, there are some AI sales tools that are popular across the board. Let’s look closely at five of the top AI sales tools.

Many sales organizations know the 80-20 rule all too well: the all-too-frequent situation where 80% of the revenue is driven by 20% of their reps. But when one of your top performers leaves, that can cause a major headache (and revenue shortfall) for sales departments. Instead of continuing to hope that their top reps don’t leave, forward-thinking companies turn to Mindtickle. Our platform empowers sales reps to achieve a continuous state of sales excellence by using its tools and processes to increase reps’ knowledge and improve their performance. With Mindtickle, you can correlate competencies with revenue outcomes, helping you focus on the individualized knowledge, skills, and behaviors that help your reps win deals.

Mindtickle uses AI to analyze all sales interactions, from customer calls to emails, to assess reps’ performance at each stage in the sales process. Then it uses that data to provide AI-driven coaching and training recommendations that are personalized to each rep. These recommendations, exercises, and activities help to raise the performance level across your whole sales team so all agents can become top performers and achieve sales readiness.

An AI-powered sales readiness platform like Mindtickle offers sales leaders (and their teams) many benefits that have a positive impact on the rest of the organization:

  • Managers automatically get better visibility into their reps’ performance, including specific areas for improvement so they can prioritize coaching where it will have the biggest impact.
  • It creates a team culture of continuous improvement, as reps receive training and coaching recommendations on an ongoing basis, not just once a quarter in your sales kickoff.
  • It raises the team performance standards, which leads to improved close rates, as reps are better able to manage complex or high-value sales interactions.

A platform like Mindtickle helps your sales team close more deals by ensuring all your reps are ready for their upcoming sales calls, equipped with the skills, knowledge, and best-practice behaviors to perform at their best.

Incomplete data in your CRM makes it impossible for sales leaders to monitor the progress of leads through the sales funnel or know when their reps are facing challenges and need support. Tools like Rollio make it easier for teams to update records in the CRM after every customer interaction to improve the quantity and quality of your CRM data.

Rollio connects with Salesforce and uses AI to enable sales reps to interact with their CRM like they’re speaking to a person. For example, agents can ask Rollio to update a prospect record in Salesforce using conversational language, for example, “Update my opportunity with Mindtickle. Add a pricing conversation as a next step, and push the close date back one month.” Rollio’s AI will interpret their instructions and update the record accordingly. This speeds up data entry, so your customer records are more up-to-date and contain more information about sales interactions compared with updating records manually.

An AI-driven tool like Rollio benefits sales reps and managers by:

  • Reducing time spent on data entry, so reps can spend their time on higher-impact sales interactions instead
  • Improving the quality and quantity of data in your CRM, so reps and managers have access to all the relevant data for prioritizing leads and follow-up sales activities
  • Giving sales leaders an easy way to get updates about their team’s activities

More complete data in your CRM helps sales professionals close more deals, as they have the full context available for their next interaction with a prospect. For example, reps can personalize follow-up messages based on their conversation, and managers can more easily support agents when CRM data suggests a deal is moving toward closed/lost.

Forrester found that sales reps spend only 23% of their time on core sales activities. Tools like Conversica enable sales organizations to increase their team productivity (in terms of touchpoints and follow-ups) without hiring more reps and increasing their headcount.

Conversica provides sales teams with an AI assistant to automatically follow up with leads via chatbot, email, or SMS. It helps increase the number of touchpoints leads have with your company by automating low-value acknowledgment messages while enabling your reps to focus on higher-value sales interactions. In addition, Conversica uses conversational AI to speed up response times and scale up your team’s productivity without needing additional team members to do so.

For sales teams, this means:

  • They can automate lead follow-up so prospects hear back from you sooner
  • Leads are kept warm and engaged between interactions with real members of your team
    Sales cycles may accelerate due to an increased number of touchpoints in the process
  • Reps have more time to personalize their interactions with customers, as low-value acknowledgment-style interactions are handled automatically

AI tools like Conversica, which provide sales teams with a virtual assistant, help them close more deals by spending more time personalizing their messages and less time on routine prospect interactions.

If sales leaders don’t know how prospects are progressing through their sales funnel, it becomes difficult (or almost impossible) to accurately plan team resources or prioritize upcoming sales interactions. A revenue communication tool like Troops gives sales teams — both reps and managers — ongoing visibility into your team’s performance by surfacing and sharing relevant updates from your CRM.

Troops connects your CRM with messaging apps your team uses all the time through integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. It automatically delivers notifications in your messaging tools to provide your team with insights, updates, or reminders about deals in their pipeline. It also notifies you in real-time when anything happens that will have a significant impact on revenue — such as a deal that’s marked closed/won or closed/lost.

It offers several benefits for sales organizations:

  • Sales leaders get a better overview of deal flow and rep performance
  • Improved pipeline visibility means managers can improve the accuracy of their sales forecasting
  • You can leverage team expertise to move deals forward, as all updates are visible to your whole team

AI tools that give your sales leaders better pipeline visibility help sales teams close more deals by making it easier for managers to support more complex customer interactions. Managers are more aware of ongoing sales conversations and the potential roadblocks and can support their team where needed.

AI sales tools will empower your team — not replace them

Many sales teams still have a lingering fear that AI sales tools will replace them and steal their jobs. Or they worry the AI will become a data dump, giving their teams piles of data with no context to help them draw actionable insights.

But AI technology actually empowers and enables your sales team — it helps them do their jobs better and gives them the data and insights they need to help them close more deals. There are lots of different ways AI can support sales teams, so if you’re ready to add artificial intelligence into your department’s toolkit, check out our Buyer’s Guide to Conversation Intelligence Solutions.

Buyer's Guide to Conversation Intelligence

Everything you need to know when you're evaluating a technology partner for conversation intelligence solutions.

Get the Guide

This post was originally published in March 2022, was updated in July 2023, and again in February 2024.

The 8 Essential Features Your Sales Enablement Tool Should Have 

Helen Waite on November 15, 2023

In 2022, only 26% of sales reps reached 90% or more of their quota. That’s not a very successful win rate, considering new sales revenue streams are the bread and butter of an organization. So the question is, how can we empower our sales teams to successfully reach their sales quotas?

Percentage of reps who hit quota in 2022
0%

The simple answer: introduce sales enablement tools.

With sales enablement tools, you can train your sales reps to effectively target new customers, tackle difficult negotiations, close more deals, and increase your company’s bottom line.

Once you’ve read this article, you’ll have learned about:

  • The advantages that the right sales enablement tool can give your company
  • The essential features to look out for in sales enablement tools — and why
  • The top five sales enablement tools
  • Our helpful recommendations

Why are sales enablement tools important for your business?

The most powerful feature of sales enablement tools is their ability to centralize knowledge between the sales and marketing departments.

This has a butterfly effect that increases revenue, boosts quota attainment, and solidifies brand identity across the company.

When sales and marketing departments have centralized access to content, insights, and approaches, it impacts sales revenue due to streamlined processes, provides successful strategies, and shapes sellers with winning behaviors and skills.

With sales enablement tools, your business can:

  • Align sales and marketing teams with clear goals, tasks, and knowledge sharing. This is important, as 50% of teams feel they need additional resources to properly execute enablement tasks.
  • Learn winning attitudes and skills from top-performing sellers, and transform those behaviors into skills for other sellers to learn and replicate.
  • Optimize material for better win rates with content insights.
  • Accelerate the onboarding ramp process for new hires. In turn, this sets up new hires for success, with almost 79% of companies that have effective training meeting 100% of their sales quotas.
  • Keep sellers up to date on new strategies, product launches, and market approaches. In fact, 90% of sellers who hit more than 75% of their quota participate in sales training monthly.
  • Keep track of KPIs and goals. Over 71% of companies that have clear sales KPIs reach 100% of their sales quotas.

The benefits that sales enablement tools bring to your team

Modern sales enablement solutions make all of your sales processes simpler, more measurable, and more actionable.

1. Centralize access to content

Sales enablement tools help reps know what content is available to them and how to use it in their sales interactions.

With half of all customer engagement coming from only 10% of a company’s content, reps need to quickly find relevant sales material to nurture leads, follow up with prospects, and convince important decision-makers of the value of your products.

But Forrester found that “not having the right content” is one of the biggest challenges for sales teams. Sellers reported that finding content and information is a significant productivity obstacle, affecting their daily work.

With a sales enablement tool, your enablement team can tag content to categorize it based on buyer persona, stage in the sales funnel, customer outcome, or the stakeholder it’s most relevant to. This includes:

  • Case studies
  • Whitepapers
  • Sales playbooks
  • Competitor comparisons
  • Microlearning modules
  • Training call recordings

Then your reps can search for key content terms and easily find relevant sales enablement content. This system equips sellers with the knowledge and content they need to progress conversations with prospects, helping them improve their win rates and close more deals.

2. Increase collaboration between sales and marketing

LinkedIn found that 85% of survey respondents believe that better marketing and sales alignment would provide major business growth. Unfortunately, sales and marketing teams often fall into silos with little communication between them.

Sales enablement improves alignment between these teams and gives better visibility into the effectiveness of their processes. Marketers can see how sellers use marketing content in their sales conversations and get measurable data on how different content types impact the sales process.

Additionally, sellers can see what content the marketing team has produced and get updates about new case studies or product sheets that they can use in their nurturing flows.

Both teams can see which messaging, content, and campaigns are working, so they can collaborate to improve overall sales performance.

3. Improve visibility into team performance

Sales enablement gives sellers access to content, resources, and training materials to help them build the skills and knowledge they need.

Sales leaders, can see their reps’ performance data alongside insights into their content usage and training completion.

This helps managers understand how the content, resources, and training provided affect the sales team’s performance.

With access to data on how training content and exercises affect team performance, managers gain insights into providing a data-informed and personalized approach to sales coaching programs for each team member.

8 features you need in your sales enablement tool

Organizations in the market for a sales enablement tool should look for the following key features:

  1. Insights and analytics
  2. Onboarding management
  3. Gamification
  4. Automated workflows
  5. Program management
  6. Content management
  7. Integrations
  8. Governance

1. Insights and analytics to optimize sales efforts

Most organizations spend a great deal of time, money, and resources training their sales teams. But without a way to measure those efforts, it’s hard to understand what’s working and what parts of the training process need improvement.

With sales enablement tools, you get detailed analytics and insights into what works, what doesn’t, and how to improve.

With data and insights from your sales enablement platform, you can make data-driven decisions to improve sales initiatives or develop a specific skill in individual reps.

For example, managers can benchmark a sales rep’s performance in a key area, like closing. After training sessions and 1:1 coaching designed to improve closing skills, the manager tracks the close rate and other closing-related KPIs to see how the rep’s performance changes. Based on those measurable results, the manager can adjust the training program accordingly.

Also, sales enablement tools show how much time and money it costs to train each sales representative. If costs are higher than managers would like them to be, they can take steps to reduce inefficiencies and improve productivity.

2. Onboarding management and accelerating ramp time

Sales enablement tools help onboard new sales hires with the knowledge and training they need to succeed in their roles.

During the sales onboarding process, it can be a challenge to keep reps engaged, track their readiness, and provide them with easy access to forms, manuals, and other onboarding materials.

 

However, using sales enablement tools for onboarding helps teams to:

  • Improve learning and testing through automated training paths that get reps ramped up faster.
  • Ensure better communication by keeping reps constantly updated and thoroughly engaged, leading to higher productivity and fewer turnover costs.
  • Enhance coaching by leveraging the tools and content that empower reps and managers to identify and address any areas — like knowledge and skills — requiring improvement.

3. Gamification to motivate sales reps

It’s not easy to keep sales representatives engaged during sales onboarding and continuous training.

That’s where gamification comes in.

Through gamification, organizations can turn routine tasks into enjoyable activities that motivate and incentivize sales reps to develop their skills.

 

Through gamification, managers encourage friendly competition, break learning into bite-sized segments, offer relevant games and quizzes, and introduce real-life scenarios.

Gamification can also add a social element to onboarding and training and promote open communication among sales representatives.

Gamification can be used by new reps during the onboarding process and by seasoned reps who need to build upon their skills and experience consistently. It can assist with continuous training and the fine-tuning of skills, all in a fun environment.

4. Automated workflows to streamline sales strategies

Collaboration and accountability are common struggles for organizations. Not only do automated workflows make it a breeze to collaborate — but they also hold all the right people accountable.

For example, you can use automated workflows to create a seamless feedback loop between managers and sales reps. Here, audio or video recordings submitted by sales reps are sent automatically to sales managers who can offer qualitative and quantitative feedback. This removes manual reminders and a continual back and forth, streamlining the learning process.

Automated workflows help managers and sales representatives tackle tasks instantly and through a centralized process that tracks progress.

5. Program management to reach strategic goals

Program management helps sales teams reach their targets through strategic initiatives, such as voice of the customer programs or sales onboarding programs.

These initiatives include multiple connected projects, with a project manager overseeing the team members who are focused on different projects.

These projects are bigger than the individual sellers working on their deals. Instead, they involve different teams, such as leadership for strategic direction, marketing for content creation, and IT for technical implementation.

If your sales enablement tool doesn’t have a program management feature, it’s difficult to manage and execute these strategic initiatives, and this can negatively impact your sales enablement efforts.

But with a program management feature, program managers can ease some of the stress they face by creating and structuring programs, adding and managing collaborators, creating and publishing relevant content, and automating communication.

6. Content management and centralized resources

Throughout the sales cycle, sales representatives depend on a variety of content to increase buyer engagement and understanding.

The challenge with all of this content is that it must be well-organized so that it can be easily located and fully utilized.

A content management feature makes it simple for sellers to access sales material quickly. By having a simple and accessible content management system, you empower sellers to utilize the correct content at the right time within the sales journey.

Additionally, enabling multiple people to collaborate in the content authoring process, whether in PowerPoint, PDF, or video, empowers teams to bring shared experiences and best practices into play.

An effective sales enablement tool helps your team track content usage and gives insights into the content with the highest engagement rate and how to properly use and introduce content resources.

7. Integrations to facilitate organizational planning

As sales enablement practices evolve within organizations, new tools are purchased. This can overload users with numerous platforms and multiple logins.

The solution for consolidating disparate tools is to integrate them with a sales enablement tool.

A sales enablement tool that offers integrations helps organizations keep their communication, calendaring, CRM, reporting and business intelligence, content management, and other tools all in one place.

Integrations allow sales representatives to spend less time digging through multiple platforms and more time doing what matters: selling and improving their skills.

8. Governance to organize tasks and data insights

Sales enablement programs have a lot of moving parts. Therefore, you’ll need to operate under complete confidence that your organization is using its resources efficiently and securely at scale.

Platform governance allows you to set up different access levels across multiple user roles and locations.

This helps you simplify coaching workflows and roll-up reports based on organizational hierarchy and define custom roles for those who need special access.

The 5 best sales enablement tools to improve revenue

Tech marketplace and review site G2 lists over 160 tools in the sales enablement category. So, if you’re looking for sales enablement software, you have plenty of options.

We’ve picked out five top-rated tools to help you find the best one for your sales team.

A powerful and comprehensive sales enablement tool

Mindtickle’s platform increases sales rep revenue by 64%. This is because Mindtickle’s strong combination of sales enablement features with advanced insights continuously works to improve seller and content performance.

Mindtickle’s sales readiness platform provides tools and processes to help sellers increase their knowledge, enhance performance, and go into every customer conversation ready to succeed.

One of the biggest challenges of traditional sales enablement is that reps forget their sales training quickly, so they aren’t able to make the best use of the content and resources available to them.

Mindtickle helps reps build and maintain their knowledge and skills through gamification, reinforced training, continuous skill assessments, and coaching exercises.

Our platform combines sales enablement, content management, conversation intelligence, sales training, and manager-led coaching. It provides continuous training, content, and enablement to ensure that sellers remember — and use — the knowledge and skills they’ve learned in their training and coaching sessions to move sales conversations forward.

Sales enablement is an essential part of Mindtickle’s comprehensive sales readiness framework. We make sales enablement best practices an ongoing part of the sales process rather than a siloed additional tool or exercise that sellers only think about a few times a year.

Notable Mindtickle features:

  • Centralizes content management and provides content insights to personalize materials to mimic winning strategic approaches
  • Records phone calls and interactions and, using AI, provides feedback on tone, sales opportunities, and future insights
  • Identifies winning behaviors from sales reps across the company to propose skill development and training
  • Analyzes real-world data to suggest relevant training and role-plays to improve the sales approach
  • Centralizes the sales stack with CRM integrations and APIs
  • Creates an Ideal Rep Persona to track KPIs and training progress
    Includes a mobile app for sellers to always be prepared — even on the go

  • Mindtickle G2 rating: 4.7

To break down marketing and sales silos

HubSpot is best known for its CRM and inbound marketing platform, but it also offers a Sales Hub to help companies already using its marketing tools break down the silos between their sales and marketing departments by getting everyone on the same platform.

HubSpot Sales Hub is primarily an easy-to-use CRM, giving sellers and their managers greater visibility into their deal pipeline and task list.

However, its free plan includes content management to give sellers easy access to sales content. Enterprise customers can use sales management playbooks such as battle cards and call scripts to better enable sellers to close deals.

While the most robust sales enablement features aren’t available to all customers, HubSpot integrates with more than 148 other sales enablement tools, so it may work well in combination with other instruments in your tech stack. Additionally, HubSpot has a vast library of training content and certifications to help sellers master best practices and essential skills.

Notable HubSpot Sales Hub features:

  • Email templates that can be personalized to prepare your team for success
  • Email tracking to keep up to date on lead health and opportunities
  • Document management and content tracking that can be directly sent through email inboxes
  • Automated sales workflows to keep sellers on top of tasks
  • Phone calls logged in your CRM
    Conversation intelligence to find opportunities for improvement in phone calls

  • HubSpot Sales Hub G2 rating: 4.4

For personalized and engaging content materials

Seismic is one of the leading dedicated sales enablement platforms. Its standalone platform provides a centralized hub where sellers can access the content and resources they need to engage with their prospects.

It recommends content and training at the time when they’re most relevant to your sellers. For example, when a prospect moves from a sales-qualified lead to an opportunity, it shows content and resources relevant to that stage of the buyer journey.

As a dedicated sales enablement platform, it’s a better choice for sales enablement teams than a tool that’s a CRM with enablement functionality added on. It has a great reputation and established customer base in the finance industry — particularly for wealth management, asset management, and banking organizations — which makes it a trustworthy option for companies operating in those spaces.

Notable Seismic features:

  • Offers resource personalization with advanced content management
  • Provides learning and onboarding courses to train new hires
    Integrates with almost all platforms
  • Connects and logs prospects through social media, email, and phone

 

  • Seismic G2 rating: 4.7

For sales enablement with strong CRM features

Salesforce is one of the best-known sales tools available. There are split opinions in the sales world: some companies love it, and others find it has a steep learning curve and is difficult to implement for their business.

Like HubSpot, Salesforce is a CRM first, with additional features and functionality built on top. The Salesforce sales enablement tool is a paid add-on for its Sales Cloud product at the cost of an extra $25 per user per month on top of the original subscription.

If your company already uses Salesforce for its CRM, then its sales enablement add-on may be the simplest option for your team. However, it probably isn’t worth switching to Salesforce just for its sales enablement tool.

Notable Salesforce features:

  • Forecasts pipelines with the help of KPI management and logged interactions
  • Manages accounts through logged communication history and internal notes
  • Uses process workflows to automate business processes and save time
  • Mobile app for ease of use outside the office

  • Salesforce G2 rating: 4.3

To understand prospect health and upsell approaches

Showpad is a revenue enablement platform that helps sellers prepare for each sales conversation and gives them the resources to ensure each call or sales interaction makes a positive impact on the customer.

It combines training and coaching functionality with content management, ensuring sellers have access to the content they need. Its platform is split into two parts: Content and Coach.

Each is an essential part of sales enablement, but the two parts of the platform are priced separately. This means companies need to pay twice to benefit from the full sales enablement functionality they can get from other tools.

Notable Showpad features:

  • Tracks content ROI and enforces brand compliance in content creation
  • Lets users identify upsell and cross-selling opportunities as well as in-deal coaching
  • Share information through brand microsite for prospects to share content with their internal stakeholders
  • Gauges and tracks prospect interest to understand next steps

  • Showpad Coach G2 rating: 4.4

The tool you choose needs to support your team’s growth for ongoing success

The best sales enablement tool will be the one that your team will find the easiest to adopt in their everyday tasks and responsibilities.

It’s important to keep in mind your company’s growth as you choose your sales enablement tool. You want to be sure that it’ll continuously grow and adapt to your business needs, market changes, and new product releases.

This support comes with insights and data that continuously update with each interaction and sales training that prepares your sales team for success through engaging and motivating material and courses.

Mindtickle can help support your team with its comprehensive sales enablement platform that provides direction and new skills to your sales team.

Learn more about Mindtickle’s sales enablement tool, or play around with our demo and take a peek into how we continuously help companies reach their revenue and growth goals.

Find the sales enablement tool that works for you

Talk to our team about your challenges and we'll show you how Mindtickle can scale and grow your sales enablement efforts so your team is hitting quota every quarter. 

Get a Demo

Sales enablement tool FAQs

What is sales enablement software?

Sales enablement software provides a centralized place for the training, resources, and data needed to help salespeople sell more effectively.

Sales enablement software:

  • Helps sales reps easily access training materials, product documentation, and other content (no matter where it is stored)
  • Records key sales metrics, so managers can identify opportunities to improve certain skills through coaching
  • Tracks reps’ progress against development goals
  • Improves visibility and alignment between sales and marketing teams
  • Enables micro-learning and virtual training to teach and reinforce key skills

At its core, a sales enablement tool does much more than just support a more efficient and effective sales team. With the proper tool, all types of organizations can boost their sales processes to enhance every step of the sales journey. And, what’s more, the right tool supports sales teams by providing them with the content and information they need to successfully engage with customers the first time and every time.

What are the best sales enablement tools?

The best sales enablement tools that have the most impact on your company are:

  • Mindtickle
  • HubSpot Sales Hub
  • Seismic
  • Salesforce
  • Showpad

For a full list of all the sales enablement tools and features, read our guide.

What are the essential features of a sales enablement tool?

The features that your sales enablement tool should have are:

  • Integrations
  • Content management
  • Program management
  • Automated workflows
  • Gamification
  • Governance
  • Onboarding management
  • Insights and analytics

How much should I spend on sales enablement tools?

Every company’s budget is different, as are their definitions of success. To understand how much you should be spending on sales enablement tools, you need to understand how the ROI of sales enablement can be measured. This will give you a better understanding of the benefits a sales enablement tool will have on your company.

Now with all of this knowledge, you’ll be empowered to make an educated choice on the best sales enablement tool for your team.

Sales Enablement in Action

Connect with our team to learn more about how Mindtickle helps you prove the ROI of your sales enablement efforts. 

Request a Demo

(This was originally published in May 2022, updated in December 2022, and re-published in November 2023.) 

3 Focus Areas for Sales Enablement to Help Your Organization Exceed Modern Buyer Expectations

Nicholas Gregory on November 6, 2020

There is no denying that 2020 has had an impact on the way by which sales professionals engage with their customers and prospects. The biggest shift is the obvious one – the elimination of face-to-face meetings, being replaced with remote meeting platforms. Sales professionals and buyers alike have quickly accepted and adopted this new reality. In fact, in a recent McKinsey & Company study, 80% of B2B decision makers surveyed prefer a sales model where there are more “remote human interactions” or digital self-service instead of in-person. Cited reasons are safety due to the Covid-19 pandemic, ease of scheduling, and expediting the buying experience.

The motivating news is that those same buyers believe the new sales model is just as or more effective than the face-to-face model. When it comes to the level of spend, it is not materially impacted by the buyer/selling engagement being conducted remotely. Nearly 70% of those decision makers would spend $50,000 (USD) or more in a completely self-service or remote interaction.

While there is no doubt there has been a shift, this does not mean that you can sell in the exact same manner remotely that you did in person. This fact presents a unique opportunity for sales enablement teams to highlight and further demonstrate their value and strategic importance to the customer-facing teams and organizations they support. Sales enablement can help sales teams become hyper-focused on improving their virtual engagement capabilities and exceeding modern buyer expectations overall.

There are new skills required to conduct virtual meetings to align to this buyer preference, however the core expectations modern buyers have for the sales professionals they engage with haven’t materially changed. I would argue their expectations they had prior to the pandemic are more heightened in a more virtual setting.

 

THE TOP BUYER EXPECTATIONS

Let’s now link the current research on “how” buyers choose to engage to “what” they expect when engaging with sales professionals. Looking at Miller Heiman Group’s (Now part of Korn Ferry) most recent Buyer Preferences Study, B2B buyers surveyed have the following four expectations for the sales professionals they engage with above all others:

  • Deep understanding of the decision maker’s business: Sales professionals should consistently conduct the appropriate research about their customer’s business and the individuals they engage within each customer meeting
  • Demonstrate excellent communication skills: The sales rep must be “crisp, compelling, and concise in every customer engagement”
  • Focus on the post-sale: Sales reps should consistently articulate, with all stakeholders on the buying side, what happens after the sale (i.e. sharing the vision what happens after the contract is signed, how is the solution implemented, what to expect once the customer takes delivery of solutions purchased, etc.)
  • Provide decision makers with insights and perspective: Sales reps are expected to educate the buyer in each engagement

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend all of my Sales Enablement colleagues (sales professionals and leaders as well) read this data-rich and eye-opening study. It will provide context to the 3 opportunities we’ll review below that we have in Sales Enablement to better support our customer-facing colleagues to exceed buyer expectations.

We could try to tackle 10 or 15 challenges and do them at a satisfactory level. Or we can be laser-focused on the critical few and execute on them exceptionally well, which in my experience typically yields better outcomes. As such, I am choosing to focus on 3 key elements that rise to the top of my organization’s priorities:

 

1) Onboarding: Defining what your organization considers a fully onboarded customer-facing team member to accelerate ramp appropriately

Whether your sales onboarding program is several weeks or months, no one would deny the desired outcome is to ensure your new sales reps reach revenue productivity as quickly as possible. But what does your organization consider as being a fully onboarded sales rep? This is clearly a journey and not an event and I recommend you start with the end in mind by collaborating cross-functionally and deciding on clearly defined KPIs and milestones that align to your organization’s definitions of an ideal sales rep, sales engineer, or customer success rep.

To ensure your constituents are learning and retaining knowledge over longer periods of time. I suggest a hybrid onboarding model including on-demand e-learning courses, benchmarking, assessments, video-based certifications, leader interactions, and when we can, in-person classes. Layer the continuous education to consistently reinforce what they learned previously and build incrementally.

Your onboarding program shouldn’t become a “check-the-box” exercise of items to complete where magically you produce a fully ramped sales rep. It should be a program that is challenging, aligned to their role, engaging, true to their real world, and be consistently reinforced.

Think of your new hire ramp program in this way: No matter the duration of your formal program, it is an allotted amount of dedicated time that your new hire will never be afforded again to invest in themselves so thoroughly. To that end, it’s imperative it be a program that is measured, consistently reinforced, entrenched with adequate skills training on how to exceed buyer expectations, and aligned to your sales and organization’s strategy.

Some questions to consider with respect to your onboarding program to support exceeding buyer expectations:

  • How does your current onboarding program currently set your sales reps up for success to align to the buyer expectations we reviewed previously?
  • Does it prepare them to plan for and execute on successful customer engagements through videoconferencing such as Zoom or Teams?
  • Are they provided proper soft skills training to help them sharpen their communication skills to be better communicators during customer engagements?
  • Are your new hires taught how to conduct proper research ahead of customer meetings such as making it a common practice to read annual reports, 10-Qs, or leveraging LinkedIn to learn more about key stakeholders they might meet with? To ensure at each customer engagement your sales reps demonstrate they are well-versed in their customer’s business, industry, market, and current or future strategic imperatives.
  • Do they properly learn throughout your onboarding program how to properly educate and provide valuable insights at each engagement whether by video, email, or phone?

2) Effectively Developing Sales Teams by establishing a Coaching Culture

A first-line sales leader’s job is one of the most difficult in sales. The two primary objectives of a first-line leader are to help their team make their number and develop their people. Both objectives are strongly connected. What’s unfortunate is that often these leaders are underinvested in and not adequately trained on the skills to make that jump from highly successful sales rep to a people leader in the sales org.

An area of focus for sales enablement (in partnership with senior sales leadership and HR) would be to define the ideal profile for a successful first-line leader within your organization. What are the skills, competencies, level of EQ, and so on required? Secondly, once defined if your organization does not have a proper sales coaching program or framework by which to align to and upskill your first-line leaders, as an enablement team it’s never too late to build basic elements to support your first-line leaders to better execute on the two primary objectives.

For example, it could prove to be a quick win to establish a light framework and coaching model where first-line leaders can help develop their teams to improve communication skills, how to best conduct customer research and align to the other buyer expectations we discussed.

Here are some questions to consider about Coaching:

  • Are your first-line leaders actively and continually developing their teams? What is the established cadence in which they engage team members for coaching opportunities? Such as weekly 1×1’s, post-call de-briefings, after “ride-alongs”, and periodic opportunity reviews. Having the right cadence provides the windows of opportunity for coaching to take place.
  • If you feel your organization’s leader does actively coach, how do you measure and/or track coaching moments that are focused on developing sales reps to better align to your key buyers’ expectations?
  • How are their sales reps progressing in improving their sales skills over time?
  • Are all reps being developed in a consistent manner across the company aligned to your ideal buyer and their expectations?

3) Aligning Enablement Services to the Buyer’s Journey to Exceed Buyer Expectations

Lastly, we should strongly consider all the points mentioned above as well as how our holistic Enablement services we offer align to our buyer’s journey to further ensure we prepare our sales teams to exceed buyer expectations. Too often I see Enablement teams focus their services on the beginning stages of their sales process or simply offering product training, sales onboarding, competitive intelligence, or all the above. While this is foundational, we should expand upon the initial sales stages and focus our energies on aligning our services to our ideal buyer’s journey, end-to-end.

If our objectives are to exceed buyer expectations, improve the buyer experience and build ongoing trust and credibility, we should ensure that our enablement services (and our sales process to that end), is aligned to the full buyer’s journey. Keep in mind that the journey does not end when the customer signs the contract. Their journey has just begun and is filled with uncertainty if they made the correct buying decision and if outcomes they were assured will be realized.

Remember one of the top four B2B buyer expectations is to focus on the post-sale. While this is more specific to showing your buyers a vision (during the buying cycle) of what happens after a customer signs the contract such as how will your solution be implemented, you would also focus enablement services on those who engage with the customer during the life of the contract. For example, account managers, customer success managers or both if your organization has them. Supporting these teams to execute on customer centric QBRs to ensure your customers are getting past value delivered (getting the expected value for the solutions/services they purchased) or uncovering new opportunities within your install base.

Some questions to consider focused on aligning Enablement services to your ideal buyer’s journey:

  • Does your current sales process reinforce your organization’s ideal sales behaviors and customer-centric selling actions that align to your end-to-end buyer’s journey?
  • What content do you currently develop that aligns to your ideal buyer’s journey and helps those buyers gain insights and perspective? Such as what valuable content can your sales reps share with prospects or customers that helps educate them or shows your thought leadership during the entire buying cycle?
  • How do you leverage technology to offer your customer-facing teams the right content at the right time during your entire sales process?
  • What services does your enablement team offer to ensure your sales teams conduct proper and ongoing customer discovery throughout the sales pursuit?
  • Do you provide a level of consistency in how your sales, sales engineers, and customer success teams are trained so when they engage with customers during the buyer’s journey there is uniformity in messaging, approach, and process?

TAKING ACTION NOW
What I highlighted in this article does take a level of effort and support, not only by your enablement team but by others cross-functionally within the organization. While offering enablement services to align to buyer expectations might seem like a large undertaking, it doesn’t have to be. There are quick wins that can be achieved, and you can expedite your efforts with the appropriate sequencing of priorities for your organization and/or by engaging a technology partner to support you. As the B2B sales landscape continues to rapidly change, organizations must accelerate their efforts investing in their customer-facing teams with the objective of exceeding buyer expectations. The positive performance gains by doing so are proven in the research. The question is if your enablement services and organization are not currently aligned to exceed buyer expectations, are you ready to take the first step in that direction today?

3 Mandates That Matter for CROs: A Conversation with Forrester and Juniper Networks

Gopkiran Rao on October 16, 2020

COVID-19 changed the game of life and by extension changed the way we think and do business. For people that sell, support customers, and manage clients for a living, 2020 will mark the end of an era that focused on interpersonal, in-field skill. What the pandemic has not changed is the pattern of sales leaders running full speed ahead to hit and exceed their quarterly numbers. This is both a paradox and an existential crisis. If you are a CRO and are looking at a hockey stick of quarterly sales goals you have a small window to enable your inside and outside teams. I recently hosted a webinar with two Sales Enablement experts, Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks, to discuss how CROs at the most competitive organizations are ‘democratizing B2B sales’ and building digital-first, customer-ready teams in the remote and ready era.  

Our discussion opened with a clear acknowledgement that Sales team effectiveness was an issue even before the pandemic hit. According to a March 2020 research report from the Sales Management Association, 44% of companies surveyed said their sales force isn’t effective, 57% said they’ve not been able to improve sales effectiveness over the past 12 months, and 82% don’t have effective development programs for their sales reps. All these deficits have left many companies struggling to prioritize opportunities, engage with the right buyers and connect with important prospects, demonstrate value, and retain business.

From there our discussion moved to seven trends, underlying these alarming stats, that Mary and Hang did a great job of covering  in the webinar: 

The downward trajectory of the on-site sales meeting. A Forrester survey conducted pre-COVID-19 revealed that one in seven business buyers prefers not to meet with a sales rep in person. This momentum increased as the digital-native generations became the economic buyers. Post-COVID-19, we’re likely looking at 80% of B2B sales taking place digitally anyway — over Zoom, for example — forcing sales reps to increase and improve their skill sets and close the gap between buyer expectations and seller capabilities.

The convergence of inside and outside sales. Forrester research shows that about 40% of field sellers’ activities are essentially the same as inside sales, all as a result of increased digital activation of buyers. The point is that they’re all sellers now, and as such, they all require the skills and training needed that will help them be successful.

Use of digital tools for buyers and sellers. Buyers are increasingly doing more on their own to self-educate, browsing peer-review sites, engaging with analyst communities and downloading digital content. They’re also engaging through interactive digital tools, whether that’s on a supplier website or through a remote meeting share. As the buyer does more of the legwork to understand foundational concepts of a product or service, the seller’s role becomes more consultative, where they’re advising and coaching the buyer with stats, inside information and industry trends to support and supplement the buyer’s decision. On the sales side, it’s becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing tools to be interconnected and automated. 

Increased investment in remote selling models. Companies are pouring money into the inside sales channel. For example, Microsoft completely restructured its selling organization a few years ago to account for its cloud-based business; and ADP transferred a lot of its external sellers into an internal remote selling model, making it the company’s largest quota-carrying channel.

SaaS-ification of industries outside of technology. Traditional businesses are now starting to embrace the subscription and SaaS delivery model. 

Sales motion is perpetual, not a one-time spike. The flurry of one-time sales activity before a deal closes or before renewal is unnecessary; in fact, Forrester found that the actual selling motion is only about 16% of the entire sales cycle. Buyers now expect ongoing and consistent value-added interactions across the entire customer life cycle, which could include providing ongoing data or other support even after the deal has closed. It also broadens the number of employees on the seller’s side that are involved in customer interactions, which again reiterates the need for all customer-facing personnel to have the skill sets and training required to be successful.

Buyers are indifferent to how sales organizations are set up. Customers don’t care whether they’re buying from inside or outside sales reps. They just want to engage consistently and fluidly across any channel at any point in the buy cycle.

As you can see, while COVID-19 didn’t create these trends, it certainly accelerated them. And, as we all agreed, with  the remote-work environment likely here to stay, sellers must make that 16% of their “selling motion” impactful and effective in a wholly digital landscape. Here are three tips from our discussion to keep your sales force — and sales organization as a whole — effective, efficient and successful:

Audit your sales tools, renegotiate contracts, keep only the vendors that are providing consistent and ongoing value, and create a digital selling platform at scale. There was a time when digital transformation was reserved for high-margin tech and services companies, but no more. Given the transition to digital selling, every company should be building some sort of digital selling platform that can scale.

Rethink traditional seller hierarchies and focus on establishing a universal set of skills across revenue-generating teams. Despite the fact that customers really don’t care about whether a seller is inside, outside, SDR, etc., companies continue to hang on to the hierarchical nomenclature and terminology. It’s now time to rethink how they organize, align and train sellers and how they’re branded. 

Activate more employees on behalf of revenue goals and make readiness a CRO objective. Ensure that everyone in your company is equipped at any moment to have a customer-facing conversation because in 2021, they’re all going to have to do so.

While the pandemic has been a great global challenge, it is also driving opportunity for transformation. Just look at the gig economy: Uber, Airbnb and others emerged in our last global economic downturn in 2009. Today, companies can see this new, challenging sales landscape as teh graveyard for the good ol’ days and ways, or they can look at it as a transformational opportunity to really change the way enablement and all customer-facing teams can succeed at selling in the “next normal,” all-digital environment.  

Learn more in this on-demand webinar featuring Sales Enablement experts Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales & Technical Enablement at Juniper.

7 Tips for Hacking Sales Enablement to Drive Readiness in a New Era

Leon Hassid on August 28, 2020

A lot has changed since March — the way we interact, the way we work, the way we live. But as a SaaS-based company with high growth and high sales velocity, Security Scorecard’s goals are one thing that hasn’t changed. Rather, what’s changed are the tactics we use to achieve our goals.

Now more than ever, sales organizations need smart and practical engagement, which probably looks a little different than it did at the beginning of the year. New tactics to ensure sales readiness must take into account the digital nature of our work world, where in-person interaction is now the exception rather than the rule. For the foreseeable future, leads no longer come in via live events, sales kickoffs are experienced through a screen, bootcamps and on-boarding new talent take place over video, and training and coaching are done virtually.

Faced with this, there are some hacks that sales reps and enablement leaders can employ to navigate these new challenges and stay engaged and connected — with each other, their larger teams and the customer.

Master the all-important virtual meeting. Aside from being familiar with the features and functionality of videoconferencing tools like Zoom, sales reps and leaders alike must ensure they have reliable internet service, quality headsets and a proper background to make remote communications as seamless as possible. This is especially important with customer meetings, as distractions and technology hiccups can negatively impact the flow of the conversation.

Maintain clear communication and coaching. Clear communication is absolutely critical now so that sales reps are aligned and don’t feel like they’re operating in a vacuum. Sales and enablement leaders can help by keeping their team informed about the company’s approach to the new normal, new messaging and training. In addition, boost morale by recognizing accomplishments, whether in one-on-one meetings or in a virtual group setting.

Align with marketing. Collaboration between sales and marketing hasn’t always been easy, but it’s more important now than ever. By working more closely together, sales can benefit from open lines of communication with customers across all digital channels to find and nurture leads and tie into the marketing side of the sale cycle.

Support sales with technology. It’s imperative to support sales and keep remote workers connected with technology. For example, at Security Scorecard, we use Slack to send out daily selling tips, a new piece of content or a new top track that a sales rep used to communicate ROI. We also use technology to record sales conversations to help with on-boarding and training, and Mindtickle to reinforce reps’ product knowledge with continuous learning, refresh messaging and re-certify through virtual role play and assessments. And short training videos — maybe three to five minutes long — are perfect for driving home new tips and information that help the sales rep be successful.

Engage with the customer in the context of the new world. More than ever, it’s critical for sales reps to understand that the customer is going through their own unique situation, and the sales rep must be empathetic to that. Messaging should be very deliberate and delivered in a way that keeps in mind the customer’s own circumstances: Perhaps their budget has been cut or they’re working from home; maybe they’ve been told to go through a risk exercise. In short, time saved by not traveling to meet a customer in person should be spent on building relationships against the backdrop of this new normal.

Keep an eye on data, metrics and feedback to determine where sales enablement can boost sales velocity. Clearly, sales enablement can’t expect that tactics and strategies that worked before will work now to generate higher sales velocity. But determining what, exactly, to tweak is difficult to pinpoint without the insight gleaned from data, metrics and even the minds of those in the trenches. Start by tracking the four factors affecting sales velocity using this equation:

number of opportunities in the pipeline x average deal size x win rate
————————————————————————
sales cycle

The resulting value is the amount of money coming into the company on any given day or month. Tracking this number over time can help optimize sales processes and tactics, and highlight what kinds of enablement programs can have an impact. Outside of hard numbers, sales enablement leaders can also tap into the reps themselves. Surveys or polls can yield insight that helps fine tune sales enablement programs so that they work for more reps, more often.

Plan for the future. Engage with marketing and the entire sales organization to determine how enablement programs and strategy should be adjusted for the future. Explore how the market opportunity has changed and how to optimize account plans for new market opportunities. Reps can provide insight into how demand has changed in their territory, what the most frequent objections are, which channels perform best and the ideal customer profile. External information, such as from market research firms and investment banks, can also yield information to help companies plan for the future.

As we move forward, sales enablement leaders must prepare for more of the same. Taking time to optimize training and materials so that they work for a remote workforce and finding new ways to communicate and engage with the team and customer are critical if sales organizations are to continue to come out on top in our new normal.

For more information, check out my webinar, Sales Enablement Hacks: Keeping Remote Sales Teams from Falling Asleep Into the Next Normal.

Steps to an Effective Enablement Session

Haley Katsman on July 13, 2020

Most strategic revenue initiatives fail – research from Bridges Consultancy found that 67 percent of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. When only five percent of employees understand their company’s strategy, it’s not hard to see why. Employees don’t want to execute strategies that they don’t understand or feel connected to.

What can enablement leaders do to help teams become more effective in executing strategies? Planning alone is not enough – you have to give your teams the resources, oversight and support needed to bring your strategies to life. Follow these steps to effective sales enablement that will provide your enablement and sales leaders, as well as salespeople, with the tools, knowledge, and motivation they need to turn your company’s strategies into action.

Lay the groundwork for success

Before you pull your reps off the floor for the next training exercise or activity, ensure alignment and support from sales leadership. It is important to proactively address natural skepticism about enablement initiatives and ensure that sales leadership understands how you will help improve their team’s effectiveness.

Provide visibility and seek feedback early and often – sales leaders can help identify potential objections that you may have missed. They can also help you articulate the WIIFM – what’s in it for me – to help you “sell the seller” and land the desired outcomes of training. Ask sales leadership to partner with you on holding their teams accountable for leveraging the new training and practicing it in the field while measuring impact. Soon your teams will look forward to your training, knowing just how much value it brings.

Ask and address key questions

Great outcomes start with a great understanding of what you’re looking to accomplish. Before you begin building your plays and training content, you need to have a clear vision of the business goal and the outcomes you are striving to impact. This will also help you measure the ROI of your enablement efforts. To ensure your training and sales plays resonate and land, ask six foundational questions:

  • What is the business goal?
    • Examples: Increase win rate, grow pipeline, shorten deal cycle, customer retention, etc.
  • Who is my internal audience
    • Examples: Sales, account management, customer success, etc.
  • Who is our target customer?
    • Examples: Industry, company size, region, buyer persona, etc.
  • Who are my play builders?
    • Examples: Product marketing, sales enablement, front-line sales manager
  • When should the training be put into action?
    • Examples: In the discovery phase, during customer implementation, etc.
  • What’s in it for the sellers?
    • Examples: Hit quota faster, increase ASP to close fewer deals, recognition from leadership, etc.

Having strong answers to these questions will be essential in getting buy-in and feedback from your sales managers. Further win over managers by determining If you can plug into an existing sales event, rather than creating a new one.

To motivate sellers and increase engagement during the training, assign pre-work and reading before the training begins. A blended framework that includes pre-work, self-paced content, virtual role-play and webinars create an engaging training experience. For example, having a sales leader record a video that demonstrates a best-in-class pitch or demo is a great way to keep learners engaged. Self-paced voice-over slideshows and pre-recorded videos that teach information and show what great looks like can help with pre-training engagement. Save the live training session for discussions and Q&A.

With clear goals, managers on your side, and an established training format, you’ll have laid the foundation for effective enablement.

During the training

We’ve all been met with lackluster stares during our training sessions before – a primary reason for lack of engagement is your sellers not understanding what’s in it for them. In their eyes, you may be taking an hour away that could have been spent generating more leads, or even time they would have rather spent making prospecting calls. It’s your job to “sell the sellers” and convince them that your training will help them drum up higher quality leads in the same – or even less – the amount of time.

Capture attention immediately by previewing your next-generation sales play. Gone are the days of traditional, one-size-fits-all playbooks – a dynamic sales environment demands a dynamic playbook. With advanced sales enablement technology, you can provide your sellers with plays that contain both content and guidance designed to prepare your team what they need to know, say, show, and do in every unique selling scenario.

Make your session interactive and engaging. Ask questions, have sellers share their stories, or breakout into groups for activities to help connect the dots between the training and action.  With the right play and training delivered in an interactive, audience-first way, your salespeople will begin to look forward to your sessions, knowing the knowledge provided will ultimately make them, and the company, more successful.

After the training

As impactful and inspiring as your training might have been, salespeople are busy juggling dozens of tasks a day. Unless your training is reinforced and muscle memory is built in the field, it will quickly be forgotten.

Promote the play or training materials via multiple channels such as email, your CRM, and your sales enablement platform, so that it’s easily accessible where reps spend their time. To overcome the forgetting curve that naturally happens after training, it’s important to include spaced reinforcement of knowledge and training after the event to ensure reps have adopted product messages and have time to internalize that information. Ongoing training will also play a critical role. You might provide courses, quizzes, coaching sessions and more directly within your sales enablement platform to help your reps stay sharp on their skills.

In order to gauge your enablement effectiveness, you can measure key metrics that indicate whether or not your training landed internally and helped reps take off externally with their customer conversations. Metrics like sales play adoption, curriculum completion, and pitched content performance can all be indicators of enablement success. In addition, use technology to request feedback on what worked, what didn’t work and what could be improved moving forward. Showing that you heard and acted on feedback will make sellers more likely to show up, engage and share.

Turning strategies into action

Even the best strategies are rendered useless without execution.

Enablement plays an essential role in ensuring customer-facing teams not only understand the strategies, but are committed to executing them in a way that drives business results. Get started with Highspot’s new eBook How to Enable Revenue Teams with Plays that Turn Strategy Into Action.

It’s Not All About Efficiency – The Missing Link to Consistent Sales Performance

Haley Katsman on June 25, 2020

Balancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team is a delicate act. Although closely intertwined, each plays a critical role in your sellers’ success – and the success of your business. 

In the age of the customer, success ultimately does not come down to how many dials a seller makes, but to the impact and quality of the customer conversation. Sellers often get one shot to deliver value to buyers who have already completed much of their journey alone. A rep’s confidence and readiness in these critical moments can mean the difference between a win or loss.

Many leaders live and breathe the philosophy: “Keep the reps dialing – we can’t waste time on non-selling activities.” But what if the time spent off the floor is directly correlated to making reps more effective in closing deals? Used wisely, this time can create consistency and predictability in your reps producing desired results. 

When done well, pulling reps off the floor to make them more effective can have a massive impact on performance. Efficiency may save time and effort – but effectiveness closes deals.

THE KEY TO IMPROVING SELLER EFFECTIVENESS

You’ve made the decision to invest time in enabling your salespeople – now what? The most successful companies ensure that their enablement activities are aligned to business initiatives and focused on increasing sales effectiveness. 

To prepare your teams to have the most effective customer conversations, your sellers need the perfect combination of role- and regional-specific content and training plus guidance on when and how to use it – all at the moment of action.

Within Highspot’s sales enablement platform, training and guidance come to life in the form of industry-first SmartPage technology. Enablement leaders can build out dynamic sales plays that help salespeople what they need to know, say, show and do in every unique customer conversation. With context on how to use the content, combined with experiential training, sellers are equipped to make the most of critical customer moments. 

When preparing to pull your reps off the floor for an enablement session, follow these do’s and don’ts to ensure your training is relevant, actionable and measurable.  

What to Avoid What to Do
Generic presentations for all customer-facing teams  Role-specific content aligned to the buyer’s journey and sales process
Global training programs that lack specific regional intelligence Role- and region-specific training programs that are interactive, engaging and ongoing
Long-form static playbook used primarily in onboarding Plays that provide guidance for specific scenarios at the moment of action 
Massive dump of competitive information Dynamic, curated competitive intelligence with customer stories to prove differentiation delivered in consumable microlearning formats
Enablement updates sent via email Engaging homepages with the latest content, training and best practices to win with customers 
Communication of business initiatives solely at the annual sales kickoff  Consistent consumable communications and a feedback loop on business initiatives, as well as guidance for customer-facing teams on how to execute 
No clear way to measure the adoption and effectiveness of your business initiatives  Scorecards and analytics to measure the effectiveness of enablement programs and understand the sellers demonstrable capabilities with the ability to segment by initiative, role, region and more 

 

MASTERING THE BALANCING ACT

Efficiency alone is not enough. Your reps might be holding one hundred conversations a day, but if they’re not the right ones, then they will not be successful in driving your desired business outcomes. 

To help your salespeople be more effective in producing results, you have to build, land, and optimize your training and guidance. Take action with Highspot’s Guidance Framework eBook that outlines how you can enable your revenue teams to provide value in every customer conversation. 

Mindtickle and Sandler Training: Partnering to Deliver World-Class Sales Readiness

Kevin Matsushita on June 12, 2020

If you know anything about Mindtickle, you know we’ve enjoyed some pretty significant growth in the past year — almost 170% growth in enterprise customer acquisition. Driving that growth is the understanding among today’s organizations that their sales readiness programs must provide reps with much more than just content for training. They need a systematic approach to continuous learning, skill development, and coaching. Another element driving Mindtickle’s growth is strategic partnerships with companies like Sandler Training.

Sandler sales training specializes in solving complex business challenges through proven systems for communicating with, developing, and motivating salespeople. Founder David Sandler developed the Sandler Selling System in 1967, a seven-step program to teach best practices for sales, leadership, and organizational success. Today, the company is one of the leading sales training and leadership development companies in the world.

Recently, Mindtickle partnered with Sandler Training to create a unified learning experience for its users. By virtue of the Mindtickle platform, Sandler sales training is now augmented with elements of coaching and gamification to reinforce best practices and keep salespeople engaged. As part of this, data generated by users through the platform informs sales leaders about skills that need improvement or where there may be gaps in their reps’ knowledge. This data prompts sales leaders to suggest content that can be consumed to reinforce specific concepts.

Our partnership with Sandler Training also speaks to a theme we’re currently seeing among all of our partnerships, and that’s the idea of blended learning. That is, incorporating both classroom – be it virtual or in-person – and online learning into sales training. By itself, the in-person, classroom learning that our partners like Sandler can provide certainly has its benefits. Aside from the obvious challenge of current work-from-home mandates – there exist some drawbacks as well. For example, classroom learning is, essentially, one episode, not a continuum. A classroom training session might last for a day or two, then it’s over. After that, the “Forgetting Curve” sets in — the rate at which humans forget information if there’s no attempt to retain it. By delivering training via a platform like Mindtickle’s, Sandler can offer reinforcement of knowledge or skills training over time, rather than just the duration of a single training class.

And, with the shelter in place/stay home mandates still in effect due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many, if not most, reps are working from home anyway, and virtual online learning is likely their primary avenue for training. Indeed, our partnership couldn’t have come at a more critical time.

Aside from our technology collaboration, our partnership with Sandler combines the strengths of our companies’ broader teams allowing our joint solution to benefit a much larger market together. It’s a partnership that has endless possibilities for mutual value. Partnerships like the one we’ve made with Sandler Training address the importance of a holistic sales readiness program that keeps sales reps engaged with ongoing learning, skills development, training, and coaching to drive sales effectiveness and higher win rates

To learn more about our partnership, read our press release.

Mindtickle and PSI: Helping Sellers Speak the Customer’s Language

Kevin Matsushita on May 1, 2020

Do you know what “TK” means in life sciences? How about “kaizen” in manufacturing? Do you understand how AI is affecting financial services or how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing manufacturing models? For new reps selling into these verticals, familiarity with industry hot topics and vertical-specific concepts like these may mean the difference between closing a deal and losing it. That’s one reason why Mindtickle and Performance Solutions International (PSI) have joined forces in a new partnership.

Speaking the customer’s “language” is critical on many levels, but especially when companies go to market by industry. Reps selling in this environment must have a level of expertise that shows they are market-savvy, that they understand industry dynamics and challenges, and that they understand the products and services sold in the market. Engaging on a deeper level inspires trust and confidence in the seller’s ability to understand their needs and deliver a solution that will have a significant return on investment — critical elements in making a sale.

No one understands this more than PSI, a leading provider of industry-focused performance improvement services that empower professionals with the knowledge, industry context, and insights they need to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment. With its 25 years of experience, PSI is an expert in helping professionals understand specialized industry dynamics, including the competitive landscape, market trends, and key executive hot-button issues.

Together, Mindtickle and PSI offer Sales Readiness paths that drive knowledge specific to companies in financial services, manufacturing, health care, and life sciences, insurance, retail and technology, media and telecommunications. Mindtickle’s data-driven approach to gamification-based learning, virtual role play, and coaching is enriched by PSI’s industry wikis and eLearning curriculums. The combination of our offerings sets the stage for customer-facing professionals to become more than just sellers; but rather, knowledgeable and consultative advisors.

The genesis of our partnership with PSI was driven in large part by two Fortune 500 clients of both PSI and Mindtickle. A successful go-to-market strategy common among many large enterprises includes an industry-specific approach, as is the case with these joint clients. Both immediately saw that our solutions provide a winning combination to help prepare their reps to close more opportunities.

Our partnership with PSI emphasizes the importance of Sales Readiness. Gain what you need to know about how AI is affecting health care or financial services or how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing manufacturing models. Then, build the skills and behaviors of a top producer. And, for those inquiring minds that want to know, “TK” is “toxicokinetics,” and “kaizen” is “the practice of focusing on continuous process improvement.” — two definitions that I know everyone can’t live without.

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.