A good sales enablement tool empowers a sales force to better engage with potential customers, who in turn leads to satisfied or exceeded sales goals. Sales enablement helps equip your sales team with the right resources, to make them dangerously effective during all stages of the sales process.
The right sales enablement strategy not only makes your sales team more dynamic; it also allows you to gather actionable data. In today’s competitive marketplace, measuring progress is of utmost importance. To measure progress, you’ll need easy access to key insights of the market. This makes the right sales enablement tool a virtual necessity in today’s time.
Many organizations struggle to find an ideal sales enablement solution that fits their needs. While some sales enablement tools claim to solve a variety of sales challenges, finding the one that caters to your specific requirement can be a task. While zeroing in on the ideal sales enablement tool for you, there are certain features you should look for. These features ensure enhanced efficiency, understanding of key insights and transparency — making them indispensable in a sales enablement tool worth the investment.
Let’s examine eight essential features that you’ll need in a sales enablement tool.
1. Insights and analytics
Spending your time, money and resources on sales training programs means nothing if you don’t have a way to measure efficiency. A mechanism that allows you to measure these efforts will help you figure out the loopholes in your sales training, and it’ll also highlight what’s working best for you.
Furthermore, these insights can help you amplify the effectiveness of internal compliance training, while you measure capability gaps. Analytics can also highlight actionable data, such as an approximate time-money investment required to train each sales representative. Such data and insights from a sales enablement tool will help you make data-driven decisions, reduce inefficiencies and boost productivity.
2. Onboarding management
At times, the sales onboarding process can be challenging. Keeping your sales force engaged, tracking their readiness and providing them with the proper marketing materials can get extensive, and often feels like an uphill battle.
The onboarding management feature allows leaders and decision-makers to provide clear direction for their sales force. A well-managed onboarding process enables your sales team to:
- Scale faster and improve workforce learning;
- Communicate better through real-time updates;
- Leverage the right tools to identify gaps.
Leveraged well, the onboarding management feature of your next sales enablement tool can help your sales team improve operations from their first day on the job.
3. Automated workflows
Collaboration and accountability within your sales force are important, but they’re not usually easy to establish. Fortunately, automated workflows can help.
Automated workflows not only make internal collaborations a cakewalk; they also enable you to track the accountability of the representatives. Deployed correctly, your automated workflows can encourage action and motivate your team to work hard, improving task speed and enhancing transparency between sales representatives and leaders.
4. Gamification
The biggest limitation of traditional onboarding and training is that it can’t be engaging all the time. Gamification bridges this gap. Gamification can turn your usual training tasks into more engaging, enjoyable, and motivating activities that will encourage the sales representative to develop their skills.
Gamification lets you offer games, quizzes, present real-life scenarios, and add a social element to the whole process.
5. Content management
Throughout the sales funnel, the sales force depends on more than just one piece of content. It may contain a sales pitch, product brochure, competitor analysis, response drafts and templates, in addition to any presentations your sales team might need when interfacing with potential customers.
The content management feature of your sales enablement tool ensures that you have timely access to a variety of content, useful at every stage of the consumer acquisition process. The same sales enablement tool makes it possible to share the right content at the right stage of the sales journey, through certain automation options. Multiple content authors can collaborate in real time, to encourage teamwork in creating new content assets.
A good sales enablement tool will also help you and your team track how the content is used over time.
6. Program management
Program management is a tactical process that helps organizations reach sales objectives through strategic initiatives. The process ties together related projects, under a leader to oversee and lead the sales force.
Such projects require the right blend of team collaboration and activity prioritization, to ensure that projects are completed, and assets are delivered, on time. The program management feature in your next sales enablement program should help users create and shape programs, add and organize collaborators, automate tasks and improve communication.
7. Platform integrations
As your organization grows, sales enablement practices and processes become more complex — and more important. Often, organizations look for help from various tools that can ease or automate certain processes. Without the right integration, your information and data scattered across multiple platforms can create increased turnaround times.
The best way to tackle this challenge is to integrate your platforms with your sales enablement tool. With this feature, you can access all the information you need from various platforms — calendars, charts, revenue trackers, etc. — under one roof.
These integrations help your sales force by reducing turnaround times and keeping projects on time for delivery.
8. Governance
Governance in your sales enablement tool allows you to control permissions through a “role filter” feature. Governance also allows you to define specific roles for special accesses. These programs are characterized by multiple branches, which makes high-quality governance a top priority for many organizations. Applying complex programs across multiple user roles, locations and levels of access comprises a major part of governance.
If your organization is looking for a 360-degree sales enablement tool that can help every member of your team elevate efficiency and close more deals, you’re looking for EnableU. not only do we offer every one of the above features; we’re an an all-in-one sales excellence platform that combines a proven framework of standards with sales readiness and enablement tools.
Connect with our Solutions team today to leverage the power of sales enablement for every member of your team.