8 Sales Enablement Tools to Help You Boost Your Sales
If you were to spend a day with your favorite professional sports team, who would it be? What would be some of the things you would see? I would bet you would see the players, coaches, and staff all focused on their mission at hand, like a well-oiled machine. What are other things you would pick up? Not only do they work together, but they also have tools that they use to effectively help them run their practice and their team effectively, from the moment they step on the field to the moment they’re done for the day. What do high-performance organizations do that are similar? They also work effectively together, leveraging tools to make their day run smoothly and help improve their team both day in and day out.
What tools do your sales team have to enable them to be effective? Do you have tools that allow your teams to run effectively, together, and while working on opportunities? We are here to dive into sales enablement tools that can help you become more effective in time, reaching out to clients and managing your time. Let’s check it out!
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is about increasing your effectiveness in go-to-market strategy. How best can you and your organization, through sales platforms, tools, and coaching. Sales and business development teams do not have to operate completely by themselves, They need additional tools to help them build their business, but having the RIGHT tools will be effective for them to grow.
Having an endless sales enablement toolkit will overwhelm you, so I’m going to focus on a few specific areas, specifically on lead generation (LinkedIn Sales Navigator), communication (Slack, Seismic, Otter.ai), scheduling (Calendly), emailing (ActiveCampaign), and account management (Miller Heiman, Shipley Associates).
Outside of your CRM (i.e., Hubspot or Salesforce), these are tools that can help you boost your growth with your clients, improve your knowledge of your competitors, find new quality leads, and so on! While there are an endless amount of sales enablement tools out there for you to use, here are 8 tools that you can use to greatly improve your sales, regardless of where you are on your customer journey!
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Slack
- Calendly
- Otter.ai
- ActiveCampaign
- Intercom
- Seismic
- Strategic Selling Plans – Miller Heiman or Shipley Associates
*Just a note to make, effort on the user end, whether that is you or your team, is required to get maximum use out of all these tools. You can’t just set it and forget it. Learn to use and leverage the tools to your advantage.
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
One of the most powerful sales tools out there for you and your team to find leads and build your network. As more and more sales reps, CEOs, VPs, marketing managers, and analysts dive into the powerful search tool that LinkedIn provides, Sales Navigator gives you the ability to build relationships with buyers in your industries. While there are many blogs about the power of Sales Navigator out there, such as this one about what it is, or an extensive overview of its features, I think the more beneficial use is WHY it can help your sales get enabled. This is a sales enablement blog right (right…?)
While I could go into great detail (and will on a separate blog) about all the bells and whistles of Sales Navigator, I’ll jump right to the point. It can help find the leads and connections you’re looking for, a targeted audience, recommend leads for you, and help you build a more quality pipeline. Target your high-value accounts and create campaigns around who you really want to sell to. Sales Navigator gives you the enablement to directly find who, where, any existing relationships you might have, or mutual relationships you have, to reach out to. Connect to your CRM so you can track all your leads.
Are you working on a large deal at the moment? According to Weidert, up to six different people are now involved in every B2B purchasing decision. If you are in the B2G world (State & Local or Federal opportunities), you know the complexity grows with the size of the deal. and having an understanding of who the influencers, advisors, and executive decision-makers (as well as if you have any adversaries within the purchasing group) are key to winning a deal. Executives are very key to dial-in on the decision-makers and leveraging Sales Navigator to also understand the purchasing dynamic, your and the organization’s relationship with the client can be very beneficial.
2. Slack
Sales enablement comes in many forms, and let’s talk about a critical element of enablement, effective communication. Communication and interaction are key in the customer sales journey. Wherever you are, whether you are working on your leads, developing a relationship, or building out a partnership, effective communication is critical so you can close a deal. We all get lost in the overburden of emails, what they relate to or priorities get shifted to something else, Slack helps reduce (even up to 32%) communication redundancy. Are you working on a specific project? You can build out channels and threads that are tied directly to that specific project so nothing gets lost in the project timeline, share files, simplify your workflow, and the list goes on. Having one source of truth (outside of a CRM system) to collaborate can greatly reduce your need to ask “wait when did you send it? Can you resend it? I don’t remember seeing that.” Send it to one place.
3. Calendly
Automation is great, especially when it comes to building new leads (they come to you!) and getting on clients’ and potential clients’ calendars. Stop with the endless back and forth with “when are you available” as it will delay eventually getting on someone’s calendar. I will admit it almost feels like you’re asking out someone on a date for the first time, asking them when they are available, and afraid that you’re going to pick the wrong spot and never hear from them again. Show your availability and own it. The back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth will crush you, especially if you’re trying to get a larger audience on for a call. This can link to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom so you can incorporate virtual meeting needs for you to have.
Calendly provides you the flexibility to build the type of schedule you want to book meetings around your calendar, from buffers, build out what you want in your meetings if someone sets one with you, set time deadlines, the list goes on. Take the scheduling stress off so you can focus on more pressing issues. You can add a link within your signature block so people can coordinate availability with you directly on scheduling an appointment.
4. Otter.ai
Your sales and business development teams are trained to listen to their customer and communicate with them to best position your solutions to win. How are your teams effectively taking notes and relaying all that information BACK to your organization? Are they doing it by memory? Pen and paper? Is all the information in your CRM so your technical team, engineers, and executives are all on the same sheet of music? What gets lost in translation? Help yourself (and your organization) out with a live, voice-activated note-taker that can listen and help record all notes from your meeting. Otter has the ability to transform your speech to text so you can search for past highlights, so you can make sure you are tracking any and all notes from meetings, and make sure when you follow up, pass information internally, and help enable you to move smoothly through your sales process.
5. ActiveCampaign
Just like Calendly, automation can help reduce work in some areas. Specifically, around email and email automation, ActiveCampaign can help with an email from various standpoints, from email automation, campaigns, email content, CRM integrations, and more! Running a new product promo or going to be at an upcoming tradeshow? Do you have your clients on a newsletter? Leverage ActiveCampaign to reach out to your clients to centralize your reach out. Launching a new product and want to engage with potential beta-testers? This is a great way to tell people about the product and let automation do a lot of work for you.
There are many email automation tools out there, Spencer Becham of Buildapreneur has a great overview of ActiveCampaign and why he chooses to use it (and a tutorial on how to use it too!)
6. Intercom
Chatbots can greatly help your client (or potential client) engage when they are on your website. From gathering intelligence on what your potential sales lead is looking for in your solution, Intercom can help deliver more qualified leads to your sales team instead of you cold emailing or calling (also has CRM integrations!) Even from a customer support perspective, up to 64% of internet users feel that chatbots’ 24-hour service is their best feature, helping you improve your brand, and building your versatility to be there for your clients.
7. Seismic
Just like your CRM system, the centralization of resources makes life a lot easier. Seismic focuses on news, competitive intel, and product updates, helping your team have one location to go to (instead of how endless browser tabs open) to gauge all the news and have all your resources tailored to your needs. 74% of organizations have their sales assets residing in multiple locations (where are yours? Can you count on 1 hand?) Enable your sales and business development team to have a centralized resource to focus on strategies, what are their most important KPIs, and best practices to engage with current and future buyers.
8. Strategic Selling Plans – Miller Heiman or Shipley Associates
One of the most important sales enablement tools out there is how to best manage large and complex deals. Do you currently have a process to review important/critical opportunities within your organization? Not just before the bids are due but throughout their lifecycle? I’m all about quality over quantity and there are many factors that go into winning complex deals and incorporating strategic reviews can help you eliminate bids you cannot win, find either internal or external (i.e., customer) gaps within opportunities your sales team needs support mitigating, and helping you get a stronger grip on your sales pipeline and when deals are coming in too.
With large deals, you are not only looking for a sale but also to foster long-term relationships, you want to also layout how to bring in a large account, and understand the complexity of the buying behavior (i.e., decision-makers and who they are), the competition, technical challenges, and partnering engagement, proposal costs/buildout. How will you do this? How do you structure a long-term, repeatable process that you and your organization can implement? Miller Heiman and Shipley do a great job of building out structure and tools to help you develop techniques to bring in large deals.
There are many factors to consider when working on large accounts. You want to qualify your large projects, how do you do this? Where do you start and how can I maximize my time spent on these projects? You need to develop a winning strategy to improve your probability to win an opportunity.
Conclusion
There are many sales enablement tools out there, this is just a small list of what I believe can be used at any level, whether you are just starting off, an entrepreneur, small business, or large business. You can leverage these tools to maximize your existing resources or to start to build in areas you know that you might be struggling in. Try them out! Many are free, come with a free trial, or are cost-effective. Let me know what you think! What is your favorite sales enablement tool?
