In this increasingly digital world, you now have access to mountains of data to help your sales process. Data about your market. Data about your prospects. Data proving the usefulness of your product. It can take sales reps and their teams hours to sort through this information and highlight the most important points for each sales meeting. Introducing – “Sales Enablement”.
There’s been a recent growth in software products to help make this sales enablement process more efficient. In fact, Gartner estimates that sales enablement technology will account for 15% of all sales technology spending by 2021 – a growth of over 200% from 2017’s level.
What Can Sales Enablement Do For Me?
As the name implies, sales enablement encompasses any tool that helps the sales process go more smoothly and result in higher success rates. Anyone in sales knows that there’s more to a sale than a cold call or pitch meeting. With every step of the process, from gathering information on your audience to closing the deal, sale enablement technology can be leveraged to improve, streamline, automate and scale these processes.
Sales enablement products can be used to:
- Improve your customer relationship management (CRM) practices
- Streamline content development for meeting prep, pitch decks and proposals
- Effectively deliver content to prospects
- Help train new sales talent and improve knowledge management across the organization
- Produce detailed analytics and reporting on all parts of the sales process
What are the Main Products in this Category?
There are countless products out there to try. When choosing a new technology, you should have a clear understanding of what part of the sales process you want to improve, how the tool integrates with your existing technology, how many users it can support and if it fits your budget. In the content development and management space specifically, here are some of the main products to check out:
- Proposable: Their proposal software streamlines how sales teams create, deliver and track sales materials. Rather than having to source multiple locations to build a proposal, with their tool you can save time and money by having everything you need in one place. Their support team frequently gets kudos for being so responsive.
- Proposify: Their cloud-based tool can create quotes, contracts and sales documents that are beautiful and efficient. Their dashboard is easy to use, and they have well thought out layouts and default copy. The tool isn’t as flexible as other platforms, but it is a good software as a service offering.
- PandaDoc: This tool also focuses on making the sales proposal and contract process more efficient and scalable. It’s easy to create documents using a drag and drop interface. However, they don’t have an automated follow-up system and their documents don’t look as clean as other offerings when they are printed. Support is not always as helpful as some of the other services.
- Conga: Conga leverages the power of AI to optimize document and contract creation and workflows. Their solutions can help improve contract lifecycle management, and they include an e-signature option for easy sign-off. Their platform is not as intuitive as other offerings on this list.
Choosing the Best Solution for Your Team
Many factors go into the decision to purchase a new software. Most of these products offer a demo or 14-day free trial so you can test them before you buy.
In addition to price considerations, think about your biggest pain points in your sales process.
Are you wasting time on repeatable tasks?
Is it hard to find sales information in your system?
Do you need more metrics to improve your workflow?
Choosing a product that addresses your key concerns can help you reduce the amount of time and money needed to hit and exceed your sales goals.
Resources:
https://blog.topohq.com/sales-enablement-who-what-how-when-why/
https://www.hubspot.com/sales-enablement
https://www.saleshacker.com/what-is-sales-enablement/
https://simplifilm.com/panda-doc-vs-proposable-vs-proposify-a-complete-review/
