Sales Enablement Platforms

Sales enablement platforms, also called SEPs, are tools that have sales enablement functions and provide assistance across the sales lifecycle. These convenient sales enablement platforms can solve the sales challenges that you and your company face and improve your sales strategies. In essence, a platform can equip your sellers with the ability to pinpoint which customers to target and how to do so more effectively throughout the sales lifecycle. 

One way that a sales enablement platform can improve your sales performance is that it can boost your company’s ease of product education. All company representatives across the board can upload content and information to a central location, allowing for improved shareability. With the help of sales enablement materials and improved sales training, your sales team may be able to speed up the sales cycle and maximize efficiency. 

In the past, sales enablement training and tools looked different. There was once an emphasis on centralized sales portals, whereas today’s next-gen platforms are considered “closed-loop” platforms. These closed-loop platforms often have comprehensive performance analytics, content scoring, machine learning, and other advanced capabilities, such as integrated sales enablement virtual labs to support customer trials, sales demos or proofs-of-concept. They seek to provide sales teams with the necessary resources and tools to succeed. These resources may include informative videos, product guides, standardized training, customer insights, and certifications.  

After becoming an expert in sales enablement, you can get a sales enablement certification to prove that you have obtained the necessary competencies. Your company can be more confident that you have achieved company-wide alignment between sales, marketing, and any other team relevant to improving the customer journey.

Sales Enablement Tools

Sales enablement tools may be a platform or a system. Typically, these tools can help sales representatives track the sales cycle better, provide increased visibility and control, and offer powerful search functions. These advantages can make a seller more capable and efficient at closing sales. Some platforms also help sellers by providing sales enablement, content similarity analysis, content scoring abilities and virtual labs to support customer trials. 

Sales enablement, meaning how your marketing and sales teams learn to target customers in a way that sells and improves customer relationships, can be enhanced through high-quality tools. Other activities that help include virtual sales demos and virtual demo labs, which can equip your sales and marketing teams with the tools and resources they need to succeed as they offer deeper level customer and prospect engagement opportunities. 

Blog posts are a great way to enable sales because of how accessible they are. However, optimizing these blogs can be hard. You want the blog articles to be engaging, informative, and easy to scale. Blog posts can be used in the later stages of a sales funnel or they can offer advice to people who are entering the top of the funnel and are still in information seeking mode. Blogs can also be a convenient way to teach sales and marketing reps about how to better close a sale. 

Another type of content that helps with sales enablement is content analysis. This may include knowing who your audience is, who your competitors are, and more. Competitive content analysis is a good way to help educate sellers on improving their persuasive skills and converting high-value leads. 

Case studies are a popular kind of customer-centric sales enablement document. They can significantly increase your understanding of what your paying customers want and expect. Testimonials and case studies do similar things for sellers as they can effectively communicate what value your business provides to your customers. When examining a case study, some questions are: How did your service or product make a positive difference? How did your brand make the customer feel? Is this good proof that a late-stage prospective customer should continue with the purchase? 

Next, social media channels are often a valuable, high-converting marketing platform. This is because of the way they enable meaningful engagement with customers. It is a good idea to run an active social media that positively promotes your brand. 

Sales enablement platforms and tools should be able to align content creation with the needs of your sales and marketing teams. The more successful and confident each representative is, the more success and revenue your company can generate. 

If you are looking for a sales enablement platform for your business, there is a selection of top sales enablement platforms that you might want to consider. When it comes to finding the right sales enablement platform, Gartner, a highly reputable consulting firm, operates a website reviewing sales enablement platforms. Since many sales enablement software companies exist in the market today, reading reviews and ratings is a convenient way to decide which platform might be best suited for your needs. 

Let us take a look at what constitutes a good platform for sales enablement. Typically, top sales enablement platforms have high customer satisfaction and reliability. The services and tools they offer can truly make a positive difference in revenue. In today’s day and age, sellers need to thoroughly understand what product or service they are selling, and sales enablement can assist representatives in their tricky jobs. 

A lot of sales are made remotely as e-commerce is bustling and remote work has become commonplace. Many sellers find virtual selling more complex compared to traditional, in-person selling. The sales strategies used for virtual sales are not identical to the ones used for traditional sales, which means that more training may be required. Enablement platforms are intended to help your sellers succeed. 

Forrester sales enablement is one example platform that helps sales enablement teams. Your sales enablement team can improve your sales asset effectiveness and better deliver your enablement functions through the Decisions services, which includes the service of providing valuable customer insights. 

Sales Enablement Examples

Some types of content are considered sales enablement examples because of the way they can help your business in terms of sales. Examples of sales enablement content include email campaigns, blog posts, case studies, testimonials, print materials, and interactive digital content.

With platforms and solutions for sales enablement, jobs become easier. A sales enablement manager can take advantage of a sales enablement platform and create an augmented understanding in sellers of how the product or service being sold provides customers with high value. As for sales enablement tools, examples are abundant and different companies have different sales enablement goals, making it hard for any one tool to be optimal for every single company. Of course, some tools will help you perform better than others.  

Sales enablement is very important for success, especially as more sales move to the virtual world. Sales content examples include but are not limited to informative blog posts, video guides, and social media posts. After your company has chosen its enablement goal by looking at what key performance indicators (KPIs) you may be lacking, it is time to improve your sales enablement. Common metrics to look at when deciding what you need help with are ramp time, win rate, deal size, and the length of your typical sales cycle. 

Ramp time is a metric that shows how quickly your new sellers ramp up to be successful and on par with the other sellers. This is important, not just for larger companies but also for growing ones, because if an experienced sales person leaves your company, that means you have lost their knowledge, experience, and expertise. It is important to have a good ramp time so employees leaving the business aren’t big threats, and expanding your company by hiring more sellers becomes more efficient. 

Win rate is very self-explanatory. How many deals in your pipeline are considered won? Every business wants to have a high rate of closing. After all, effort and resources are put into each lead. If your KPI of win rate is low, it might be time to use a sales enablement platform to train your representatives on how to close deals more effectively. 

Deal size is the average value of your closed sales. There are ways to increase your revenue and sell higher-value deals, but it might not be so obvious to your sellers and marketers in the beginning. 

The point of deciding on an enablement goal is so that your company has a qualitative idea of what you want to improve on. Deciding on a goal for each quarter is a clear way to see how your sales enablement is performing. 

The way sales training improves your sales team can be abstract. Examples include creating training modules through a sales enablement platform. These modules may seek to improve your sellers’ skills and behavior. They can even teach key information about your brand and products or services. For example, the training may highlight how your representatives can effectively object to concerns over value brought up by customers. If your representatives do not know how to do this well, it means that they may end up providing customers with discounts at multiple stages of the sales process. A platform can also enable you to provide sellers with personalized guidance so that they can stay on the right track to success – milestones and training events are a good way to track how your representatives are doing. 

Ultimately, sales enablement platforms are not just convenient, but extremely helpful in improving your sales performance and training your representatives. Learn more about how Skytap Virtual IT Labs can support your sales enablement.