What is sales enablement? Sales enablement is a powerful practice that allows you to align your marketing and sales teams to grow sales and drive growth for your business.
Here at RiseFuel, I work with clients to help them initiate sales enablement strategies that fit within their current processes and put their sales teams in a position for long-term success.
One of the first tasks that I walk clients through during sales enablement engagements is choosing the right tools.
Sales enablement tools are critical for giving your marketing and sales teams the utility that they need to effectively engage with and track their interactions with prospects.
While not every tool on this list is an absolute requirement (and many of the tools have overlapping features with one another), each does bring some very useful traits to the table.
For this list, I separated each tool into separate categories and chose what are, in my opinion, the best tools within each category.
If you are interested in boosting your sales through sales enablement, consider whether these tools would be a good addition to your current software stack:
Attivio is an enterprise-grade business intelligence and discovery platform that you can use to make effective sales decisions.
The platform allows you to build and deploy search-based applications that provide you with meaningful data and intelligence. While it is an expensive tool, Attivio is very powerful.
You can use Attivio to automate processes within your business, recall both structured and unstructured data, and re-shape your decision-making process as it applies to your business.
While Attivio provides many features outside of simple sales enablement and may only appeal to mid and large-sized organizations, the wealth of powerful features made it a difficult choice to leave off of this list.
Formstack is a simple online form builder tool that can help you to capture leads, feedback, and data from your customers and prospects.
It also includes a simple analytics suite that will help you to analyze your data and utilize the information that you collect within Formstack.
Formstack is excellent for quickly building forms and surveys with their drag-and-drop editor and deploying those forms on third-party web applications. Formstack integrates directly with many of the top apps used today.
Their forms come with a number of different themes and provide deep customization options so that you can make sure any forms that you send match your branding and provide a consistent experience to your users.
SalesForce is the customer relationship management tool for sales teams. They dub themselves as a “customer success platform” and they are a tool that I always recommend to sales teams that don’t have a suitable solution in place.
SalesForce is great for sales enablement because it integrates with a wide variety of tools and automation solutions that are currently on the market.
They allow you to track customer information, interactions, and actions taken from a single location. Additionally, SalesForce has deep automation features that remove many of the manual tasks your sales teams have to perform every single day.
The contact management features on the platform are deep. They provide a complete view of your customers that includes their activity history, key contacts within the prospect organizations, communications (including internal discussions), and all relevant social media information about the account.
There are many marketing analytics tools out there to choose from, but my favorite of all is Moz. Moz collects all of your inbound marketing analytics and data in one singular place, making it easy to track the effectiveness of your content campaigns.
Moz places most of its focus on organic search features. It allows you to discover and track content campaigns for specific keywords, including information about both national and local searches.
It also offers deep, detailed SEO auditing features that allow you to identify gaps in your organic search strategy.
As a HubSpot agency and member of the HubSpot Agency Partners Program, I would be remiss to exclude them from this list.
HubSpot is the defining marketing automation tool of this generation, providing many features that help to bolster organic inbound marketing campaigns and sales operations.
HubSpot enables sales teams to improve their conversations with leads and customers while controlling their content across many channels.
The software suite allows you to track revenue, use channel analytics to inform your strategies, and better understand the why behind the decisions that your customers make.
HubSpot facilitates sales enablement with a detailed lead scoring system that will help your sales teams to prioritize the right leads and close more sales.
Every company needs a project management platform to help them manage the various marketing and sales projects that they are working on at any given time.
Wrike is an excellent, simple to use project management platform that enables teams to work together to complete projects in a real-time digital workspace. It is a very popular choice among companies with remote teams.
Wrike makes it easy to engage with your teams through their messaging feeds and the ability to turn emails into trackable tasks.
You can sync tasks and milestones with a host of calendar tools, and manage a range of interconnected individual projects through the app.
6sense is an account-based marketing and sales orchestration platform. It provides detailed predictive intelligence for both your marketing and sales teams.
It is one of the few platforms that actively leverages real-time intent data to determine the best steps to take with individual B2B prospects.
6sense is an excellent sales analytics tool for companies that operate using account-based marketing practices.
6sense allows you to create and deploy advertisements at every stage of the buying cycle, then prioritize leads based on the actions that they take.
Their detailed lead scoring features make it an excellent tool for any sales team that wants to dig deeper into each prospect that they interface with.
Hoopla is an excellent tool for sales motivation. It delivers modern gamification mechanics, analytics, and professional video into a streamlined platform that allows your sales teams to track their progress and compete against one another in a healthy way.
With Hoopla, you can translate your business goals into leaderboards, leagues, and contests that pit your employees against each other in a friendly competition. Hoopla integrates with many of the popular CRM tools available today, making it an easy choice for sales motivation.
Your sales teams need reliable software to communicate and share screens with clients.
Join.me has risen to the top of the pack as the most popular tool in the space, giving a wealth of features to your sales and marketing teams. It allows for instantaneous collaboration through screen sharing, as well as unlimited VoIP conferences and meetings across more than 40 countries.
You can invite up to 250+ participants per call, making it a useful tool for uses outside of simple sales calls as well.
Content is a huge part of sales enablement and plays a key role in your ability to connect with prospects.
Crazy Egg allows you to deep dive into how your prospects engage with and use your content through heatmap technology.
Heatmap technology allows you to see where your visitors look on their screens, enlightening your content creation teams and giving you an idea of what content practices are working with your audience.
CrazyEgg is an excellent platform for better understanding your customers and finding ways to improve your content6.
It provides detailed metrics about how people engage with your website and content, including how far down they scroll, where they hover their mouse, and additional information about your visitors.
Sales enablement is all about improving your interactions with prospects and making better use of the data that you collect. In most circumstances, this requires the use of tools.
The tools in this article will help you to find the right tool for your specific business tasks. They are tools that I recommend to my clients on a regular basis.