Did you know that on average, sales reps waste over 50% of their time on poor prospects? So if you have a team of 10 full time reps, then you’re looking at a collective 200 paid hours down the drain every week. If you spend more money on hiring reps than training them, then you’re setting up your team for failure. The reality is, poorly trained and ill equipped reps are a persistent problem in any industry. And this is all despite the fact that trained reps actually sell 50% more effectively. Check out our blog posts where 20 sales reps share their secrets to success.
So, what’s the solution to this mess? Simple – sales enablement tools.
Research shows that as the number of companies with dedicated enablement roles increases, so too does the confusion around the related tools and technologies. This lack of clarity is further compounded by the unrelenting number of software vendors serving just this space. According to research reports, the market for sales enablement tools is set to reach $2.6 billion by 2024. In this segment, we’ll look at which sales enablement tools you should be making use of in 2020?
But first…
What are Sales Enablement Tools?
The term sales enablement is quite broad. Similarly, there are plenty of different types of technologies available to assist modern sales companies. However, all the available tools exist for pretty much the same reason. And that’s to make life easier for anyone in sales. Therefore, a sales enablement tool is any piece of technology that supports a more efficient and effective sales process. All this is with the end goal of helping sales teams achieve their corporate goals.
Beyond that though, there’s plenty of variance. For instance, some tools are large scale platforms that require a ton of internal administration i.e CRM. Others tend to focus on one or two particular sales challenges. Now, while there are several different ways to categorize the tech, what matters is knowing how it can solve problems for your company. Below is a line up of the 5 key types of sales enablement tools and software along with explanations on how they can assist you.
Read more: Top 5 Sales Enablement Tools
Top 5 Sales Enablement Tools for 2020
1. Customer relationship management
When it comes to sales opportunities, buyer contact information, account ownership and pipeline management, sales teams need a single source of truth. Your marketing teams require the sale lead generating activities such as campaign execution, customer segmentation as well as other lead-gen activities. Between marketing, sales and customer service, the average company generates a lot of business data. Without a way to organize and structure this high volume data, companies will struggle to harness it. They’ll also have a tougher time keeping non sales functions aligned with sales.
With a CRM, companies can manage and organize their client relationships and interactions. The good news is that CRM can do much more than that. It can help measure key customer data and sales results through dashboards. It also serves as the integration anchor for other SE tools. On top of all that, your CRM will allow you to track KPIs related to key SE initiatives. So if you’re trying to cut down time to productivity for new hires, try partnering with sales ops to track run rate productivity and conversion rates for fully onboarded reps.
2. Sales content management
Today’s breed of consumer wants great content that offers valuable insight into their business challenges. Likewise, your reps also want solid content so they can better positions the solutions they’re selling. But even if your SE teams are producing all the right content, it gets hard to identify what would serve better for particular buyers. That’s why you see unsettling statistics such as 80% of marketing content going unused by entire sales teams.
The solution is sales content management tools that helps businesses organize, find and promote the right assets. This includes assisting reps with effective leverage content, identifying which content works best and tracking how prospects engage with the content. From an SE perspective, such a tool will allow you to organize content into relevant categories such as messaging guidelines, product information, success stories and much more. The content is then made easily discoverable with permissions and descriptions that ensure your reps only use accurate, approved, and on brand content.
3. Sales enablement tools for intelligence
Consumers expect reps to share information tailored to their unique challenges. According to Linkedin, over 90% of B2B decision makers are more likely to consider a brand if its reps personalize their outreach. Today, the average sales opportunity now involves as many as 7 buyers – each with their own preferences and roadblocks. So as committee purchasing decisions become more commonplace, personalized comms need to evolve to scale.
Sales intelligence tools let sellers find and track contextual insights into a prospects business. With customized searches, you will be able to identify ideal buyers, have a better grasp of what they care about and know when to engage them based on data like job title, company size and revenue, location, purchase history, buying signals, among other useful data filters. All this data allows your teams to find accurate contact information for new leads, build custom lists to narrow the scope of searches, update records for existing prospects and uncover insights by sorting buyer personas.
4. Video coaching and practice
It’s no secret; buyers expect reps to be well versed and knowledgeable when it comes to leading the sales process. In fact, Salesforce shows that almost 80% of buyers deem it necessary to interact with trusted advisors. But while most companies recognize the need for coaching, sales managers often lack the time or skills to offer useful feedback. What’s more, there’s no way for companies to know if a rep is prepared unless they try and fail in front of prospects.
As a sales enablement tool, video coaching allows your teams to reinforce what they learned during training. It then validates whether sellers are well equipped to apply the knowledge using coaching assessment and video based practice. So instead of guessing whether your team can add value, you can assess the reps’ readiness before they even engage a client. This will always lead to more productive sales interactions.
Read more: Sales Enablement Blog
5. Sales engagement
As your company focuses on KPIs such as average deal size and conversion rates, you no doubt want your reps to use the most effective outreach tactics. You also want to scale through high quality buyer engagements. This becomes even more vital once you consider the day to day activities of sales reps. For instance, Hubspot shows that sales reps spend about 17% of their time entering data, 21% writing emails and another 18% prospecting and following leads.
Sales engagement platforms allow you to measure, manage and optimize how sellers interact with prospects. They do this by streamlining and scaling the different ways that reps communicate with their prospects (social, phone, email etc). They also provide actionable data that highlights which methods are the most effective allowing sales teams to save time.
Veloxy offers these and many more benefits to sales organizations all over the world. Veloxy is an AI powered sales enablement app that helps improve Salesforce engagement, sales enablement and customer data mapping. It offers all the above tools plus much more to give your sales reps that much needed competitive advantage.
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