Sales enablement is a buzz. Just google ‘sales enablement tools’ and you’ll get buried under thousands of listings 100+ items long with anything from a CRM to revenue intelligence software to an email marketing platform claiming to be a sales enablement instrument. Everyone wants a piece of that pie, given how lucrative all things related to sales processes sound.
However, what is sales enablement really about? Which sales enablement tools do you need—and do you need them at all? In this article, we’ll discuss these questions and give you a selected list of instruments that will help to boost your sales team’s performance.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is a process of providing your sales team with knowledge, content, resources, and instruments to help them hit their KPIs faster and more effectively. With them, your sales ops are well-prepared for their calls and presentations, say the right things at the right time, and make data-driven decisions.
Given how general this definition is, it’s easy to see why there are so many apps and tools with this label. However, what sales enablement really is about is the alignment of sales and marketing.
Within a good sales enablement strategy, the marketing team creates quality content that lines up with your business’ sales processes. It can be a piece of client-facing marketing collateral, such as a brochure, a presentation, an explainer video, or a collection of use-cases, conveying product value to a prospect.
Another important goal of sales enablement is to provide the sales team with client knowledge. It requires gathering and analyzing the prospects’ behavior, their needs and pains, and usage of the product. The better the sales rep understands the lead, the more effective communication will be.
So, as the result of a good sales enablement strategy, the marketing team provides the sales team with well-thought-out, quality content, and valuable data. Equipped with these tools, sales reps have more engaging, substantial conversations with their prospects and close deals faster, or on a bigger scale.
What are Sales Enablement Tools and How to Choose the Right Ones?
In a nutshell, sales enablement tools are apps that cater to your sales team’s needs and simplify creating, sharing, managing, and analyzing sales collateral easier.
Good examples of sales enablement tools are email, document, and outbound call tracking software, collateral creation and management software, training and coaching platforms, and CRMs.
Each company is different, so there’s no one-size-fits-all option when it comes to good sales enablement tools. But to help you navigate through everything that the market offers at the moment, we have compiled a list of the top 10 best sales enablement tools. This is a diverse selection of proven, easy-to-adopt, scalable instruments to help every sales team perform better.
Top 10 Sales Enablement Tools
1. Gong
Gong is a revenue intelligence tool that gives you insights into your client’s behavior by analyzing all the customer-facing interactions across phone, email, and phone conferencing. It helps you understand your customers and market better, as well as provides accurate data for sales training, outbound call script improving, and smart strategizing. You’ll know what your best sales reps do right and will be able to adopt these best practices to make the entire team stronger and more productive. And if there’s something that needs fixing, you’ll see it before the deal is lost.
Pricing: by request.
2. FlippingBook
FlippingBook is a powerful online tool for creating and tracking sales collateral. It lets you convert PDFs into interactive presentations, proposals, and pitches that are easy to share and analyze. With FlippingBook, your sales reps can send over documents as links instead of attaching huge PDFs to emails and update the content in a click when it goes stale. Thanks to instant email notifications, a rep is alerted as soon the document is opened and sees how exactly the client has interacted with it. Plus, professional-looking materials, enriched with branding, videos, and GIFs look are much more engaging.
Here’s an example of an interactive product offer created with FlippingBook:
Create yours
What's more, you can try the FlippingBook app that helps your sales team keep trackable sales collateral in their pockets. You can share any document through the app and track how and when leads interact with your collateral for effective, timely follow-ups. Watch the video to learn more!
The app is available for registered FlippingBook clients and trial users. You can download it from the App Store or Google Play.
Pricing: starts from $14/month (billed annually).
3. Brainshark
Brainshark is an online platform for training your sales reps and onboarding new hires. It gives you access to proven sales courses from learning providers and lets you create your own video-based learning programs, tailored specifically for your teams. The platform can be integrated into your CRM, giving the reps the opportunity to learn on the go. Plus, thanks to sales performance tracking, you’ll be able to see the correlations between your sales team’s learning progress and success.
Pricing: by request.
4. Guru
Guru is an app that delivers sales knowledge right at your door. It stores and manages product and client knowledge in the form of memos, reminders, short answers, and prompts. And gives it to the sales rep right where they need it—in a chat, email, or in a browser. This way, sales reps can remove the friction that ‘I’ll get back to you on that’ creates, and provide all the info the client needs right on the spot. This saves time, drives conversations, and helps create amazing customer experiences.
Guru also offers browser extensions and Slack integration for a seamless workflow.
Pricing: offers a free plan, paid plans start from $5 per user/month.
5. Cloze
Cloze is a CRM—but a bit more than that. In addition to keeping track of your leads’s email history, it pulls all the relevant data about the lead and the company there is and helps you make sense of it. The AI will suggest which of your contacts is the right person to talk to, and will remind you to follow up at the best time. Plus, it’s very straightforward and easy to adopt at any stage of your company’s life.
Pricing: starts from $17/month (billed annually).
6. Klue
Klue is an intelligence app that provides you with up-to-date data on your competitors. It collects information from external as well as internal sources and delivers it to the rep, making it much easier to answer questions, such as ‘How are you different from X?’. You can use it to create newsletters and reports, too, for smarter analytics and sales strategies.
Pricing: by request.
7. Soapbox by Wistia
Soapbox isn’t strictly a sales enablement tool, but it’s a great asset for creating personalized custom-facing videos, such as explainers or demos. The best thing about it is that you don’t need to be a professional video maker or to master complex video editing tools. Soapbox lets you make videos with just a webcam and a Chrome extension. Combining different videos and adding transitions is easy, too. Overall, it’s a great tool if you want your sales reps to have friendly video introductions or want to partly automate live demos.
Pricing: offers a free plan, paid plans start from $300/year.
8. Seismic
Seismic is a powerful sales enablement platform that covers collateral creation, sales training, content analytics, and sales automation. It allows you to create tailored dynamic content for each prospect and share it across any channel. Content analytics makes it easy to see what works and what needs re-thinking. And with a built-in learning platform, you can train your hires faster than ever—in an interactive, compelling way.
Pricing: by request
9. Consensus
Consensus is a sales automation tool that lets you create on-demand interactive video demos. With it, you can have a library of ready demos for any use case. Your sales reps can share the demos privately while pitching to the leads—and have meaningful discussions while saving up time for other tasks and opportunities. The clients, on the other hand, can easily reshare the demo with other decision-makers within their company, streamlining and shortening the whole sales process.
Pricing: by request.
10. PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a handy tool for creating and tracking digital documents. What’s great about it is a really intuitive drag-and-drop editor which lets you create elegant documents even if you don’t have design skills. And automation makes it really easy to produce personalized content, such as presentations and proposals, with the help of ready templates.
Pricing: offers a free plan, paid plans start from $19 per user/month.
