Because customer behavior and purchasing decisions continue to evolve at a breakneck pace, companies need a way to keep everyone up-to-date on the latest sales processes and techniques.
Sales enablement is the methodology that lets this happen. An effective sales enablement process provides reps with the right content at the right time to keep buyers interested in what they’re selling.
It ensures that sales teams have the training, expertise, and first-rate technological tools they need to retain their keen competitive edge in a global business environment growing increasingly cutthroat by the nanosecond.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- How sales enablement boosts customer engagement
- The power of sales enablement tools
- The essential sales enablement tools every business needs
The importance of sales enablement
Salespeople have their work cut out for them. They have to become intimately familiar with a dizzying array of new products, hit their daily quotas regularly, and engage with customers, managers, and support teams. Sales enablement lets overworked reps get it all done without getting burnt out to the point of exhaustion.
Leaders well-versed in sales enablement best practices ensure that all business activities are optimized for maximum customer engagement. These days, buyers are savvier than ever, and the sales process must keep up with the times. Before, customers just wanted a decent product at a reasonable price. Reps could provide more information to the buyer and influence them towards their product or service.
Now that information is readily available for buyers to research independently, reps have far less time to influence prospects. Research done by Gartner shows that reps only have about 5% of time with customers during the buying journey. This means that any interaction, no matter how small, is vital for your business.
Sales enablement lets companies keep up with these ever-evolving customer expectations. They can give sales teams the tools and knowledge they need to successfully shepherd prospects through every stage of the buyer's journey.
What a sales enablement tool is
Because your sales teams face new competitive threats every day, you need the best sales enablement tools at your disposal to stay ahead of the competition.
A good sales enablement tool allows you to effectively execute your sales enablement strategy to increase customer engagement. That way, you're better able to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
High-quality sales enablement tools have tremendous revenue-boosting potential. They supercharge a company's marketing and sales efforts, so they can take the leap from the technological dark ages into a new era of stunning digital transformation.
Key sales enablement tools for your workplace
VODIUM
Knowing how little time reps have during the buying journey, let’s face it: you can’t afford to deliver a horrible presentation—or even a mediocre one.
That’s where VODIUM comes in. It provides the groundbreaking technology you need to make a fantastic impression on prospects and customers.
VODIUM is a teleprompter you can use for Zoom and other videoconferencing apps. It sits discreetly below your computer’s camera, ensuring your audience feels that you're speaking directly to them. VODIUM allows you to read your remarks while maintaining firm eye contact with those you're speaking to.
This practical tool—that's taking the tech world by storm—helps significantly improve presenters' video communication abilities. It dramatically enhances speaking delivery because presenters aren't constantly looking at multiple screens.
However, VODIUM is more than a teleprompter—it's a powerful sales enablement tool. VODIUM sets you up with your key speaking points, discovery questions, up-front contract and more, all directly at your disposal—meaning you can focus on delivering with confidence.
VODIUM provides you with the flexibility and autonomy to let you seamlessly take control of your video conference. Rather than glancing down at your notes or worrying about logistical details, you can put every ounce of your energy into giving your all to the presentation itself. If you want to read a scripted presentation, use VODIUM’s automatic scroll. If you need to reference your notes, go with the manual scrolling option.
Either way, you’ll be able to remember key talking points without looking anywhere other than into the eyes of your audience. Thus, you always stay on message.
Salesforce
Once upon a time, companies managed customer data the old-fashioned way—by jotting down buyer details on little index cards and storing the notes in metal file cabinets. Unfortunately, this antiquated method failed to tap into the tremendous potential of the mountains of customer information that was meticulously collected.
Enter Salesforce.
This comprehensive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform is loaded with features that make it easier to boost customer engagement. For example, suppose your business is dependent on sales performance analytics. In that case, this data-based platform can offer them up in spades.
In this era of rapid digital transformation, companies are increasingly turning to tools that help them more effectively leverage customer data. Salesforce is one of the best at doing this. From fledgling startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, Salesforce is having a revolutionary effect on revenue organizations.
This feature-packed CRM effectively processes and analyzes vast amounts of user data to provide keen insights into customer behavior. It allows enterprises to leverage cloud technology to better connect with buyers. However, tracking customer activity and marketing to prospects is just the tip of the iceberg of what the platform can do.
Customer 360 is their complete suite of products, uniting the sales, marketing, commerce, and IT teams into one glorious whole. This cloud-based software helps companies find more leads, close more deals, and create better customer experiences.
The marketing cloud app enables an enterprise to send targeted messages to prospective customers. When buyers click on a company ad or website, the app sends an automated message to the sales team, letting them know there’s a new lead that they can nurture.
Sales Cloud lets every sales team member see all relevant buyer information, giving them an abundance of actionable intelligence they can use to close a deal. Because the sales team sees in-depth details about every customer, they’re better able to meet customer needs.
AI-driven prompts let the sales team know the best time to take action to complete a sale, and proprietary analytics sends an automated message when it detects a significant trend on the horizon. That way, a company can retain its razor-sharp competitive edge by staying ahead of the curve.
Ambition
Ambition promotes healthy competition amongst sales reps by scoring user performance in real-time using benchmarks set by sales managers. The platform enables a company to boost the performance of sales team members in a fun, visually-exciting way. There's even an option for personalized sales anthems every time a sales rep exceeds a milestone.
If you want to boost the productivity of both remote and in-person sales staff, there's no better platform to do it on. It makes onboarding more constructive and provides individualized training for experienced salespeople.
Ambition's metric-based coaching programs are endlessly customizable, which helps them meet your company's unique needs. However, the tool only works with data from your CRM, which means that if your reps aren't logging their activity, you won’t be able to use it.
Outreach
Outreach’s tools help teams bridge the sales execution gap:the gulf between the revenue an enterprise projects and the revenue it actually attains. When companies close this gap, they can execute more successful sales cycles, helping them win more deals with less effort and deliver better customer experiences.
Sales execution gaps are the outcome when legacy sales technology is no longer sufficient to serve the needs of revenue teams. The longer an organization hangs onto outdated processes, the more these gaps expand, causing a company to lose opportunities and reps because of antiquated systems.
Outreach has invested considerably in proprietary AI technology that seamlessly translates collected sales information into actionable intelligence. That way, it's better able to help businesses leverage data to boost their revenue-generating activities.
Outreach’s impressive suite of features allows a business to powerfully transform insights into actions that boost the efficiency of the sales process. It helps companies pinpoint with laser-sharp precision the most effective actions to take out of the hundreds of individual moments comprising every sales cycle.
Deliver polished and powerful sales presentations with VODIUM
These days, remote work is an integral part of the professional landscape, and it isn't going away anytime soon. Because the way you do business has radically changed, you need a new way of delivering sales presentations better suited to the times.
VODIUM is the sales enablement tool custom-made for the work-from-home era. Its cutting-edge features help boost your video communication abilities so that you always appear polished, proficient, and confident. Get started today!
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