Sales Enablement Software: The Basics

The Sales Enablement Definition

Sales enablement is the “collection of materials, tasks, and tools that are intended to improve the execution of key sales activities” according to Salesforce. We agree with that. Sales enablement isn’t just about the tools used, but it isn’t just about the practices used either. The two must work in sync. The sales enablement jobs and sales enablement tools your company needs to function fluidly cannot be found on the sales enablement Wikipedia page.

Sales enablement systems take months to develop, therefore, they are always changing. New knowledge and new communication methods always lead to new products. The future of sales enablement imagined for a company now is in no way the absolute future that it will be.

The Essential Sales Enablement Tools and Jobs

Sales enablement jobs are almost as vague as sales enablement itself. These positions can live in marketing or sales departments and consist of anything it takes to boost the movement and closing of deals. For example, a sales development representative, or SDR, could be considered a sales enablement position because this person tees up ideal prospects for account executives to talk to. A writer, even though often times housed in a marketing department, could also be considered a sales development role. Whenever a writer or designer is creating sales enablement materials to assist in pipeline movement, that’s sales enablement. There’s no defined sales enablement salary, because it really depends on the role at hand.

Sales tools generally constitute software, but software can be extremely complex in its own right. Sales tools examples include pipeline management, content measurement, communication cadence, director feedback, and plenty more. The top sales enablement tools incorporate all of these things, some more highly functional than others.

Pipeline management – This feature assist managers in the organization of current deals. On any given day, a myriad of deals are opening, some close within hours, some take months. With a pipeline management system, the organization becomes simple. Sales representatives can even customize their sales funnel.

Content measurement – If your marketing team is busting out one resource after another, it’s nice to see what’s working. There are entire systems created for the creation, distribution, and assessment of content. When the focus is sales enablement, these systems excel in lead-tracking and data. For example, say you’ve created a resource that’s 20 pages long. With a system revolved around content measurement, you can see if people accessing the resource are dropping off after page 12.

Communication cadence – A great sales enablement platform will make communication…. communicate! Let’s be real, it’s so difficult to convey genuine sentiment with cadence emails or automated language. No matter what the sales enablement market size is, any decent sales enablement product is going to keep a sales rep on-track with prospects.

Director feedback – Among sales enablement best practices is the classic feedback opportunity. A sales enablement app that keeps open the line of communication between a rep and a director is greatly useful in a big company.
One thing that remains vacant in sales enablement software is training. This makes complete sense, because how is a sales enablement software supposed to know how your company’s processes and procedures work? Computers can’t do it all!

This is where a learning software, like Lessonly, usually fits into the frame. Training sales representatives doesn’t end after Week 1. Sales reps not only need excellent onboarding training, but ongoing training must be part of the lesson plan. New knowledge is constantly changing the way we do things; the way we sell things. It is completely necessary to keep learning materials (how-to’s, product knowledge, resources) updated. Without a modern learning system, these things become difficult to update and redistribute.

Lessonly makes these actions — and many others— easy. In Lessonly, you can build an unlimited amount of learning materials, assign and assess them, and update them at any time. Lessonly is a software-as-a-service, meaning that we take care of our platfrom; we don’t charge clients for new updates, and we take into consideration their suggestion. This lifts a lot of weight from the client’s end.

Learning systems can be a lot to handle. Largely established companies sometimes build their own, but that consists of a team to develop, maintain, and manage it. It’s super costly compared to going with a SaaS. And besides, when you need great learning, you should be focused on making the learning great, not figuring out the system your learning is housed on. With Lessonly, you can focus on creating great learning material to enable your sales reps and their clients.

Sales Enablement Software in Ongoing Training

Sales enablement software vendors can provide a lot of functionality in their product and service, but there are no sales enablement tools examples that are going to make the action of training effortless. Furthermore, who is going to teach you the use of each tool? Whether it’s in-house or mobile sales enablement, Lessonly is a seamless learning platform that enables your team to set a foundation for democratized learning. Sales enablement training software exists, but why not use something that is useful not only in the sales department, but in the entire company!

Sales enablement practices can be easily incorporated into ongoing training. There’s no need for Sales Enablement for Dummies, just think about asking questions to your reps. In Lessonly you can create a lesson and distribute it weekly. In the lesson, you can add poll questions and free-response questions to elicit feedback from reps. This keeps a line of communication between a rep and a manager by hosting opportunity for suggestions and improvements, whether it be personally or for the company. If you need to update the lesson, just do it. It saves automatically. And you don’t have to assign the same lesson every week. Because Lessonly supports automated functions, you can assign a lesson once and schedule it to be repeated at a weekly cadence. The same goes for annual learning. If everyone needs to take a certain course every year, you can schedule that course at an annual cadence. Lessonly is also integrable with your CRM’s API. You can set triggers to teach reps the in’s and out’s of the platform that are specific to your company.