The goal of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with the resources and the training to help them sell their products and services to customers more effectively. A good sales enablement program is designed to enhance the customer’s purchase experience by providing salespeople relevant content and tools to compellingly address the needs of the customer at each stage of the buyer’s journey. With a plethora of sales enablement solutions in the market, companies need to evaluate the various solutions to see which one fits their business needs well. That being said, sales enablement solutions need to be equipped with certain must-have features that are crucial for every kind of business to optimally benefit from them. Let’s take a look at these important features.
Sales enablement platform evaluation checklist or features
Integrated solution of sales enablement tool
Sales enablement consists of three core capabilities - content, training, and coaching. However, not many solutions in the market offer all three capabilities on a single platform; instead, they supplement their own native capabilities with solutions from third-party vendors. Sales coaching, for instance, is rarely offered as an integrated solution by sales enablement platforms. As a buyer, you might want to consider an integrated platform that supports all three capabilities natively. The benefits of doing so are many. An integrated solution would provide a more seamless platform experience for its users. Moreover, since the same platform is used by the organization to engage buyers and educate sellers, insights drawn from the analytics of these engagements can be used by the organization to provide further training inputs to the sellers and deliver more relevant content to the buyers.
Sales onboarding, training, and coaching
With work from home being the new norm due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies need to see if the sales enablement platform that they choose has all the features to efficiently onboard, train, and coach sales reps remotely. For instance, at a time when frontline managers may not be able to interact personally with the reps, does the platform provide an embedded video conferencing solution that is fully integrated with the training and coaching module? This would allow trainers to share demos remotely with the sales teams, conduct virtual role-plays, and monitor sales reps’ pitch activities through recorded sales calls.
The platform should be equipped with tools to create persona-based onboarding journeys that can be customized to suit each sales rep’s training needs and learning style. It should support the creation and delivery of training content in bite-sized modules for increased comprehensibility and support continuous learning with periodic reinforcements (including quizzes and quests) to ensure knowledge retention.
Content creation and customization
Content is a critical element of the sales enablement process. It is key to guiding potential buyers through every step of the customer journey. The content management functionality of a sales enablement platform should be user-friendly and intuitive.
With the increasing need for remote selling, companies must invest in solutions that allow them to provide virtual product experiences without requiring the onsite presence of sales reps. Streaming video, adaptive content for smart devices, interactive demos, product walkthroughs, and 3D visualizations are some of the content formats that enable buyers to experience what a solution can do for them virtually. Ensure that your sales enablement platform supports all such modern content formats.
Great content is of no use to anyone if it can't be found and accessed. A good sales enablement solution should have a dynamic and robust content architecture that allows you to publish a wide variety of content, organize the content into simple and intuitive categories, update the content easily so that it stays fresh and timely, and help the rep find and retrieve the most relevant content for each customer at various stages in the sales process.
Understanding which content is effective involves having a comprehensive view of how content is used, consumed, and acted upon. The platform should have built-in analytics to track the performance of each content piece. With insights into how customers engage with the content, marketers can empower sellers with the right content for each stage of the customer journey.
Integration with other systems
A sales enablement platform needs to have integration capabilities with other software that a business may be using while allowing data to be synced across all platforms. One of the critical aspects of sales enablement platforms is its ability to consolidate data from multiple disparate sources. Depending on the business' technology stack, sales enablement platforms may need to integrate with email, CRM, marketing, customer support, and product development. The integration of different data types within a common platform to provide a single unified view of all data is essential to ensure that the information is accessible to all stakeholders.
Analytics with AI capabilities
Artificial intelligence has come to play a significant role in driving sales enablement technologies to the next level.
AI-powered sales enablement tools can provide valuable insights into how reps and prospects are engaging with sales content. Marketers can use this information to further optimize content creation. They can promote content that customers are interested in. They can also use this data to inform reps about content that is most likely to help move a deal forward.
Sales coaching is another area that will benefit from AI. Sales managers will be able to utilize the technology to gain greater clarity and a better understanding of how their salespeople work. For instance, AI systems could be used to analyze sales conversations, support voice analysis, and provide insights into what top performers do in sales conversations. Based on such analyses, AI algorithms can ensure that the entire coaching program is customized to individual learner needs.
AI-powered solutions use predictive analytics to support guided selling. Predictive analytics provides contextual content recommendations to sales teams as a way to speed up buyer movement through the sales funnel. As buyer journeys grow more complex and nonlinear, predictive analytics offers sales reps the capability to find the right content that answers questions, overcomes objections, and influences purchase decisions by mining the prospect’s behavioral and psychological data.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while selecting the right sales enablement solution for your company would depend on the nature of your business, the features mentioned above are a must-have in any solution you choose. These include the ability to support remote onboarding and training of reps, content creation in all modern formats and their customization, analytics with AI capabilities, and the integration of sales enablement content, training, and coaching within a single platform. These are the foundations on which you can take your sales enablement operations to the next higher level.
Here is the question that you need to ask yourself: does the sales enablement platform that you are considering check these boxes? If it doesn’t, Nytro has got you covered.
