How the Right Tools Create Sales Enablement

Now, more than ever, an effective sales team is essential in leading your companies’ performance and growth throughout the pandemic. The good news is that a new breed of digital sales tools are enabling new and more agile approaches to selling. But it is important to use the right tools.

The number of different sales enablement platforms has doubled in the last 10 years. Experts warn that sales teams can suffer despite the innovations. “Adoption has run rampant on the promise of productivity and revenue, but in practice, the tools have become more cumbersome than ever,” says Forbes council member George Donovan. “Most sales enablement managers are already stretched too thin. It’s important to have a streamlined sales enablement tech stack.”

A new breed of digital sales tools are enabling more agile approaches selling. But it is important to use the right tools.

Enabling Your Sales Goals

Companies with a focus on sales enablement have about 30% higher sales effectiveness than those without. Nearly two-thirds surpass revenue targets, often by 25% or more. In a highly competitive environment, enabling your salespeople to be at their best—and giving them the right tools to do so—is a distinct competitive advantage.

Best Practices = Best Tools

With all the different sales enablement tools available today, how can you determine which vital few would work best for your company? Consider these sales enablement best practices and match those practices to some specific features that work best for your organization. 

Easy Access to Information

It is important to provide your team with timely and accurate access to the information they need to sell more. After all, if your sales team struggles to find and use the right information, when they need it, team performance will suffer. Establish customized, user-friendly search capabilities, and work to provide content that is organized, easy to find, and available quickly for every step of the sales journey – including updates, new product features, competitive insights, and success stories. Ensure access to the most up-to-date resources via the systems often used by reps in the field, like laptops or mobile devices.

Pre-Vetted, Customized Collateral

Sales teams need to move fast. But generic, copy/paste content doesn’t cut it. Ensuring easy access to pre-vetted content that can be immediately tailored to fit different customers, demographics, products, or stages in the buying process is essential so your teams can out-compete the competition. Make sure reps are able to assemble the various parts, pieces and pricing they need for their proposals and tenders quickly, and with confidence that the information is up-to-date and curated to compete. In the end, this increases agility and enables sales teams to sell more, sell more quickly, and do so with less effort.

Feedback and Insights

An effective sales enablement platform also makes information available for ongoing analysis and sales support situations. For example, look to boost the power of your sales team’s knowledge with perspective about the customer journey throughout the sale process. Information on how well content and collateral perform offers powerful sales effectiveness insights with feedback generating valuable changes that align the selling process to the customer’s path. What’s more, customer interactions and data tracking for reports, dashboards, and planning improve the relationship between sales, marketing, and customer service.

Tracking and Enablement

Winning sales teams track how they are performing. Reps can sell more effectively and adjust to compensate for improvements and inconsistencies with the right information and analytics at their fingertips. Plus, today’s buyers are informed, often entering a sales interaction with research and other market knowledge. Sales reps must be prepared to have consultative—rather than transactional—approach in order to engage customers at a deeper level. 

Take Advantage of the Top Sales Enablement Platform

Xait has developed a sales enablement platform to address the critical capabilities needed for sales team success. It starts with XaitPorter, a co-authoring solution that gives sales teams the ability to work collaboratively and seamlessly on highly-complex, high-value proposals and tenders, no matter where they are located. Unlike common file  sharing, XaitPorter employs a single cloud-source repository where all your content is managed. This is a game-changer in the era of remote work since everyone is literally on the same page. Automatic formatting and composite content management means the same content can be used and updated in different documents, and master data management that ties everything together. 

Xait has developed a sales enablement platform to address the critical capabilities needed for sales team success.

Another important sales enablement tool to consider is XaitCPQ, a cloud-based extension of the Xait platform that captures all of your product, pricing, and business rules in one central place. Built with large, multi-national enterprise operations in mind, XaitCPQ can be used as a standalone software or integrated with leading CRM and ERP systems. It is ideal for automating and streamlining product configuration and quoting. Your teams have everything they need at their fingertips to close deals faster, with better collaboration, control, and transparency. XaitCPQ makes it easier for customers to buy from you. And since the Xait platform can be fully integrated with Salesforce, it makes it easier to sell to them as well.

Moving Forward

Meaningful sales enablement means leveraging new technology and tools to help your sales teams sell more. Look to these solutions and best practices for the tools you need to increase team success, boost the quality of buyer interactions, and maximize sales effectiveness. Look for partners and suppliers like Xait with the right combination of capability, vison, and experience to make the most of your efforts.