What To Look For in Your Sales Enablement Platform Investment
There are hundreds of sales enablement platforms out in the market today. So, it can be hard to determine which platform is right for you and your sales team. The best sales enablement platform will help your sales reps increase their productivity and achieve greater win rates. In fact, 76% of organizations achieve an increase of up to 20% in sales with the right sales enablement platform.
To simplify your search, we’ve put together a list of features your sales enablement platform should have. Take a look at the criteria below so you can discover the best sales enablement platform for your team.
Content Management
The first thing you should look for in a sales enablement platform is content management capability. The right platform should be able to house content in an easily accessible place. With all sales materials in one location, your sales reps have instant access to the most updated versions of collateral. Thus, your reps are enabled to communicate consistent and current messaging with your prospects.
In addition, your marketing team is able to serve up effective materials to sales reps using content management features. For instance, marketers can make recommendations to reps as to how to best leverage content at different stages of the sales cycle. This alignment between sales and marketing will help nudge buyers along the buyer’s journey and retain their interest.
For sales teams with their materials scattered across the intranet, finding the right piece of content can take hours. On average, about 64.8% of a sales rep’s time is spent on admin tasks like searching for content. That means reps only spend 35.2% of their time (at most) on selling! The best sales enablement platform houses all sales materials organized by industry, potential problems or questions, and more. Thus, searching for a piece of content to share is quick and easy.
Content Personalisation
A great sales enablement platform also allows reps to personalise content to boost the customer experience throughout the sales cycle. We’re not just talking about inputting a prospect’s name into an email template. We’re talking about creating unique experiences that take the prospect’s personal information and pain points into consideration when offering a solution. Below are some examples of just how a sales enablement platform can personalise content.
Interactive presentations
Interactive presentations are a surefire way to capture your prospect’s attention and keep them engaged throughout the meeting. Actually, interactive sales content can be up to 25% more effective in communicating a message than traditional presentations. Sales enablement platforms offer features to make sales presentations interactive and dynamic. Dynamic presentations support the customer dialogue. At the click of a button, reps can load reports, videos, and slides to answer any question the prospect asks. Thus, by adding visuals and slide and content navigation features, the presentation is easier to follow and engage with. As a matter of fact, interactive presentations help keep the prospect engaged and encourage them to remember more information. According to Brain Rules, by supporting your message with visuals, prospects will remember 65% of the information. Whereas presentations without visuals lead to prospects remembering only 10% of the information.
ROI / Value calculators
Another great advantage of a sales enablement platform is the ability to create and collect data from ROI calculators. An ROI calculator incorporates the prospect’s specific information to produce the right ROI results. This creates a highly personalised experience for the prospect, putting them in the shoes they’ll be in once they make a purchase. Basically, these calculators visualise the value prospects gain when investing in your product or service.
CRM and Sales Enablement Integration
A CRM, while awesome on its own, can be significantly bolstered by sales enablement software. Upon integration, the right sales enablement platform will keep track of CRM data. This is accomplished by automatically logging all activities and shared content to your team’s contacts, accounts, leads, and opportunities.
Basically, a CRM integration streamlines, organizes, and simplifies the sales process. Sales reps are no longer sending repeat content to prospects or forgetting to follow up. Instead, the reps have full visibility into which content was previously sent and where their prospects are in the sales cycle. From here, reps can choose which pieces of content to send next to further move the prospect towards purchasing. Consequently, the marketing team is able to create smart content recommendations directly within the sales enablement platform. These recommendations depict which piece of content will resonate most with a buyer in their next interaction based on persona, industry, stage in the sales cycle, and more. The sales enablement platform works with the CRM to ensure reps stay on top of their most influential prospects.
Scalability
Often as organizations grow, their technology fails to grow with them. Because of this, organizations are continuously buying new tools that can support and manage their sales collateral. Moreover, scalability is crucial when it comes to figuring out which sales enablement platform is best. A great sales enablement platform will allow sales teams to expand their platform’s capabilities without needing to add more resources or tools.
Moreover, you need to adopt a sales enablement platform that will grow with your team. For instance, as your lead generation expands, the right sales enablement platform will scale to house the increasing amount of content, contacts, and analytics to stay on top of your sales initiatives.
Analytics
Last but most certainly not least, your sales enablement platform should offer extensive analytics. These analytics should depict your customers’ engagement, your sales reps’ productivity and performance, and your overall sales effectiveness.
For example, your sales enablement platform should be able to tell you which piece of content a prospect is engaging with and when. Gaining this insight provides reps with the data to support their decisions moving forward. Consider this example.
Analytics show a prospect is spending the most time engaging with a value calculator regarding a whole life insurance policy. Meanwhile, that same prospect is avoiding the content regarding term life insurance policies. Based on these insights, the sales rep can make a data-driven decision to focus on selling a whole life insurance policy to this particular prospect. Thus, analytics allow sales reps to provide a more targeted approach in their selling methods.
In addition, a sales enablement platform can also provide analytics on the sales reps’ performances. For instance, you can take a look at which content your top sales reps are sharing with their prospects. Then, you can use this knowledge to train the rest of the team on best practices. Analytics can show where a sales rep is struggling. The data may show that a rep tends to lose clients after a phone call. Gaining this knowledge enables the sales manager to train that rep to boost their confidence and skills in phone conversations.
Marketing analytics help boost sales
The insights derived from sales enablement software help the marketing team understand which materials are resonating with buyers at each stage of the sales cycle. For example, ebooks and 1-pagers might be working well to nudge buyers along in the early stages of the buyer’s journey. Meanwhile, case studies and ROI calculators might be more useful later in the purchase journey. Marketers can use sales enablement statistics to prove theories, test hypotheses, and generate highly impactful content to support sales.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know which aspects of a sales enablement platform are most important, it’s time to discover which platform is right for you. Prezentor has continuously been named a high performer by G2 for enterprises and mid-market organizations. With an easy to use app built for tablet, desktop, and mobile, your sales team is enabled to create, access, and share content all at the touch of a finger. Don’t forget about the ability to track customer engagement, sales productivity, and sales rep performance!
It’s time to transform your sales with the best sales enablement software. Reach out to us to receive your demo of Prezentor and see all that your team can accomplish.