Sales enablement is the glue that holds your sales process together. Finding the right sales enablement tool, however, can feel overwhelming.
The right sales enablement tool can help your team build essential skills, close deals faster, and ensure everyone is killing their sales quotas.
But is a sales enablement tool worth the investment? Let's take a closer look at the benefits--then we'll share our favorite sales enablement tools.
Why Is Sales Enablement So Important?
Sales enablement has become a competitive necessity. As buyers become more independent, and technology continues to transform the sales landscape, it’s more important than ever for your sales team to have the best possible automation tools, sales coaching, and onboarding methods available.
Sales enablement provides your reps with the processes, technology, information, and training needed to further customer engagement and close deals.
It also smooths the way for marketing and sales to collaborate—improving the experience for your customers and your team. Sales enablement also helps build a better relationship with your prospects by helping sales teams deliver comprehensive pitches tailored to each potential customer's needs.
Your reps benefit from intentional support throughout the sales cycle, from lead qualification to opening cold call to the very end of the sales funnel, and everywhere in between. The stats don’t lie:
- 42 percent of sales reps believe they have insufficient information before making their sales calls.
- 57 percent of respondents in this survey admitted their organization hasn’t established a clear sales methodology—or they aren’t sure if they have.
- 81 percent of sales executives say that sales content search and utilization is a top productivity improvement area.
There’s no denying it. Selecting a sales enablement software and improving your overall sales process can no longer be put off.
Not sure where to begin? Here’s a head start—we’ve compiled the top 14 sales enablement tools for 2024.
Looking for insights into lead qualification? Our article on MQL vs. SQL has you covered.
14 Best Sales Enablement Tools to Close More Deals
Sales enablement tools come in all shapes and sizes—unique functionality, different price points, and broad versus laser-focused purpose. Some focus on outreach and customer interactions, others on overall sales performance or rep training.
Every tool on this list is an amazing product/service, but remember that not every solution will be what your team needs. (We’ll talk about this later on, so don’t tune out.)
Now, to truly optimize your sales enablement strategy, it’s time to organize and automate as much as humanly possible. Here are the tools to help you do it:
1. Close CRM
Close is the perfect sales enablement tool to automate the follow-up and improve sales training. Our customer relationship management (CRM) system improves your team’s sales performance by organizing customer data, streamlining outreach, and ultimately increasing your close rate.
Close empowers your sales organization via its all-in-one, user-friendly software platform for fast, agile teams.
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How Close enables sales:
- Straight-forward customer data entry, shareable across your organization
- Call coaching—train, mentor, and assist reps during in-progress sales calls
- Sales and marketing automation tools that increase customer engagement
- Record, review, and use past sales calls to train new reps and track progress
- Robust sales reporting capabilities to inform each and every sale
- Close's iOS mobile app for seamless sales management on-the-go (Android version also released in January 2024). Plus, with the user-friendly interface of Close's mobile app, adding leads becomes a breeze. See the image below for a glimpse of the Adding Leads feature in Close's mobile app view.
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2. PandaDoc
This easy-to-use tool for sales documentation helps you keep an updated, dynamic library of proposals, contracts, quotes, invoices, and more. Plus, it allows you to get eSignatures and track usage.
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How PandaDoc enables sales:
- Lets you create pre-approved templates for quick creation of new sales documents
- Automates approval workflows
- Tracks when reps create, send, and get signatures on documents
- Integrates with other sales tools, like CRM software
3. Highspot
Highspot helps sellers engage their audience through advanced sales content management, training, and analytics. They organize plays, integrated communication, and dynamic sales training into one platform. This tool also includes AI features and analytics to help you see how reps use the materials you provide, and which pieces perform the best in different situations.
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How Highspot enables sales:
- AI search feature to find the right content at the click of a button, and quickly scan through results
- Highly organized content spots for documentation
- Sales analytics to see how prospects and customers use the content sent to them, and which pieces of content push prospects through the pipeline
- Option to add feedback that goes back to content owners
- Relevant training materials show up alongside content, meaning reps can quickly refer to training when creating and sending sales content
4. Showpad
This sales enablement platform combines content and training in one easy-to-access place. It also includes AI features to surface the right pieces of content and training materials at the right time.
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How Showpad enables sales:
- Helps unify marketing and sales efforts by providing data on which pieces of content are being used, and how effective they are
- AI-powered content recommendations based on seller usage, buyer engagement, and closed deals
- Intuitive training, coaching, and practice features with peer review and role-playing
- Automatic content syncing from CMS or DAM systems
5. Seismic
This enterprise-grade platform connects marketing, sales enablement, and sales teams and empowers them to create, deliver, and understand their content better than ever.
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How Seismic enables sales:
- Practical search feature with the ability to save, send, track, and present right from the results page
- Quick sharing and integrated chat for easy collaboration
- Microsite with individual landing pages for training materials
- Integrations with other tools bring relevant, on-demand training materials to users when they need them most
- Analytics show how your team is using the training material and content, as well as how prospects and customers engage with content
6. Brainshark
This training and sales enablement platform helps you prepare your reps for any situation they may face. It allows you to quickly create dynamic content that can be shared with the team and focuses especially on creating video training materials.
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How Brainshark enables sales:
- Video-based coaching, practice, and assessments to certify that reps are ready
- Automated scores and analysis powered with AI
- Analytics to track the progress and readiness of each of your sales team members
7. Bigtincan
This sales enablement platform is mobile-first, giving sales reps and leaders the ability to create and use training materials, build content, and share insights all from their mobile device. It includes a simple interface and easy collaboration features. They also offer tailored solutions for specific industries such as tech, finance, retail, life sciences, and government.
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How Bigtincan enables sales:
- Mobile app for sellers to complete learning activities on the go
- Adaptive, AI-powered learning gives the right training materials to the right person
- Create, edit, and share materials for customers
- Content management for over 150 file types, including HTML content and VR presentations
8. ClearSlide
This platform works as a hub for both sales and marketing content, organizing team collections and allowing for easy discoverability. It also includes advanced features such as email tracking, web conferencing, auto-log to your CRM, and guided selling.
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How ClearSlide enables sales:
- Recommended content and collections depending on the stage
- Content sharing and engagement data is automatically logged to your CRM
- Create tailored coaching materials and surface them for the sales reps that need them
- Insights into which pieces of content work best, and at what stage
9. Guru
Guru is a knowledge base platform first and foremost, but that gives it unique features for sales enablement. With real-time knowledge management for reps and sales leaders, Guru allows reps to have the sales content they need and shows leaders which content resonates best with their team.
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How Guru enables sales:
- Content delivered to reps within their workflow
- Easy content organization with boards, sections, and cards
- Reporting that shows which cards have been used most by reps, and what phrases reps are searching for most in the knowledge base
- Slack integration to capture SME answers and add them directly to the knowledge base
10. Slack
Slack enables your team to streamline conversations via channeled messaging and huddle calls, rather than wait on email or shouting across the room. Discuss sales opportunities in real-time to enhance team performance, and collaborate with the marketing team (and others) both internal and external to your organization.
How Slack enables sales:
- Channels to focus and organize your work life
- Real-time messaging and team huddle phone calls
- Share links, documents, videos—Slack can handle it all
- Collaborate with teams at other companies, just like you do your own
11. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a sales intelligence tool that helps you connect with new leads in less time. Instead of digging through websites or social media, discover the professional email addresses behind your target companies quickly and efficiently. The platform verifies emails, and all information is collected transparently from public sources.
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How Hunter.io enables sales:
- Save any emails to your leads list and export/import directly to your CRM
- Advanced filters by type, department, and data to find the contacts you need
- Discover verified email addresses, or a confidence score in percentage
- Check the public source along with the last discovery dates
12. Owler
This sales enablement solution optimizes your prospecting and sales results by providing exclusive company and industry insights. Use Owler to find competitors, leads, and up-to-date news that will empower your team to grow the pipeline and improve sales productivity.
How Owler enables sales:
- Push customized insights right to your CRM and email
- Find new prospects and qualify them for your pipeline
- Set sales triggers and automate tasks for customer engagement
13. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder helps you uncover your hidden leads by identifying the companies that are already visiting your site. By converting page views into pipeline, you are adding high-value leads to your outreach list. Sync the info to your CRM—and you’re off.
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How Leadfeeder enables sales:
- Turn anonymous traffic into company names and reveal their on-site behavior
- Create filters to segment the leads with the highest potential
- Search for company decision-makers in a comprehensive global database
- Sync visit data and intel with your CRM
14. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you target the right customers, understand key insights, and engage with prospecting leads. This tool taps into LinkedIn’s 675M+ member network to help grow your pipeline and increase win rates.
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How LinkedIn Sales Navigator enables sales:
- Connect with high-value prospects via advanced lead and company search
- Get relevant, real-time updates on your leads (including job changes)
- Smart Links presentations let you easily create and share sales content, while tracking who views what
- Organize leads with tags and notes that can sync to your CRM
- Save prospecting leads and accounts to your CRM automatically
These are the top sales enablement tools currently on the market, and all have distinct features and options that help them adapt to your specific needs. So, you can confidently choose the one(s) that fit your business best.
How to Choose the Right Sales Enablement Tools
After reading through the above, you might be thinking: Now what? With so many options, how do you know which sales enablement tools are right for you and your team? Here are some points to consider.
Growth Plans
Consider your trajectory. You should choose sales enablement solutions that can provide valuable support during your growth period—and beyond.
Maybe your plans include expanding into a new market, region, or industry. Maybe you want to revamp your sales outreach approach, or increase close rates by X percent. Maybe your growth is internal—scaling your sales team, upgrading training, or navigating a merger. Whatever your goals, enablement tools can help you achieve them—but which tools?
Certain tools are no-brainers. Just about every sales team on the planet can benefit from a robust and user-friendly CRM (like Close). This will streamline everything your sales team does to manage customer relationships, automate outreach, and improve sales intelligence. (Take the initiative and sign up for our no-strings-attached 14-day free trial now.)
Other tools are more ad-hoc and a la carte. They will benefit your team if the tool’s purpose complements your growth plans. For example: If your entire company is growing and you need to improve interdepartmental communication and content sharing, consider Slack, PandaDoc, and ClearSide.
If you plan to expand into a new industry or take on a new customer segment, you need intel and info, so choose accordingly. From our list, check out LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Owler. These will equip your team with key industry insights that support success.
Ultimately, once you have a firm grasp on your growth plans, work backwards to figure out exactly which tools will help you get there.
Size of Your Sales Team
As you scale your sales team, sales enablement must be a top priority.
As your team grows, realistic implications might include: communication issues, file-sharing and organizational problems, lack of comprehensive, individual sales coaching, and sales processes that become complex, sluggish, and inefficient. This is all complicated further if your company is remote (like we are).
If you are growing in this area, take this into account as you select your tools. Your inside sales team of five, all of whom see each other in the office every day, probably don’t need Slack. If you’re hiring up to a team of 15 and going fully remote? Slack might be a good addition to your toolbox.
So, consider your team. Where are you now in terms of employee numbers, and where do you expect to be in the near future? A sales team of five will probably require different enablement solutions than will a sales team of 500.
Or at least, the way they use them will be different.
Most of the solutions we listed above offer pricing plans based on your team size and the features you are looking for. Does your team of five really need the souped-up version of these already amazing tools? Probably not. Sometimes, less is more.
The size of your sales team is important to consider when picking out your shiny new tools … as is your onboarding process.
Current Onboarding Process
Take a hard look at your current onboarding process—and any related metrics, like employee turnover. Is your onboarding process truly setting your reps up for success within your organization?
If the answer is an easy yes, great! If you hesitate, or it’s an easy no, don’t worry—there’s hope.
Consider adding in specific tools to help with onboarding, or continued training. The key element here is support: You need to demonstrate to your new reps that you have the proper tools in place to support their continued career growth, and alleviate unnecessary pain points that are inherent to their jobs.
Stellar onboarding can also give you a competitive edge that can sell top recruits on your company. So, do it right.
How Much You’re Changing Your Process
Don’t rock the boat. Or do?
Selecting and implementing team-wide sales enablement solutions can create friction between decision-makers or sales reps.
Sometimes, however, it’s worth it. Sometimes that ecosystem is unhealthy, and your sales process needs to adapt in some way. As technology evolves, and the enablement tools offered become more and more responsive to your pain points and critical to your competitive agility, make sure that you don’t become so scared to rock the boat, that you miss the boat instead.
As you change your sales process, consider your strengths and weaknesses. Lean on your strengths, while you bring in the right enablement tools to patch up your weaknesses.
But remember: Sometimes less is more. Choose your tools carefully, with a long-term perspective for growth. And keep in mind both team and customer satisfaction. Don’t overwhelm anything. You do not want to go throwing in these tools haphazardly. That would be frustrating for all involved (not to mention, dangerous to your budget).
Your Sales Stack
Take inventory of your current sales stack, and consider how each sales enablement option will complement (or complicate) your workflow.
Leading tech products/services will frequently integrate with your other favorite tools. For example, Close integrates seamlessly with Slack, LeadFuze, and many more. Other companies—smaller niche options, or new startups—might not have this capability.
Here’s the bottom line: If you’re going to spend the time and money to incorporate a new tool, you want to make sure it’s adding significant value—while honoring the current process your sales stack has created.
Which Sales Enablement Metrics Should You Measure?
Now you know how sales enablement works and which tools can help you accomplish your goals.
But before you start a sales enablement strategy, you need to be prepared to measure the right metrics. That way, you can justify your investment to the powers-to-be, and find ways to tweak your sales enablement strategy and make it even more effective.
Here are some metrics you should measure:
- Sales cycle length: How long does it take to get from one end of the funnel to the other? Has the sales cycle length gotten shorter with better content management and training for your team?
- Time spent actively selling: Since improved productivity is a key aspect of sales enablement, tracking the time reps spend selling will show you whether your strategy is actually making them more productive.
- Content usage and engagement: How often do reps use the pre-approved content? Who are they sharing it to? How do those customers engage with the content?
- Quota attainment: What percentage of your reps regularly hit (or miss) their quotas? With sales enablement, how is this metric improving?
- Training content consumption: How much of the onboarding content have new hires completed? Where do your experienced sales reps stand in their performance on training materials? Which materials are being referred to more often, and which ones seem to have been forgotten?
- Time to find content: How long does it take for your reps to find the content they need, whether it be training materials, email templates, customer-facing content, or something else? This will show you how well your sales enablement content is set up and whether or not the content management tools you’re using are working for your team.
- Sales tool adoption: Whether it’s your CRM, sales enablement tools, calling and email tools, or anything else, measuring adoption will show you where your team needs more training or incentive.
To effectively track these metrics, you’ll need to first set a baseline before implementing your sales enablement strategy. This will show you where you’re starting from.
Then, as you implement new tools, create better content, and build more training materials, you’ll see how these metrics shift and improve for your team.
And hopefully, you’ll see your team acing their sales activities and crushing their quotas with the help of your sales enablement strategy.
Sales Enablement = Sales Success
So, we’ve convinced you. You get it. Sales enablement and customer engagement tools are key to the vitality and prosperity of your sales team—and, ultimately, your organization.
Sales readiness refers to how well your sales reps are equipped with the proper knowledge and skills to handle every stage of the customer journey. And what’s a critical step to reaching sales readiness? Yep. Sales enablement.
Microsoft Teams might work for a while to share relevant information between reps. At this point, Gmail might be sufficient to handle customer outreach. But with a growing team, increasingly competitive marketplace, and (frankly) just some brilliant technological solutions to your inefficient friction points, both big and small—you need to consider your options.
Dear Sales Management Team, this one’s on you.
First things first: you need a CRM—the beating heart of your sales team. Say hello to Close, your new best friend. Our platform helps automate customer engagement and streamlines your workflow. You can also record sales calls, review them later, and use them for training new reps and monitoring progress.
Check out our demo video and grab our free 14-day free trial.
