What are the best tools for sales enablement?

The best tool you can ever have is a great relationship with your sales leaders and super star sellers. Building empathy and truly understanding their challenges is critical to your success.

We use Highspot as our knowledge base and document repository. It works well for us and each product PMM can own and update their own product spot, which makes it easy to keep content refreshed. 

We also use Showpad for the online training element.

There are likely several tools out there that I do not know of, but the ones I liket:

- Highspot for hosting and managing sales content

- Guru for sharing messaging, content, and things like product information

- Loom can be a great way to do quick self-serve enablement

- Klue for sharing competitive battle cards

- Uberflip can be great for hosting specific content streams 

- Notion or Confluence are also great for creating sales content hubs if you don't have a huge budget for an enablement tool

I would recommend considering a few tools for the enablement stack (but try not to get crazy here - focus on what your team absolutely needs depending on the maturity of the org):

- Call recording to be able to listen to calls in a scalable and systematic way (like Gong, Salesloft, Zoom IQ)

- Sales collateral platform to host all content in one central location, track usage, versioning, analytics, etc. (like Highspot, Showpad)

- Competitive content platform for up-to-date information and competitor battle cards (like Klue, and Crayon) 

I'm a proponent of standardizing the core bill of materials PMM teams produce for sales enablement, both to keep your PMM team focused and avoid one-off requests, and to align with sales teams on what they need and what they can expect. Here are some of the foundational materials that I've found to be most essential at improving the sales team's confidence positioning and selling my products. Depending on what works best for the sales team, I either package all of these components into a cohesive sales playbook, or keep them as separate assets.

• Market Primer: Summarizes 1) define the market in which we play, 2) the market context/dynamics that are impacting our buyers, 3) the market problems that keep our target audience up at night, 4) why traditional approaches to solving the those problems fall short, and 5) to summarize the competitive landscape.

• Persona Guide: Guidance on ideal customer profiles (qualification criteria & characteristics of companies that make a good fit/bad fit), sample customer org charts + the key personas you target. The latter should include sample job titles, key responsibilities, their goals, key challenges, and their tech stack (useful for B2B tech companies).

• Prospecting Email Templates & Call Scripts: I realize this is a tactical deliverable and in some companies your demand gen team may own this, but it's wayyyyy more efficient for someone in marketing to create good templates and scripts for your global sales team to use, vs. each sales rep needing to roll their own.

• Discovery Guide: What to ask, listen for and say to qualify early-stage prospects in/out and help your sales reps confidently navigate discovery meetings.

• First Call Deck (and gold-standard video recording): Used as a vehicle for discovery + to share your POV in under 10 minutes, answering questions like "Why Change?", "Why Our Company?", "Why Now?".

• Exec Positioning Deck: A version of your POV/pitch geared toward an exec/c-level audience.

• Cheat Sheets: These can take many different forms depending on your sales plays, but think of these as a high-level, 2-3 page summary of the main things a sales rep needs to be able to quickly reference to position your product, use cases, or differentiators. High skim-value is a key guiding principle here.

• Competitive Battlecards: How competitors position themselves, their strengths & weaknesses, our differentiators, objection handling, trap-setting questions, and real-talk guidance on where to expect competitive friction (to help your sales team qualify out or steer away from points of weakness).

• Demo Scripts (and gold-standard video recording): Scenario-based demos that show how your product solves customer problems and addresses use cases you've uncovered through discovery.

• Economic Value Calculators: Interactive tools to measure and communicate the ROI of your product.

• Sales Play Guidance: this can take multiple forms and fits best in a formal sales playbook, but I like to package up guidance on what to do at each step of the buyer's journey. For example, how to research your prospect's key business priorities, how to prospect into an account, what to propose as a next step from a successful discovery call, when to run a demo, how to pull together a proposal, pricing guidance, etc.

Outside of sales tools, you may also want to look into sales enablement software platforms, which can provide an intranet portal to house all of your sales enablement content + make it easy for sales reps to find and use them. Most of these platforms also offer analytics and tracking on sales enablement asset usage, so you can see how the content PMMs create is used. I've used Showpad across two companies now, but there are several other software tools in this space. Highspot is another well-known vendor in this category.

There are many ways to drive successful sales enablement -- paying for technology can definitely help, but there are low cost ways as well.

Here are sales enablement tools and approaches I've used as a product marketer:

• Email and Slack: While simple, email and Slack are great ways to keep sales and other cross-functional teams updated on the latest messaging and content you've created, and to reinforce launched initiatives and ongoing programs. We've had weekly and bi-weekly enablement newsletters which PMM and other teams contribute to. We also have a dedicated Slack channel for marketing to share latest content, events, sales play performance, etc with sellers and other teams.

• Meetings: If you're launching a new program, first call deck, messaging, or something that would benefit from a voice over and dedicated time, then doing it via a call is a great way to get everyone aligned. If your business / sales has All Hands calls, those are a great place to slot in. In past experience, I've also hosted monthly "community calls" for enablement. Currently, our marketing team also consolidates updates for sales in a weekly deck that is presented in weekly sales team calls.

• Lessonly: At Salesloft, we use Lessonly for certifications and trainings. For example, Tier 1 and Tier 2 product launches, buyer personas, first call deck, etc. This is a great way to not only educate but drive action, helping sellers put what they learned into practice. You can also track who completed the training.

• Seismic: Our content management platform we use is Seismic. This is our one stop for all sales and marketing assets. Messaging, demos, and any other assets are consolidated here. Sellers can send content directly to buyers from Seismic, and you can see usage and opens.

• Salesloft: We use Salesloft a lot at Salesloft. As a PMM, I can create email templates for our latest sales plays, launches, and content that sellers can easily slot into their email cadences. In addition, we have call recording capabilities. As a PMM, I can create words and phrases to track based on the latest first call deck, messaging, or competitors and see how they're being used in conversations.

• Clozd: We use Clozd as our win/loss reporting platform. We can take insights from these interviews and distill them for sellers to help them understand what drives closed deals and what's contributing to lost deals. Based on this information, we create competitive marketing campaigns or sales enablement programs to drive up win rates.