4 Sales Enablement Technology Trends You Need to Adopt Right Now
As markets become more competitive and the sales cycle becomes more complex, the need for better weapons grows.
Now that AI and automation have become mainstream, this arms race has given sales leaders more tools to improve sales effectiveness than ever before.
Here, we’ve condensed all of the terrific options out there into four key sales enablement technology trends and how organizations are using them today.
These B2B sales enablement technology tools can be integrated or built into your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. They allow you to streamline how your reps do their jobs. If done correctly and optimally, they’ll fuel success and give you the ability to go toe to toe with the competition – and win.
1. Relationship Mapping
If nothing else, sales is about relationships. Sales reps have to know how to analyze and navigate complex relationships within a target account. They need to know who’s who, and find the quickest path to decision makers.
Relationship mapping is a sales enablement solution that goes beyond looking at a static org chart. The process is designed to show not just who reports to who, but who influences who. It’s designed to highlight supporters (contacts who view the sales effort favorably and are willing to help) and blockers (those who will just get in the way).
All of this is done dynamically. You can drag and drop contact and account data. Plus, you’ll have the relationship map updated automatically (as well as your CRM data).
The result is an insider’s look into the inner workings of a target account. When used as a part of an account-based sales strategy, the impact on sales performance can be tremendous.
2. Conversation Intelligence
Selling is also about conversations. During the course of an average engagement, reps will talk to anywhere from 6 to 10 decision makers (and the contacts who lead the way to those DMs).
One method a sales enablement team can use to analyze those conversations and other customer engagements is conversation intelligence. It also allows you to pick out what’s working and what isn’t. This is usually an AI-powered sales enablement tool that examines the phone calls, emails, texts, social media messages, and other recorded conversations. The tool then identifies trends, red flags potential problem areas, and compiles activity metrics.
The outcome is a quantifiable look at how well sales teams are communicating with buyers. Sales conversations and buyer interactions can yield a treasure trove of actionable insights into the buyer journey and how the sales team can best plug into it.
And since much of it is automated through your CRM, the people-power required to fuel it is minimal. If you’re already collecting data on your sales and marketing efforts – and you should be – the rest is simple.
Understanding how your sales professionals are communicating with potential customers can unlock a wide range of improvements to your sales process.
3. Revenue Intelligence
Sales managers want their teams to generate as much revenue as possible. But the problem sales organizations run into is that the data they need to find this revenue is often incomplete, siloed across multiple teams/business units, and outdated.
Revenue intelligence is a sales enablement function that combines data from a multitude of sources, all across the organization, and analyzes it to tell sales leaders how to best pursue revenue growth.
In other words, these sales tools give you the best picture of where the money is and how to get to it.
A good revenue intelligence sales enablement platform will use AI and CRM integration to collect data from multiple channels and keep it up-to-date with minimal human input required. That doesn’t eliminate the need for sales reps and marketing teams to input data. However, it does make the process much easier.
When combined with other sales enablement technologies, revenue intelligence can offer a 360-degree picture of how to best interact with a target account.
4. Sales Onboarding
It’s no secret that sales onboarding – getting new reps up to speed on product and territory – is the Achilles heel of many sales organizations today.
The faster you can give reps the product knowledge and sales skills they need, the quicker they’ll hit quota. This makes it more likely you’ll hit quarterly goals.
Sales onboarding technology has blossomed over the past few years. Sales teams have rushed to shorten time-to-territory and time-to-quota metrics. The latest development in sales onboarding tech is to use reinforcement and on-demand learning. This provides an always-present way for reps to get the resources they need to train and improve. It also allows them to make sure that newfound knowledge doesn’t decay.
At the end of the day, a sales enablement strategy isn’t very effective without the tools to make it happen. That doesn’t mean you need all the bells and whistles. After a certain point, sales reps will have too many shiny tools to make good use of without sales productivity dropping off a cliff.
Finding the best sales enablement technology tools to power up the selling process is a key duty that leaders must embrace.
Effective sales enablement fits the goals and unique characteristics of the organization. Find the sales enablement software that best fits how your team works. Use it to improve your team and then teach your reps how to use it to its best potential.