Level Up Your Sales Enablement Strategy With the Right Tech

By 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will upgrade their tech stacks in ways that enhance efficiency, performance, and customer insights—yet less than a quarter (22%) of their sales enablement budgets are currently allocated to technology. [1]

If you’re a sales enablement leader, you’ll likely play an important role in the adoption of technology tools. But to garner the support of decision-makers, you’ll have to be strategic. This Gartner research-based guide explains how to align specific tech tools with sales enablement tasks so you can build a case for investment as well as a more effective sales enablement strategy.

The sales enablement team is responsible for equipping new sales team hires with the skills they need to perform their jobs effectively. They also provide ongoing sales coaching and training to upskill reps with the necessary knowledge, skills, and behavior to improve sales performance. 

Technology can help your team by offering innovative methods for designing and delivering sales training modules as well as measuring learning effectiveness. Two emerging technologies in particular are well suited for these tasks: conversational AI and digital adoption platforms. 

Conversational AI

A conversational AI platform analyzes conversations between buyers and sales reps, using AI to deliver insights that improve interaction quality. This provides an important and previously unavailable feedback loop to train a new sales rep on the best way to respond to common questions and issues.

Conversational AI tool Gong.io gives recommendations to help sales reps improve tactics

In conversational AI platforms like the one shown above, call data can be integrated with sales coaching modules to ensure onboarding programs are harnessing customer insights. Sales engagement insights can also pair with survey software to get a quantitative and qualitative picture of sales rep performance, which can then be used to support further training and development.

Digital adoption

A digital adoption platform can replace traditional software training and speed up sales onboarding by guiding sales reps on how to use various sales applications within their daily workflows. These tools can increase the accuracy and compliance of tasks performed as well as engagement and adoption of new technology.

Digital adoption tool Product Fruits features a no-code user onboarding platform for quicker and easier onboarding

Digital adoption platforms, like the one shown above, integrate with all types of software tools to offer in-application guided learning to help sales reps learn how to navigate tech tools and perform their tasks quickly and effectively. 

To keep sales professionals on top of their game, sales enablement leaders and their teams need to create and distribute high-quality content in a timely and effective manner. Learning management system (LMS) platforms and generative AI are two technologies that can help your sales enablement team build content and distribute it across the organization.

LMS platforms

LMS software allows your sales enablement team to combine organizational expertise, knowledge, and experience to develop cohesive and insightful sales content. These platforms ensure the most up-to-date material is available to reps, is clearly coded to critical workflows, and is tagged to product lines, use cases, or competitive scenarios where sales training content works best.

LMS platform Thinkific’s drag-and-drop course builder helps create engaging training content

Generative AI

Generative AI platforms use deep learning to generate brand-new, completely original content. For sales enablement teams, this means using AI to create content for training programs, such as instructional videos with content that aligns with the brand voice (e.g., tone, style).

Generative AI tool Writer ensures content aligns with brand guidelines

The key to increasing sales productivity is to automate and simplify sales activity through tech tools. Research shows that organizations that offer a high-quality user experience for their sales reps are more likely to exceed sales goals. [1] To directly impact your organization’s sales productivity, you’ll want to add demo and sales enablement tools to your tech stack.

Demo software

Clients often want to see a product or service in action, but it takes time to set a demo with the right subject matter expert who aligns the value message, ensures the correct technical fit, and builds client confidence. Additionally, typical demonstrations lack the personalization a potential customer needs to differentiate one solution over another.

Demo tool VideoCom allows users to create personalized presentations and recordings

Demo tools allow your sales team to deliver personalized and shareable product or service demonstrations to customers whenever they want, reducing sales cycle length and improving productivity. They also provide valuable insight into buyer engagement with demos, allowing your team to identify ways to improve demo quality and measure enablement effectiveness. 

Sales enablement tools

Sales enablement software covers content and communication tools that help your sales team show off product information to prospective customers, engage potential leads, and overall boost sales productivity. These tools provide sales-enablement best practices that inform your team of what particular message tends to work best at each particular point in the sales cycle.

Sentiment analysis capability in sales enablement tool Outreach

In the above example of a sales enablement platform, sales professionals are given an overview of customer sentiment, specifically in the form of objections in email messages. Such capabilities can help train a sales representative on ways to respond that increase the likelihood of conversion.

To understand the impact of your sales enablement program across your organization as well as customer buying groups, you and your team must leverage analytics and insights. Emerging technologies such as data management and business intelligence can give you the data and insights you need to connect enablement efforts to business results. 

Data management

Data management platforms, like the one shown below, can collect, organize, and analyze sales data from various channels, such as software apps, customer databases, and social media, and present it in an easy-to-use format.

Data management solution Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps teams create and save custom views of their data to understand how prospects are engaging

Gartner expects data management systems to be essential for AI work in the future, especially for sales enablement leaders who want to elevate their insight across their entire tech stack. [1] One potential use case could be leveraging conversational AI to create on-demand sales role-plays based on transcripts of customer interactions.

Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) tools, like the one shown below, allow your sales enablement team to create dashboards where learning data insights can be aggregated. Pulling from multiple sources, your team can get real-time data throughout the training process.

BI tool FullStory helps users visualize data through custom dashboards

BI tools do this by delivering insights in real time and preventing the time-intensive activity of producing reports, spreadsheets, or summaries to make decisions. This allows enablement to make changes to training in-flight, respond to learners within a course when they have questions, and produce robust reports to showcase training impact to senior leaders. 

The recommendations in this article show how sales enablement tools can improve sales performance across your organization. Here are some resources to help you once you get the green light to invest in new software:

• How To Use GetApp's Comparison Tool To Find Your Best Software Fit

• Software Selection Criteria Template To Choose the Right Software

• Get the Most Out of Software Demonstrations With This 5-Point Checklist

• 5 Questions To Ask About Software Integrations

• Software Buying Tips

Note: The screenshots of applications included in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations.