It takes a lot to make it in sales. You need grit, empathy, drive, intimate knowledge of your customers, the capacity to bounce back after rejection, and, most importantly, the ability to familiarize yourself with practical sales tools for your business. Without sugarcoating it, selling is hard. However, with the current technology trends, selling has been flipped on its head by improvements in artificial intelligence, process automation, data analytics, and cloud technology.

You will always want to ascertain that you have the best sales enablement tools to assist you in accelerating sales. Here are some of the best sales tool categories to help you automate tiresome tasks, expand your team’s performance metrics, keep your pipeline flowing, or cause game-changing makeovers in particular facets of your sales process.

1. Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence tools allow you to discover and track contextual insights into a customer’s or prospect’s business. Sales intelligence tools are thus used to help you get accurate contact information for new leads, build custom lists to narrow the scope of searches, update records for existing prospects, and uncover insights by sorting out target customers. Here are some examples of sales intelligence tools:

D&B Hoovers

D&B Hoovers helps you gather insider data on new prospects with immediate needs.

DiscoverOrg/ZoomInfo

Configures behavioral triggers to provide you with real-time data on whether the targeted prospects are prepared to buy.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Since LinkedIn has access to the biggest troves of business, it has gathered plenty of information from user-submitted data on social connections and networks among diverse professionals. Accessing this sales enablement tool helps you unlock data, such as company size and more, that the system has gathered. This enables you to nurture leads through LinkedIn messaging.

2. CRMs

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps you manage and bring together your client interactions and relationships. It helps measure sales results, basic customer data, and most significantly, serves as the integration anchor for the other sales enablement tools. Here are some examples:

Salesforce

This has a full range of functionalities and integrates well with other services and apps to inspire a thriving third-party ecosystem. It permits a high level of customization and supports collaboration.

HubSpot

This takes care of every little detail — recording calls, managing data, and logging emails — freeing up crucial selling time in the process.

3. Sales Content Management

Sales content management helps you find, organize, and uphold the right sales assets. It allows you to manage your content into relevant categories — like customer success stories, messaging guidelines, product information, etc. — and makes the content easily discoverable via search. You can even add instructions and descriptions to help your sales reps use the content. Examples:

Allbound

It is an all-in-one platform that provides your sales team with training. It also organizes all your content so that your team will find and send the appropriate content at the right time. Additionally, it accelerates partner revenue by enabling your partner sales team.

Showpad

Enables you and your team to easily find, present, or share the perfect content for each situation. It helps boost your sales performance by inspiring and engaging customers with enhanced, action-inducing conversations.

Highspot

It helps you discover and act on relevant data or insight. Highspot can manage and deliver information for every single scenario. When integrated with Salesforce, it enables you to gain real-time information on how leads and prospects respond to your messaging.

HubSpot

This provides your business with an absolute look at your sales pipeline and also full access to a variety of marketing creation tools.

4. Automation

Any practical sales enablement approach is built around automation. Your sales reps are able to do healthier work when their lead nurturing occurs automatically. Automation tools help to get insights into your leads’ mindset. Here are some examples:

Customer.io

It is used to develop appropriate content and training established on the diverse fragments of the product user.

Eloqua

It fits in with your CRM to trigger automated messaging, enrich lead data, and track engagement with your website and content.

HubSpot

This helps you build optimized follow-up sequences, enabling your reps to make the most high-converting plays.

5. Sales Management

Being able to manage a sales process also means being able to handle those who run that process. That includes employee engagement, performance metrics, and sales contests to improve productivity. Examples of tools to help you make reliable decisions:

Hoopla

This sales enablement tool aims to build a culture of collaboration and excellence. Using gamification, data analytics, and other characteristics, Hoopla puts all members of your sales team on the same page and keeps them focused on achieving their goals.

You can find many more sales management tools listed here.

6. Sales Engagement

Sales engagement tools help manage, measure, and optimize how your sales team interacts with potential buyers. They do this by streamlining and scaling how your reps communicate with customers and providing actionable information that includes the most efficient outreach methods. Examples:

Outreach

It helps you track, analyze, pace, and automate your voice and email messages to your customers. By integrating it with your CRM, you will never need to manually log your messaging outcomes and activities, which frees your time to close more deals, book more meetings, and make more informed decisions.

SalesLoft

It provides you with the ability to establish, share, and execute your pattern of sales steps across phone, social, and email. It helps you make more connections.

HubSpot

This makes sales enablement collaboration easy. Additionally, it helps you connect all your marketing and sales efforts to bring out a more effective sales outcome.

7. Video Coaching and Practice

Video coaching tools allow your sales team to reinforce what is used during training and then validate whether they are fully equipped to apply the learned skills in front of a customer using coaching assessments and video-based practice. Example:

Brainshark

This sales enablement tool provides you with flexible training resources for your sales team along with practice and coaching modules to keep the sales reps sharp. It helps you and your team recognize strengths and weaknesses in the sales process and address any knowledge gaps you uncover.

The Bottom Line

Whether you are tracking performance metrics, organizing documents, or training new sales agents, the right sales enablement tools are sure to speed up the process. They give your sales team the lift required to analyze basic sales tactics and enhance your business’s overall productivity.