What tools or technologies do you use for sales enablement, and how do they support your initiatives?

Technology to support sales enablement will vary significantly, with key factors around product marketing’s responsibilities, size of the organization, and budget. Less is more, as ultimately, you want to ensure relevancy and team utilization (“team” utilization was intentional!).  CRM systems, sales enablement platforms (from content management to account-based marketing), and collaboration and communication tools are some of the most relevant groupings. 

CRMs: 

Salesforce and HubSpot are well-known CRMs for sales, serving as a source of truth for prospects and current customers. When developing case studies, much of the data will come from your CRM, such as segmentation, geography, industry vertical, product usage, and conversation highlights. These systems are robust for strategic planning and execution.

Sales Enablement Platforms: 

Seismic (for enterprise) and Guru (for SMBs) are popular content management platforms. Similar to CRMs, it's important to have a source of truth for sales enablement content. This is the go-to repository for sales on internal enablement (sales playbooks, buyer personas, battlecards) and customer-facing collateral (demos, presentations, case studies, data sheets, solution briefs, webinars).

Account-Based Marketing Platforms: 

6Sense, DemandBase, and many other ABM platforms are popular, and with companies still getting started to employ this discipline, it’s important to determine what is best for your team.  This is a significant endeavor (one I’m fairly passionate about!) between sales and marketing from strategy to execution across regions.

Collaboration & Communication Tools: 

Zoom, Microsoft, Google, and Slack are typically top of mind on communication and collaboration tools, and not specific to only sales and marketing. Additionally, Confluence and Coda are strong tools for internal documentation and knowledge sharing. If you are new to these, think of an internal Wikipedia but much better! They offer turn-key templates that can be used instead of a sales enablement platform depending on your business needs or to augment what already exists.