What is Sales Enablement? Strategies, Solutions and Process

Although top sales companies and professionals can’t seem to agree on a single authoritative definition, sales enablement is simply the term and concept for empowering sales reps and agents. In short, sales enablement means strategically uniting the relevant information with the right salespeople at the most opportune time to help address pain points, handle objections, and close deals more effectively.

Sales enablement can take many forms: providing SDRs with relevant blog posts and whitepapers, creating scripts and product sheets to help reps hit the important notes during calls, drafting email templates to guide prospects through the sales funnel, and more. The important part is that your sales team has exactly the materials they need in order to create more sales opportunities where leads are efficiently qualified into prospects that eventually turn into customers.

Part of the confusion around sales enablement is that the term is used for so many different activities: from supplying representatives with the tools they need to assessing their performance. Sales enablement has been mentioned in conjunction with everything from training and mentoring to customer relationship management (CRM) software and other technological solutions. In truth, sales enablement means all of these things and more, which is why it’s such an essential activity for organizations to perform.

Why is Sales Enablement Important for a Sales Organization?

Sales is a fast-paced, difficult field and sales representatives often struggle to maintain a consistent level of performance. According to a study by sales research firm Aberdeen Group, a full two-thirds of sales reps failed to reach their yearly goals.

In the face of these challenges, your sales representatives will need all the help that they can get. Some examples of how sales enablement can benefit your organization include the following:

• Automating data collection about interactions with prospects in order to save time and reduce human error.
• Using analytics to identify leads with the most promise or potential for a particular SDR or company.
• Building a centralized hub for the most up-to-date, high-quality sales content, including white papers, case studies, demo videos and more.
• Creating reminders and message templates to follow up with prospects.

How Does Sales Coaching Fit Into Sales Enablement?

No sales rep is an island. Behind every great sales representative is a series of coaches, mentors and colleagues who helped that person learn and improve. Coaches can provide advice and guidance on any number of areas, including how to move deals through the sales funnel, how to assess the state of your sales pipeline, and how to find the right prospects with the right messaging.

Sales coaching is a vitally important part of sales enablement. The goal of sales enablement is to give your SDRs better access to the information they need to convert leads into prospects and prospects into sales. When coaches, mentors, and managers have insight into each rep’s individual situation, they can move from general advice into the specifics of how to handle leads and opportunities and how to use the available tools and technologies.

Surveys have confirmed that sales coaching benefits not only the immediate recipients of coaching, but the organization as a whole. Research by the Sales Executive Council, for example, has found that providing coaching to the middle 60 percent of your sales reps can improve your entire team’s performance by up to 19 percent.

Sales enablement has completely changed over the past several years. While the definition of the term sales enablement might have originally referred to functional processes like CRM optimization or providing reps with content, sales enablement has truly evolved into a movement. 

This post will define sales enablement in 2025 and offer some key sales enablement resources that your team can start using right away to drive more revenue.

The Definition of Sales Enablement in 2025

When we originally partnered with Andy Paul to launch The Sales Enablement Podcast we had a feeling that there was a desire for a great podcast on sales enablement, but we weren’t 100% sure what audience reaction would be. It has since become the #1 podcast on sales enablement, providing tens of thousands of monthly listeners with a wide range of advice.

Andy—and his many seasoned guests—have been instrumental in changing the way that people think about sales enablement. So what’s the definition of sales enablement in 2025?

According to Andy Paul, sales enablement can be defined by “everything that enables salespeople with the information, acumen, skills and tools they need to have more knowledge-based sales interactions that are valuable to buyers.”

The first word of Andy’s quote is crucial: “everything.” This wide definition of sales enablement encapsulates businesses’ growing desire—and responsibility to do “everything” they can to enable success.

The best salespeople I’ve met all have one thing in common: they are fiercely dedicated to self-improvement. They are never content with just making quota. They are willing to do whatever it takes to hit their numbers out of the park. And while salespeople have a responsibility to self-educate and consistently improve, businesses have a responsibility to their sellers, to enable them to perform at their best. 

Who Owns Sales Enablement?

One of the key questions I hear discussed is “who should own sales enablement?” At some companies there is a specific role that owns sales enablement. At other companies functions of sales enablement are owned by a variety of roles including sales managers, marketers and sales ops. But we’re seeing a new trend evolve. 

Sales enablement is increasingly being owned by revenue operations roles or RevOps. RevOps leaders often go far beyond traditional tasks associated with sales ops (e.g. cleaning data) and will have a crucial role in enabling reps with the technologies and messaging they need to succeed.

Sales Enablement Strategy in 2025

While sales enablement strategies vary depending on company size and industry, there are some core components to sales enablement that seem fairly universal. Here are some primary functions of sales enablement:

Making Data Clean and Actionable

Sales data is worthless if it’s not accurate and actionable. It’s now more important than ever that this data is actionable in real time. There are a variety of tools that capture data in CRMs automatically. But it’s important to ensure that reps can use this data to have more effective conversations.

Provide Relevant Content

It’s important that sales reps know what content they have at their disposal. Marketers often spend tons of resources creating amazing content, only to have that content exist in a silo, never to be used by sales reps. A core function of sales enablement is ensuring that reps have access to content and—far more importantly—know when to use that in context. 

Our own tool Moments™ goes a step further and can automatically serve up relevant content based on key phrases mentioned during conversations.

Lead Prioritization

Reps need to know which leads to respond to first. There are a lot of different ways to help reps prioritize leads. For years, marketing automation systems have enabled lead scoring mechanisms. But the next evolution is to simply provide reps with a prioritized list of tasks based on back-end algorithms. So that when reps start their day they’ll be able to know exactly who to reach out to. And when a new lead comes in, these leads can be automatically reprioritized.

Sequence Automation/Optimization

One of the most powerful ways to enable sales success is to optimize sequence touch patterns and messaging based on what’s been proven to work. Solutions like Guided Selling can ensure that reps always take the next best action in sequences that are optimized in real-time.

The Role of AI in Sales Enablement

Another key way that sales enablement is changing in 2024 is that artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role. AI-powered solutions can automatically enable reps with the guidance they need to have more successful sales conversations. 

Imagine a world where the moment a buyer mentions a competitor, a rep sees a battlecard appear in real time showing a proven talk track for winning against that competitor. 

Or let’s say a buyer mentions a concern about implementation time. Imagine if a rep could automatically receive a link to a case study showing how a customer achieved lightning fast results. 

This is now possible with Moments™ by Revenue.io. Moments is just one solution that’s transforming the way companies are envisioning sales enablement.

Sales Enablement = Buyer Enablement 

Sales enablement has changed because sales has changed. Once ubiquitous high-pressure closing tactics are now relegated to used car lots. Why? Because the buyer’s journey has shifted dramatically. As Google told the world in their now-famous Zero Moment of Truth whitepaper, buyers are doing way more research up front. And when they reach out to a salesperson, they are often armed with intelligent questions, buying criteria and well-thought-out potential objections. 

To successfully influence this new breed of buyer, salespeople need to align their sales methodologies to exactly where buyers are within their journey.

At the core, sales enablement and buyer enablement are two sides of the same coin. The goal of sales enablement at any company should be empowering sellers to better understand their customers. By understanding buyer personas, and predicting the various questions and objections that could surface in each conversation salespeople can knowledge-based interactions that result in positive outcomes for buyer and seller alike. And by leveraging content that maps to personas and stages of the buying process, salespeople can overcome buyer objections and help buyers through the customer lifecycle faster.

When the right sales enablement process is in place it can seem like magic. But getting there requires deep collaboration between various departments including Sales, Marketing, IT and more.

How Companies Can Enable Sales in 2025

As I mentioned, sales enablement is not a tactic, it’s a movement. Depending on what your company is selling, tactics and priorities are bound to shift. But to help you get started, I’m going to outline some proven ways to enable sales reps to provide buyers with more value. 

Map Sales Enablement Content Across the Customer Lifecycle

As Director of Lifecycle Marketing here at Revenue.io, one of my top focuses is ensuring that our sales team has content that resonates with buyers across their entire journey. To do this, it’s necessary to know exactly who the personas are. It’s also important to track, in your CRM, where buyers are at in the customer lifecycle. We know that a VP of marketing at a Healthcare company who is deep in the evaluation stage doesn’t want to receive the same messaging as a sales operations manager who just found our product in search. 

Here are some different types of sales content that can be used at different stages in the customer lifecycle to move deals forward. Remember that nearly all marketing content should be used to enable sales in one way or another.

Awareness/Discovery Stage

In this stage, it’s safe to assume that your prospective buyer knows little-to-nothing about your products or services. The goal here is customer education.

• A killer website
• Display ads that build brand awareness
• PPC
• Search engine optimization
• Awareness emails from marketing

Consideration/Engagement Stage

At this stage, buyers are already aware of their pain points and have begun researching solutions. They are likely aware of your product. As such, the name of the game is building brand equity while ensuring that salespeople are enabled to have the right conversations with prospects. 

• Premium content: ebooks, infographics and webinars
• Call scripts/talking points for discovery calls
• Engagement email copy for sales reps
• How-to videos

Decision Stage

During the decision stage of the customer lifecycle, buyers are often actively looking at competitive products and, in the case of B2B sales, building consensus among other key decision makers. During this stage, it may appear to customers that marketing has “taken a hike”, as interactions are handled by sales. However, the truth is that Marketing should be heavily involved in enabling reps during the decision making process with:

• Battle cards vs. specific competitors
• Buyers’ guides
• Case studies
• Sales Decks

Customer Success

Sales enablement does not stop once a prospect becomes a customer. It’s important to ensure that customer success reps are enabled with messaging that can help them retain customers as well as up-sell/cross-sell additional offerings. At this stage, sales enablement content might include:

• Customer newsletters
• In-app messaging/offers
• LinkedIn and display ads highlighting cross-promotions
• Awareness emails highlighting new features and offerings
• Reliance on Voice of Customer software for vital customer feedback to incorporate into the above

Enable the Transfer of Knowledge to Sales

Providing sales people with the right external messaging and sales content is mission critical. But it’s just as important to have a process in place for facilitating the transfer of internal knowledge. Here are some key categories of internal knowledge that companies should be enabling their reps with.

Tribal Sales Knowledge

Ramping new reps is no easy task. But some of the most successful sales organizations have taken onboarding seriously, and they’ve taken some key steps to catalyze the onboarding process. Having a repository of the best calls, organized into categories can give reps the ability to self-educate. Enabling reps with the ability to learn from how top reps have solved pain points and overcome objections is a great way to pass on tribal sales knowledge, scale success and help reps reach their full potential faster. There are lots of ways to set up a library like this. But our conversation intelligence tool ConversationAI delivers one right out of the box.

Product Knowledge

Companies that have a lot of different products or companies that offer complex software solutions need to make sure that reps are always up-to-date on which product capabilities are GA and which are right around the corner. Far too often, product teams work in silos and reps have little insight into which features are in development. This is unfortunate, because knowing which features are right around the corner can sometimes make the difference between winning deals and losing them.

As an example, imagine that you’re selling a solution for hosting virtual events. Now suppose a hot prospect at a key account has a requirement that it integrates with Zoom. Suppose your solution doesn’t currently integrate with Zoom, but your product team is working hard on building an integration and it will be done in a month. Imagine the difference between your sales team knowing this information and not knowing it. It’s likely the difference between winning a deal and losing one.

Competitor Knowledge

In B2B sales or high-ticket B2C sales, it’s important to enable salespeople with the requisite information that they need to win deals against competitors. Salespeople should know exactly why your company has won or lost historical deals vs. specific competitors. They should also be armed with battle cards that reveal each competitor’s weaknesses (not to mention strengths!). And outline the best strategy for beating particular competitors.

One trick that I’ve successfully implemented at companies is competitor tracking in Salesforce. Reps should be enabled to easily mark which competitors they are going up against on each deal. This allows marketers to track which competitors are most closely associated with closed/won and closed/lost deals, as well as which competitors are coming up most often. They can then prioritize battle cards and other content that helps enable salespeople to win deals against competitors.

Customer Knowledge

One of the best ways to enable salespeople to succeed is by letting your customers do the talking, so to speak. Building up a repository of customer testimonials and case studies can help reps make their case. After all, the best salespeople are masters at building trust with clients. But they’re still salespeople. Highlighting customer testimonials helps companies see how similar companies have achieved results. In terms of format, I’ve found that videos are especially powerful, but case study one sheets can get the job done. And as your marketing team builds a library of case studies, it helps to organize them by industry, company size, competitors mentioned and other factors that can enable salespeople to find the most relevant case study, testimonial or customer reference to help move each particular deal forward.

Help Reps Build Business Acumen

Early in their career, salespeople might have an awesome set of core competencies: great storytelling, listening skills, rapport building and helpfulness. But business acumen, that ability to understand a customer’s business model and pain points well enough to be seen as an expert consultant, that’s something that tends to come with time. However, the best sales coaches can help their teams build business acumen faster. There are several key sales enablement tactics that I’ve seen work wonders for helping unseasoned reps build business acumen.

Role Playing

Role playing is a powerful tactic in sales. The idea is that the sales coach can take on the role of each key persona. They can present the rep with a series of industry- or role-specific pain points and objections and give the rep the opportunity to try to book a meeting or close a deal. After each role playing exercise, the manager should offer the rep constructive feedback that can help them better position themselves as a subject matter expert and informed consultant.

Peer to Peer Call Reviews

Recording phone calls should be a key part of any sales enablement program. Once calls are recorded, try having sessions where reps review each others’ calls. This can help them work as a team to share expertise and build business acumen faster.

Lead by Example

When we recently brought in a new class of sales reps to Revenue.io, one of our lead sales managers did something I’d never seen before during an orientation. He gave a real demo to a real prospect. Live. As it turned out, the call went well. And in the process, he showed the new reps his approach to selling. It’s one thing to talk about your approach to selling, but leading by example is a fantastic way to help reps learn which behaviors to imitate in order to have successful calls.

Enable Reps with Sales Technology

A key part of sales enablement revolves around giving reps tools that empower them to be more productive and more effective. But sales enablement technology isn’t just for sales reps. It’s just as important to ensure that managers have tools that help them do a better job of prioritizing their efforts and coaching reps to success.

There are lots of different sales enablement tools that can help sales teams succeed, including:

• Sales dialers that help reps dial more prospects each day while logging vital data in CRMs automatically. 
• It’s also now possible to offer reps real-time guidance in the context of calls.
• Local Presence helps reps maximize connection rates by dialing prospects from local area codes
• Guided selling solutions help reps follow cadences, sequences and sales playbooks. These tools can help reps focus on the next best action they should be taking at all times to move deals forward.
• Sales analytics can help managers identify which reps to coach in order to hit monthly, quarterly and yearly sales targets.
• Conversation intelligence can automatically surface important phone calls so managers can know which call recordings to listen to first. Great calls can also be added automatically to best practice libraries so reps can learn how A-players are beating key competitors and handling tough sales objections. 
• Chat bots can use artificial intelligence to talk to pre-qualify leads before they speak to human reps. 
• Meeting Schedulers can be used to book more meetings. Reps can make it easy for prospects to choose a time that works best for them. These solutions often integrate with the rep’s calendar.

These are only some of the existing sales enablement solutions that are available to sales teams in 2025. Each year, new sales enablement solutions surface, offering powerful opportunities to remove friction from the sales process.

What Every Sales Leader Should Know About Sales Enablement

Sales enablement helps sales leaders achieve higher quota attainment, more revenue, higher sales velocity, and increased lead conversion rates.

Since your organization can no longer afford to avoid sales enablement, we’ve included five ways tips to help you quickly get your sales enablement program up and running.

1. Sales Enablement Isn’t Training nor Coaching

Training and coaching salespeople are one of the key processes of every successful sales team.

On the one hand, training gives reps current product knowledge and sales best practices. Coaching, on the other, provides reps with the guidance and accountability they need to stay on track of their goals and tasks.

One of the most common misconceptions about sales enablement is sales leaders believe it’s a new fancy way of naming sales training or coaching. This turns out to be false.

To start, in a sales enablement program, sales coaching is still carried out by managers. There are no changes in that process.
What a sales enablement program changes are the way sales reps are trained. By centralizing all the content used in a training program, including the training itself, all sales reps within an organization can access the information anytime and anywhere. If there’s a video or a cold call framework the team is encouraged to use, all reps can access that information from the sales enablement platform.

This training doesn’t have to be just about sales; it can be about anything reps need to know to improve their skills and knowledge. According to David Brock, President of Partners In EXCELLENCE and author of The Sales Manager’s Survival Guide, a common sales enablement program should include:

• A monthly training with the latest changes carried out in the product
• A monthly general sales training
• A quarterly training with new tools and technology adopted by the company
• A quarterly training with the latest news in the market and industry
• A quarterly training on management and project management
• A quarterly training on critical thinking and problem solving

2. Sales Enablement Improves Your Sales Training

As we have mentioned before, sales training is an important process among sales teams in every organization. The problem is, it can be an inefficient process.

First and foremost, sales training programs tend to be one-on-one. This process not only takes a lot of time from the trainer (which could be used making sales); it’s also not scalable. Every time a new rep needs training, the sales manager needs to repeat the same concepts over and over.

The second problem with most sales training programs is they tends to be reactive; they are never done before a problem comes up, but rather after a common problem keeps coming up.

Under a modern sales enablement program, training is done on scale: the training is recorded or written once, and then it can be consumed by any sales as many times as needed. This scalability also allows companies to develop many different types of training for different sales scenarios. By using an “if this then that” logic, once a problem shows up, the sales rep can receive the training right away. This is both efficient and proactive.

This also frees up the time from the sales managers so they can spend their time working on their sales and focus on other higher value activities.

3. Sales Enablement Empowers Your Sales Reps

Motivation is one of the most important aspects of any employee-management relationship, especially for sales reps. Given most sales rep often face rejection, it’s important to empower them to take action, foster an optimistic attitude, and develop a curious mindset.

One way to empower sales rep is to help them understand the core competencies of their territory and customers. Sharing this information with them and keeping it public and centralized can help them focus their sales pitches and improve its effectiveness.
Another way to help your sales reps is to give them access to key tools, such as CRMs, to access data sets to make business decisions and automate key processes. Sales enablement also helps reps analyze businesses and territories instead of blindly dialing into their markets every day without a clear idea of who they are calling.

Finally, a sales enablement program can help you measure your sales reps performance, keeping them accountable and motivated to hit their quotas. Since only 35% of a salesperson’s day is devoted to core selling activities, the measurement of your sales reps can help you find the bottlenecks that keep your sales reps from the core selling activities.

Sales calls are only one of the metrics you can measure. Many successful organizations with a strong sales enablement culture tend to measure metrics such as:

• Calls-to-opportunity (how many meaningful calls happened with the right people in an account)
• Emails per day and calls per day
• Time spent prospecting
• Conversations per day
• Revenue dollars versus booking dollars
• Length of sales cycle
• ACV or ARR per rep

This kind of empowerment makes companies with best-in-class sales enablement strategies experience 13.7% annual increase in deal size or contract value.

4. Sales Enablement Helps Align Sales and Marketing

Large businesses face the problem of siloing and team misalignment. This is especially true for sales and marketing teams. It’s common for a marketing team to develop a successful lead generation campaign which ends up going nowhere because the sales team doesn’t follow up with the leads. Misalignment is such a big problem it’s estimated sales and marketing misalignment costs businesses $1 trillion each year in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts.

CRM tools can help sales teams find companies that fit their goals as well as bring new leads to the reps as soon as the former convert. But even if sales reps get new relevant leads, they can’t keep up with the information overload. According to the Aberdeen Group, sales reps spend up to 43 hours every month searching for information. That’s over a week every month in which sales reps spend doing something that’s not related to making sales.

Given the immense amount of information most sales reps have to deal with, a sales enablement program can allow the marketing teams to send sales reps all the relevant information they need when they are about to contact a lead. This not only can save them time, but also improve the effectiveness of their pitch.

According to SiriusDecisions, when sales and marketing teams are aligned they can deliver 19% more growth. Wheelhouse Advisors found that businesses whose sales and marketing teams are aligned achieve 208% higher marketing revenue when compared to misaligned teams.

5. Sales Enablement Fosters Transparency

Lack of transparency is a common problem among large businesses with complex sales processes. Business transparency isn’t just a moral issue: a study done by Harvard Business School found transparency in a restaurant led to a 17% increase in customer satisfaction and 13% faster service when customers and cooks can see each other.

By the same token, when everyone in the organization can see what the sales team is doing and how they impact the bottom line, you can expect better alignment with sales process best practices, more collaboration, and increased confidence among the different teams within your company in the sales team’s success. In other words, sales should be everyone’s business.

A sales enablement program can allow the whole company to participate in the sales team’s mission by sharing with them all the information they have on their prospects and customers. For example, the marketing team can share all the content consumed by the prospects as well as information on their needs and problems. The support team, on the other hand, can share unique information about their questions and doubts.

This kind of company-wide transparency can help sales reps find new product needs and competitive product tactics directly from their buyers.

Ready to level up your sales enablement strategy? Explore our comprehensive guide to discover the tools, tactics, and insights that drive sales success. Read it now and start empowering your team today!

What is sales engagement software?

Put simply, sales engagement software helps your reps engage with buyers. A good platform will help reps reach out not only on the phone but also via text, voicemail, email, and video meetings. But making these engagement activities frictionless is just the tip of the iceberg.

Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide for Sales Engagement Applications outlines eight essential capabilities of sales engagement solutions to meet the growing demands of revenue teams.

1. Remove complexity from sales sequences and increase adherence to sales playbooks.
2. Make the quality and speed of interactions significantly better by leveraging buyer intent data points.
3. Automate the onus of manual and tedious data entry tasks on sellers.
4. Make messaging recommendations based on the circumstances specific to each buyer and selling situation.
5. Adherence to data and compliance regulations.
6. Make it easier for sellers to execute actions across channels with integrations.
7. Analyze data to ensure sellers are using the right workflows and assets.
8. Get the most out of the existing tech stack.

Sales engagement solutions that meet these requirements enable sellers to achieve maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort through better workflows. For example, reps can do their work with fewer clicks, plan better, and ensure maximum CRM adoption.

So it’s no wonder that 51% of B2B companies currently have sales engagement software, and another 13% plan to add it to their tech stack this year.

What should you look for in sales engagement software?

There are a lot of technical requirements out there, but to keep it simple, great sales engagement software should help you with the “three Ps”:

1) Productivity

Reps spend less than 36% of their time selling. However, with the widespread adoption of sales engagement software, this is set to change as companies invest in new ways to increase sales productivity. Companies are using sales dialers to automate key processes like dialing and leaving voicemails, and sales dialers are especially powerful if they can automatically log data in your CRM without requiring manual effort from reps (e.g., a Salesforce dialer). To supercharge your reps’ productivity, your sales engagement software should include features like:

• Automated data logging
• Inbound call tracking
• Voicemail automation
• Automatic Dialer
• Dialer-integrated texting
• Email automation

2) Personalization

McKinsey referred to personalization as “the prime driver of marketing success” over the next 5 years, but personalization requires accessing the right data in the right context. Companies often store heaps of customer data in their CRM or BI tools, but how useful is this data if reps can’t access it in the right context? The right integration between CRM, telephony, and other customer data sources can provide reps with the data they need to personalize calls, including communications history, notes, ad preferences, and more. Features that help with personalization include:

• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) delivers customer data during the moments that matter
• Real-time conversation intelligence on calls
• Email snippet libraries that make personalizing emails easy

3) Prioritization

Sequencing tools are helping to remove the guesswork by providing reps with a dynamically prioritized list of “next best actions” that reveal who to contact, how to contact them, and what to say. In fact, Gartner’s research also shows that more than half of companies will be using guided selling over the next five years to help remove the guesswork from sales with prioritized “next best actions.” If prioritization is an important business goal for you, look for features like:

• A sales cadence solution for outbound email
• Sequences that can be triggered automatically based on pre-defined criteria
• The ability to provide “next best action” recommendations to reps
• Intelligent lead response routing and alerting

5 Questions to Ask When You’re Buying Sales Engagement Software

So you’ve found sales engagement software that meets your needs, and you’re ready to get a demo and assess if it will fit into your tech stack. How can you ensure that you’re an informed buyer and asking the right questions to ensure the solution will work for you?

The SalesTech marketplace can be tricky to navigate, so the Revenue.io SalesOps team set out to create a foolproof litmus test for new products. Don’t forget to ask these tried-and-true questions; you can feel confident that you’re choosing the perfect sales engagement software for your team.

1) Does it automate manual processes?

If a sales engagement solution can automate certain parts of your sales workflow, then it’s worth considering. But if it can’t automate anything or will create more work in the long run, then eliminate it as an option. While assessing your options, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Good automation will…

• Make less work for you and anyone else on the Ops team
• Lead to more accurate data, since you don’t have the element of human error
• Relieve other teams (such as sales reps) of the burden of data input, if you’ve been relying on them to self-report

But bad CRM automation can…

• Break or mess up your data.
• This causes you to find reporting issues later than if you’d been inputting data manually.
• Lead to a lot of cleanup work

So, good automation can make your life much easier, but bad automation is worse than no automation. It pays to be a discerning buyer.

2) Are the integrations thoughtfully designed?

Plenty of sales technologies these days tout lists of integrations with other products in your tech stack. But it’s important to understand that not all integrations are created equal. When you’re looking at a product, ask what sort of integration they use so that you can better understand how it will fit in with the rest of your tech stack. These are the four main forms of integration, from least to most desirable:

• Manual or third-party integration: This requires you to import and export CSVs or use a third-party system like Zapier.
• Unilateral integration: This works with a one-way sync (A → B), where certain types of information can go from one system to another at certain times of day.
• Bilateral integration: This offers a two-way syncs between platforms (A ↔︎ B), which solves the issue of inconsistent data. It still has a preset sync schedule and some limitations on what you can send.
• Native integration: This gives you full access to all the data between two or more systems. Whatever’s in one system can exist in the other. It’s constantly updating and syncing in real time.

3) Does the sales engagement software give you actionable data in the moments that matter?

Data is only useful if you have it when you need it. If a sales engagement platform keeps your data stuck in a silo or makes it inconvenient to access, then it’s not serving its purpose. The right tools make the most up-to-date information available in the most important moment: now.

For example, let’s say you’re buying a dialer for your sales reps. If the dialer gives you actionable data at the decision point, then it’s presenting your reps with the data they need to have meaningful conversations on calls. Data like: what time zone the person they’re calling is in, their title, what company they’re in, etc. If it can give them information on past emails or phone calls with that person, then so much the better.

You’re probably collecting all this information right now, but you can gain a lot more value from it by giving it to reps right when they need it (rather than making them seek it out in other systems). The point of the story is that any tools that make your current data more valuable are worth considering.

4) Will it bloat your sales stack or save you space?

To ensure that any sales technology you buy will earn its keep, stick to this rule: no single-use solutions. Every product you buy should be able to solve more than one issue for more than one team.

To do this, it’s best to look beyond whatever initial issue you’re trying to solve with a particular purchase. For instance, let’s say that your reps need a source of contact data to get accurate phone numbers for prospects. In addition to solving that issue, it should also be able to provide contact data to marketing to enrich their send lists or offer value in other ways.

Whatever you do, make sure that the data can flow easily between departments and that it can help at least two groups of people. By doing this, you’ll build a strong tech stack that can operate throughout the entire company, preventing your Sales Ops team from getting bogged down by administrating lots of tools that solve only one problem at a time.

While it’s certainly possible to buy one platform for your sales and auto dialer needs, another for your video meeting needs, and yet another for your email needs, you’ll risk creating huge data and integration headaches. Consolidating your tech stack will always pay off, which is doubly true regarding sales engagement platforms.

5) Is it worth a long-term investment?

Don’t quickly buy sales engagement software to fix a short-term problem, thinking you can always rip it out later and replace it if something better comes. It’s best to put in the time and research up front because implementing a new platform is expensive, both in terms of time and money.

Implementations of products that integrate with your greater tech stack take time, usually a few months (although some products out there only take a few minutes; they’re rare). Once they’re implemented, you’ll need to take the time to drive adoption across your company with orientations, training, and troubleshooting.

Also, if you’ve already followed the other four steps while assessing your purchase, then the chances are that this technology will be deeply embedded in your go-to-market plan. So, look at all your options with the long term in mind, and take your time with the purchasing process.

“Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success around your tech stack’s data isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must.”

– Jordan Henderson, Sr. Director of Revenue Operations at Revenue.io

The Roadmap to Alignment

Let’s assume you’ve decided what you need, assessed what’s out there, and bought a new sales engagement solution for your tech stack. What now?

• Align on Definitions and KPIs: If you’re going to use the data from your sales engagement platform across multiple departments (and you should; it’s great for reports on your company’s health!), make sure that they agree on the definitions of key metrics, such as qualified opportunities.
• Integrate: Connect your tech stack to your new sales engagement software and test the connection to ensure that it works as needed.
• Automate: Prioritize automating data entry and processes into your system of record for the most important data points (such as ones that show up in company-wide goals).
  
• Iterate: Whenever you have new company goals or roughly every quarter, revisit your sales engagement platform to build new automation and improve old ones.

Learn More

Curious to see what other people are buying for their tech stacks this year? Dig into the latest research on what your peers are investing in, upgrading, or replacing in the Revenue Operations & Customer Acquisition Benchmark Report.

Also, get up to date on the five most common complaints about sales engagement software.

Key Benefits of Sales Enablement

How Enablement Drives Business Growth

Sales enablement isn’t just about giving reps more tools; it’s about empowering them to perform at their highest level. A well-executed enablement strategy drives key benefits for businesses and reps. A well-executed sales enablement strategy leads to:

• Shorter sales cycles – It reduces friction in the buying process, helping reps move deals forward faster.
• Higher win rates – Studies show that companies with a dedicated enablement team see a 15% increase in win rates.
• Better alignment between sales and marketing – When marketing provides sales teams with the right messaging and content, conversion rates increase significantly.

Enabling Revenue Growth

Sales enablement directly impacts revenue by streamlining the sales process, optimizing rep performance, and improving pipeline velocity. Here’s how:

• AI-powered coaching boosts productivity – Conversation intelligence tools analyze sales calls in real-time, offering instant feedback to help reps refine their pitch and objection handling.
• Improved content utilization – Sales enablement ensures reps can quickly access case studies, whitepapers, and competitive battle cards to support conversations with prospects.
• Data-driven decision-making – Sales enablement platforms provide deep analytics, allowing sales leaders to track conversion rates, rep performance, and deal progression precisely. “Companies with a dedicated sales enablement team experience a 15% better win rate and an 8% increase in quarterly revenue.”

How Sales Enablement Improves Sales Performance

A strong strategy ensures that every rep, whether new to the team or a seasoned top performer, has the resources and guidance needed to succeed.

• Real-time AI coaching: Sales enablement platforms leverage AI to analyze conversations and provide instant recommendations for improving messaging and objection handling.
• Consistent sales training: It isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process that continuously sharpens rep skills through personalized coaching and best practice sharing.
• Tailored sales content: Sales reps who use personalized sales assets aligned with the buyer’s journey see higher engagement and better response rates from prospects.

Integrating sales enablement into your strategy ensures that every sales interaction is backed by data, insights, and the right messaging, leading to more closed deals and predictable revenue growth. Learn the sales enablement secrets top performers and top companies use to improve their development.

Top Sales Enablement Resources

For more sales enablement tips from top sales leaders check out:

• The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul – featuring hundreds of interviews with the top sales leaders on the plant
• The Sales Coaching Code – This on-demand webinar shows a new approach to reinforcing sales training.
• The RevOps Podcast – features everything revenue operations (and is often hilarious).
• 5 Ways to Have Dramatically Better Sales Discovery Calls – Enable reps to have more successful conversations with this eBook.

Want to hear how AI is shaping the future of sales enablement? Please join our latest podcast with Steve Hallowell, VP of Strategic Services at Highspot. We dive into how sales enablement simplifies data, drives behavior change, and helps reps focus on actions that move the needle. Don’t miss it—listen now!