The top 15 sales enablement tools: A guide from a sales enablement leader

When it comes to ramping up your new salespeople or upskilling existing reps, it’s crucial to enable them with the tools they need.

When your company launches a new product or service, it’s better for your team to learn about and become familiar with them personally. That way, they can confidently talk to prospects about them. This is much better than simply pinging round an email or holding a quick meeting just to let them know.

Having the right sales enablement tools is vital, but which ones should you use to ensure a tight sales process and close deals?

What is sales enablement software, exactly?

Essentially, sales enablement software refers to the technology and apps that are designed to help your sales team do their job more effectively and efficiently.

There is a wide, wide range of different sales productivity tools that could be considered “sales enablement software,” ranging from communications platforms and power diallers to sales asset management tools. And choosing the right tools for your team should be a key part of your sales management strategy.

Here are just a few examples of the different types of sales enablement tools out there:

A few types of sales enablement tools

Sales engagement tools

Sales engagement tools are generally tools that let sales teams engage or communicate with potential customers.

This includes email, phone, and even social media outreach.

Sales content management

If you’re selling a more complicated product, like enterprise software, you’ll probably need a good sales content management tool. This type of software lets you organise all the blogs, whitepapers, case studies, PDFs, videos, and any other content or pieces of your sales playbook that your salespeople are using on a daily basis.

“Bite-size” video platforms

This is a relatively new type of software that salespeople are starting to use, and these video platforms let reps do outreach at scale in a fun, digestible format. They can quickly record a short video, embed it in an email, and send it out to engage with potential customers.

(Some audiences are more receptive to this than others, so keep in mind that your mileage may vary. It’s a neat sales productivity-boosting hack, though.)

Sales intelligence tools

Again, this is probably more useful in a B2B SaaS context, but a good sales intelligence tool can give your sales team a leg up by uncovering insights about a prospect's business so they can cater their outreach to their specific needs.

If you’re in a business where every touchpoint matters, this is a way to really optimise and get the most out of your outreach efforts.

Sales intent tools

The primary function of sales intent tools is to help sales teams zero in on qualified leads. For example, some sales intent tools can tell you the roles or titles of the people engaging on your website by collecting that data.

Building your sales enablement tech stack: 3 foundational pieces

One question that many sales teams have when they start building their sales enablement software stack is: Where to start?

The first thing you’ll want to do before you even start evaluating sales enablement tools is to know which areas of sales enablement are most important to you.

Think of it as if you’re planning an event or a wedding. What is non-negotiable? It can be the food or the music, but you just need to know what you can and cannot compromise.

You’ll also need to consider other teams who might be using your sales enablement technology. For example, your marketing team will also be using your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and/or adding content to your asset management tool.

When it comes down to it, though, there are only three main types of sales enablement tools that will cover the needs of most sales teams.

1. A communications or engagement platform

This is a must-have for any sales team that isn’t going door-to-door. One of the primary tools your salespeople need is a phone system, cloud contact centre platform, power dialler, or something that lets them do the actual outreach and communicate with potential customers.

For example, Dialpad’s unified communications platform lets you do exactly that. From phone calls to video conferencing to SMS/MMS messaging, sales reps can communicate through whichever channels they want from one app.

Not only that, but it also integrates with CRMs like Salesforce and Zoho CRM to automatically log all those activities and streamline reps’ workflows. Less time spent on data entry, more time for closing deals—a sign of quality sales communication strategies:

2. A CRM

A good customer relationship management tool, or CRM, can help your sales team stay organised by storing all your customer data and relationship history in one place.

One of the most important things when it comes to your tech stack is making sure your CRM integrates with your other sales enablement tools. If you’re using something like Salesforce, that’s probably not an issue because almost all sales software will have an integration with it, but if you’re using a homegrown CRM or a lesser-known CRM, then this is something you’ll need to pay close attention to.

3. A sales intelligence or data tool

Most sales teams can get away with just the first two types of sales enablement solutions, but if you are serious about scaling growth or in a competitive industry, then having some kind of sales intelligence or data tool is essential.

I’ll go into more detail about these types of tools later on, but they’re valuable because they can automate a lot of research and other low-value legwork for your sellers—and ultimately give them back more time in their day to focus on actually selling.

Questions to ask when evaluating a sales enablement tool

Beyond just features and prices, there are a few other important things to pay attention to as you're shopping:

How does this sales enablement tool fit in with our existing tech stack?

As I mentioned earlier, if you’re using other sales software like a CRM, communications platform, or marketing systems, you should make sure your sales enablement tool integrates with as many of them as possible.

You don't want to get halfway through onboarding only to realise that everyone is spending more time copying and pasting data between different apps instead of focusing on the more important parts of the sales cycle.

What’s the roll-out like? How can I get people up to speed using these tools today?

Ask your prospective vendors about average onboarding times and what the process looks like for a company your size. If they can provide references from their other customers whose teams or integrations are similar to yours, even better.

Whenever it comes to adopting new software, getting your team to actually start using those tools—and making it a habit to use them daily—is one of the hardest parts of the gig. If your vendor can provide support here, whether that’s by providing more hand-holding in the beginning or doing training sessions, take advantage of it.

How much day-to-day maintenance is needed? (ease of use and configuration)

On a related note, if your new sales enablement software forces you to spend a ton of time doing manual maintenance tasks every day, then you’ll have to consider whether that investment is really worth it in the long run.

What's customer support like?

This is one place where you’ll really want to pay attention to the fine print. Not all software providers provide 24/7 support, and on top of that, not all vendors provide phone support.

Many providers only have an online knowledge base, while others only have support in certain countries, and so on.

Typically, it all depends on the price or tier of your subscription plan. (For example, Dialpad’s contact centre platform comes with 24/7 support over phone, web, and chat—on all plans.)

The 16 best sales enablement tools to add to your stack

Based on what we talked about earlier, I’ve divided these into a few categories. Depending on your particular industry and sales process or methodology, you won’t need every single type of tool below, but the first two are must-haves for almost all sales teams.

Category: A communications platform or phone system

1. Dialpad Ai Sales

Dialpad gives you a unified communications platform that’s designed to help sales teams with both internal and external communications.

That means whether you’re messaging a teammate in Marketing, having a weekly sales call with your team, or doing high velocity outreach, you can do it all from one intuitively designed app.

And because the app works on both desktop and mobile, you can use your personal mobile to make work calls or send SMS messages to clients—while shielding your personal number. Just choose the caller ID you want to show from the drop-down options:

Real-time sales coaching and objection handling

One unique thing about Dialpad is its built-in AI. Not only can it transcribe calls—in real time—it can also analyse call sentiment, which lets sales managers quickly see which active calls are starting to go badly and save at-risk deals if needed:

Not only that, but managers can also create Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards with tailored notes that automatically pop up on sales reps’ screens when certain keywords or phrases come up.

For example, let’s say Competitor X always comes up on sales calls. A manager could create an RTA card with talking points about Competitor X and set it to trigger automatically when their name comes up on calls. It’s like sales coaching—at a massive scale:

And of course, this is super helpful for customer success, tech support, or any other type of customer experience teams too.

Call analytics

Get powerful call analytics and dashboards that allow you to gain valuable insights on metrics you’re tracking and opportunities to improve your outbound calls. Especially effective when combined with sales call reporting:

CRM integrations

Dialpad integrates with a wide range of CRMs including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, and more. One thing to note is that Dialpad’s Salesforce integration is unique in that it works beautifully on mobile—not just on desktop!

There’s also a built-in power dialler through the Salesforce integration, which lets sales reps do a lot more outreach, in less time:

Beyond CRMs, Dialpad also integrates with everyday productivity tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and more.

Voicemail drop

For sales teams that do a high volume of phone outreach on a daily basis, Dialpad also has a voicemail drop feature, which lets sales reps pre-record a message and drop it into a call if / when they hit a prospect’s voicemail:

This way, instead of having to recite a voicemail message every single time, they can just click to drop in the message. What used to take a minute or two now takes just a second. Add that up over time, and that saves loads of time for reps.

Coaching groups

Sales training initiatives and gamification are all well and good, but Dialpad has another way for sales leaders to truly empower sales reps and drive team performance with its coaching groups feature.

Category: CRM

2. Salesforce

Salesforce's powerful CRM brings together all your sales opportunities and customer journey information into one platform. It’s one of the most commonly used CRMs and is an essential sales enablement tool.

Again, it integrates with communications platforms and virtual call centre software, and what’s special about its Dialpad integration is that even your RTA (Real-Time Assist) cards will pop up directly in Salesforce, without the reps having to toggle between windows:

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is another product suite that includes a CRM (among some other software) that’s designed for both sales and marketing teams.

HubSpot's CRM can provide your business with a comprehensive look at your entire sales pipeline—in a clean, easy-to-use visual interface—and yes, it also integrates with Dialpad:

(If you’re on a marketing team, there’s a range of content creation and marketing automation tools.)

3. Zoho CRM

Like HubSpot, Zoho has a suite of sales and marketing tools, and Zoho CRM is its CRM product.

You can log all your customer data, where they are in the sales funnel, and other related historical data inside Zoho CRM to streamline your processes, and it also integrates with a few communications platforms (like Dialpad).

Category: Sales engagement platforms

4. Outreach

Outreach is a sales engagement tool that uses automation and machine learning to give salespeople insights into when they should be calling and doing follow-ups with prospects.

With Outreach, you can design and optimise sequences of emails and phone calls so that your sales reps can follow a consistent workflow for prospects in different stages of the lifecycle. Not only that, reps can also make phone calls from right inside Outreach using the Dialpad integration:

5. Salesloft

Salesloft is another sales enablement tool that's similar to Outreach in that it lets you set up sequences with email templates and automations to make your team more efficient. For example, they can easily sync their calendar to the Salesloft platform, book meetings, and organise everything in one place—and it also integrates with tools like Vidyard and Seismic.

6. Apollo.io

Apollo.io isn’t quite as well-known yet as some of the other sales engagement platforms on this list, but I’ve demoed it before and it’s an interesting product that's similar to Outreach and has a lower price point. Basically, it lets you filter and search for leads using attributes like title, number of employees, job changes, keywords, department size, and more.

(You can also easily sync your LinkedIn contacts to Apollo.io, and there are some other features that may let you eliminate the need to purchase other tools like ZoomInfo.)

7. Loom

Sometimes, it's easier to send a quick video to someone to get your point across instead of sending reams of text. Loom gets this, and it’s a great video communications tool.

With Loom, you can record your screen, face, and voice into a video clip, and then send it along with any other relevant content. It’s a great cold outreach tactic if you’re trying to get new leads and also a creative way to do follow-ups with prospects.

8. Vidyard

Like Loom, Vidyard is a video content creation tool that you can use when communicating with clients and prospects. Again, you can easily record videos from your mobile, desktop, or web browser and send them through Gmail and Outlook with a link to book meetings right from the video.

Vidyard also has native integrations to tools like Outreach and many more, which ties back to the concept of buying a suite of products that connect easily to each other. It'll make both your sellers' and admins' lives easier.

Category: Sales content or asset management

9. Highspot

Highspot is a popular sales enablement platform that lets you store all your sales playbooks and content that sales reps might need during their day-to-day self-guided learning and outreach work.

In Highspot, they can put together a variety of tailored pages or "kits" for specific audiences. For example, if you sell to small, medium, and large law firms, you can create three sets of content in Highspot, one for each company size that your business goes after.

You can upload marketing content (like case studies and templates), embed videos, hyperlink to blog posts or web pages—pretty much any type of content you want.

In B2B sales or industries where you have particularly complicated buying cycles, having a content or asset management platform like this is very useful.

Other than general content management, Highspot also has useful sales analytics that show you how sellers are using content and help you identify gaps and how each piece drives results.

10. Showpad

Similar to Highspot, Showpad is a sales content management tool that lets you house all of your sales organisation's content in one place and also filter content by role, portfolio, geography, or other factors.

Showpad and Highspot are probably two of the most commonly used sales content management tools, especially in the B2B sales space.

11. Guru

If you like your sales content organised but want a more customised feel, Guru is another option. Guru's sales enablement solution lets sales reps organise content with collections, boards, groups, and cards, so they can not only find the right content but also see it in a view they prefer.

Guru has a few integrations as well and can capture your data from multiple sources, like Google Docs or Slack, and store it all in one organised space.

Category: Sales intelligence tools

12. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Out of all the social media platforms, LinkedIn is probably the most useful for B2B SaaS companies. As a sales enablement platform, its potential is huge because it enables sales teams to take advantage of LinkedIn as "a platform for digital selling."

Specifically, LinkedIn Sales Navigator's strengths lie in its effective targeting of prospects, personalised outreach, and other sales intelligence capabilities.

13. Zoominfo

Zoominfo is another good sales intelligence tool that should be a key part of any B2B sales enablement strategy, especially if you need to collect information about prospects and existing clients.

Whereas many companies used to have to buy email lists to get leads, with Zoominfo, you can find contact information for prospects relatively easily and cheaply, which can speed up outreach.

Category: Sales intent tools

14. Demandbase

Even if you do have a list of leads, you don't always know where in the buyer journey they are. Are they ready to buy? Or just browsing your website?

Demandbase is a sales intent tool that gives you intel about target accounts, whether prospects are likely to be in buying mode, and more. (They call it “ABM meets marketing automation.”)

It's a great booster for sales performance, especially if you work at an enterprise company.

15. 6sense

Similarly, 6sense can help you capture sales-ready leads with its AI-powered platform by using historic intent signals. With these insights into the buyer journey, you'll be able to have a better idea of where an account is at in the sales cycle.

Getting started with sales enablement tools

From auto-logging customer interactions to helping reps close deals faster, a good enablement tool can empower your sales organisation in many different ways.

By using a combination of the tools listed above, you can improve team performance, keep customers happy, and add to your company’s bottom line.