Sales Enablement Training Software: What Is It, and How Does It Work?

Effective Tools Empower Effective Sales Teams

Your ideal salesperson exhibits four primary traits: they are eager, personable, organized, and knowledgeable about your product. And until recently, they also had to spend extensive time traveling, setting up hardware, and customizing environments for demos and POCs. Waiting months for the sales cycle to play out as their prospects moved through the sales funnel. These demos were part of the job but not a particularly good use of time.

Today, innovative advances in technology platforms for sales enablement training mean that engaging prospects is faster, cheaper, and obviously most important to the bottom line: exceedingly more effective. Let’s see how.

The Golden Triangle of Sales Enablement Training Programs:

Effective sales enablement training software and tools are designed to remove the barriers to excel at each of the many tasks throughout the sale pipeline. Put another way, the right solution keeps salespeople from ever telling management that “I’d have landed that deal if only you’d given me…”

What are the three primary components of sales enablement training software?

1. Content management – A well-organized, dynamic library of up-to-date brochures, one-pagers, case studies, videos, and other collateral that can be retrieved and sent to a prospect based on the specific audience and stage of the sales process.
2. CRM – To eliminate the distraction of managing and tracking leads, this sales enablement tool contains all customer contact info, notes on interactions and collateral already provided, email tracking, and automated reminders (for both prospects and salespeople) to keep the process moving.
3. Sales Demo Software – The core of the “virtual sales call,” this sales enablement tool creates a concrete, hands-on user sales demo designed to quickly and clearly represent the full list of features and benefits that lie in store.

The Rise of Virtual Sales Enablement

While two points of the triangle – content management and CRM – have evolved gradually and modestly into their current forms for decades, sales enablement tools for virtual demos have taken a more dramatic leap forward, fundamentally transforming the sales process for the all-too-frequent cases where only a hands-on experience can tell the full story.

Traditionally, salespeople (especially in tech sectors) had only two real options to conduct sales training to prospects:

One was the video conference. Whether deploying Zoom, GoToMeeting, Skype, or any of a long list of similar platforms designed primarily for camera-based meetings, sales professionals provided a screen share experience. This revolved around a walk-through of the user interface, driven by the salespeople (sometimes hundreds of times per month). And while a remote, no-travel, on-the-fly demo is more efficient than traveling to a location, the experience was passive, and the prospect could not “feel” the interface, try it on their own time, or test out uniquely relevant scenarios on their own.

To achieve these goals, the second technique – on-location POCs – was certainly more effective… but painfully time-consuming and expensive. It required physically configuring a system, bringing or shipping it to the client, and then often leaving it behind for them to spend time testing over time. The salesperson spent way too much time with these IT tasks and logistics, which naturally meant much less time for selling.

The Next Generation of Sales Enablement Training

Today, we have the technology to blend the two experiences, extracting from them only the benefits and ease that made them popular, and none of the drawbacks.

Virtual sales enablement training provides a rich remote/online sales demo experience that eliminates travel time and hardware setup. A cloud-based, centralized management process lets a salesperson spin up a rich, hands-on, remote demonstration in minutes, not hours (or days). 

In this immersive sales demo, a single environment can be cloned for instant use and remain completely stand-alone throughout – giving the prospect the freedom to use it as they wish without interfering with current or future demos. A new version of your software means a single update to this one cloneable environment, and the whole team is armed with the latest upgrade for their sales demo.

The sales professional can watch the prospect work in real-time, can take control to demonstrate a particular function, and even train several of the prospect’s team members at once. Often most importantly, if the environment is being handed over to the prospect to review on their own, the salesperson can track usage to discover if, when, and how they have done so – allowing a prompt follow-up or reminder.

And this virtual sales enablement is cloud-based, so it’s completely scalable (no more limits on demo hardware) and geographically agnostic – sales demos can be run simultaneously by all salespeople who need it, to as many prospects as possible, in any location around the world.

Finally, with minimal setup or guidance required, a prospect must click on an email link to open the environment in a browser so sales training sessions can be launched dynamically with virtually no lead time.

It’s Time to Modernize Your Sales Enablement Training Program

Ultimately, your sales enablement training aims to prepare sales teams for nurturing leads and closing sales. Modernizing how you train these teams may carry an upfront cost, but preparing them to close sales will pay off in the end.

How can you step into the future of sales enablement? It all begins with the right sales enablement training software. You must find a cost-effective solution that integrates with all the tools you need to train your teams.

The right program will have the elements we discussed earlier: content management, CRM integration, and sales demo integration. Once you find software that meets these needs, you can start crafting policies and programs around the new software. 

For example, you may enact a new policy that calls for ongoing sales enablement training once per week. Your sales staff can then log into the cloud-based training software whenever they can to complete the training. You can track progress remotely and update content, so the next lesson is always readily available. 

Sales enablement training is a cornerstone for a strong sales team. High-value or technical products and services require a well-trained sales team to effectively qualify leads and close sales.

Cloud-Based Sales Enablement: The New Norm

Successful salespeople have inborn, creative, well-honed skills that make them effective. 

Your salespeople want to maximize their success rates, and are typically open to new approaches, technologies, materials, and best practices wrapped up in the sales enablement tools you provide them with. 

We know the right approach to sales enablement training software means they can focus on sales, not setup, which creates a better experience for your customers.

Are you looking for the right cloud-based sales enablement solution? Book your CloudShare demo today and see why our platform is the market leader in delivering highly engaging sales demos, POCs, and more.

This post was originally published on May 2021 and updated on February 11, 2023