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Buyer Enablement tools for sales teams

What is Buyer Enablement?

Buyer Enablement may not be a term that you are familiar with, but if you’re involved in complex and enterprise sales it’s time to dig into it and see how it could help your team.

By now everyone has some understanding of Sales Enablement as it is widely implemented in terms of team roles and processes.

Let’s start with what is Sales Enablement? In simple terms is a set of tools and content provided to help sales teams sell smarter and more successfully.

Buyer-centric selling is not an alternative approach, smart teams are building buyer enablement tools into their sales enablement strategies.

The term was first coined by Gartner following extensive research into the buying challenges that B2B customers face. What they discovered should concern all sales teams who will need to rethink how they sell if they are to achieve their desired business goals in the future.

  • There are more buyers/stakeholders involved in the deciding and buying
  • They are making decisions collectively by consensus and/or committee
  • Buyers find the process difficult and it takes longer than they expected
  • Buyers are inundated with a high quantity of high-quality ‘Why Us’ collateral
  • Buyers need content and tools to help them with each job or task at hand – ‘Why Change’ and ‘Why Now’
  • The majority of buyers want a rep free experience
  • Buyers want to engage with the right video content at the right time, not a once size fits all experience
  • The process of buying is chaotic and frequently undefined
  • Do nothing and retain the status quo is the number one decision outcome

Gartner defines Buyer Enablement as the provisioning of information that supports the completion of critical activities necessary to make a purchase.

Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy by providing them with prescriptive advice and practical support to make the buying process easier to navigate and complete.

Should you be concerned? That depends on how well you are structured and equipped to meet the modern buyer’s needs

To get you started here are our recommendations for buyer enablement tools that you need to know about:

3 Buyer Enablement tools for sales teams

Emlen.io

Sales teams need to have a smarter strategy in terms of how they create and manage buyer focused content. There are plenty of content management platforms available to help, the team at emlen have been the early pioneers in the Buyer Enablement space and have created innovative ways to create, share and track their buyer content.

They’ve studied how the B2C buying experience has progressed so much in recent years and they have built those learnings into their innovative approach to reducing buyer friction in the sales engagement process.

Product differentiation can be difficult for sales teams to achieve, emlen helps you to differentiate the buying experience.

You’ll love their user UI and UX, go see for yourselves.

Consensus

Consensus says that it’s not complex sales that are the challenge, it’s complex purchases. It’s only buyers that can close the deals, so sellers need to make buying easier.

Video is now heavily consumed as part of the B2B buying journey and whether you’re in sales or pre-sales you’ll undoubtedly be looking to leverage the power of video in your buyer engagements

Consensus have been the pioneers in Interactive Video Demos for the past 10 years and have created a compelling platform which includes advanced buyer analytics to give you the insights you need.

Don’t just rely on your stock 1:1 or 1 to many online demos, use Consensus to easily create video content relevant to individual buyer personas that can be watched (and tracked) when it suits them.

There no need for each member of your customers buying group to sit through a full demo or watch a full recording, they’ve got more important things to do. Give them the option to create their own video demo experience based on what’s important to them, differentiate the buying experience with Consensus.

Boxxstep

Boxxstep was one of the very early buyer enablement tools in 2017, so what role does Boxxstep serve for sales teams?

We built upon the core principles as defined by Gartner to enable sales teams to manage the wider challenge through buying committee engagement and enablement.

A good buyer enablement strategy requires that sellers know and understand their buyers before you can enable them.

What evidence do you have to see that your sales teams know who and what they need to know? Not a lot because CRMs aren’t really built to enable you to capture, manage and visualise important buyer related information.

Relationship Mapping – Visualise who and what you know about the buying group and their business.

Mutual Action Plans – Our versions are called Outcome Enablement Plans because the buyers desired outcomes should be the primary purpose of any collaborative plan. They also provide the link between the right content and tools for the right task.

Win/Loss Feedback – Learn what you did well and what you need to improve to support the buying process from across your customer buying committees, whether you win or lose or it’s a no-decision.

Conclusion

Buyer Enablement tools for sales teams are an essential, not a nice to have.

Buyers are stuck between the Pain of Same or the Pain of Change, and the easiest choice is to do nothing rather than try and navigate change.

The three buyer enablement tools listed address the growing need to engage and enable a wider and broader number of buyers in buying decisions.

Boxxstep helps you focus on the buyers involved in the buying

Emlen helps you create branded customer content portals

Consensus helps you create relevant interactive video demo’s

Investing more in top of the funnel prospecting tools is not the answer for growth, it’s essential to do a better job with the prospects we have. That’s why sales teams need to do more to support the customer buying journey!