Sales Engagement vs. Sales Enablement: What’s the Difference?

I don’t think we need much more of an introduction for what we’re talking about today than the article title, so let’s just jump right in. What do you think?

Ummm… So What’s the Difference in Sales En… Wha?

Yeah, we feel you. Let’s take this slow. 

Sales engagement tools are primarily used to automate sales cadence emails and provide data on your outreach. It automatically sends outbound emails for your sales team and allows you track if a prospect has opened it or clicked the links.

Sales enablement tools, on the other hand, are designed to provide your sales team with content, training, and resources to guide that outreach.

These tools will also allow sales to send emails with content, like brochures or presentations, and track engagement. Unlike sales engagement, they do not have the ability to automate cadences.

So sales engagement tools allow you to structure sales communication cadences and sales enablement tools empower your sales team to know what content to send and when. Still confused?

Yeah, you aren’t the only one that feels that way when researching sales engagement and sales enablement tools. They both have their own unique advantages when it comes to supporting sales and marketing teams and aligning their process.

In this article, we’ll look at the definitions and advantages of both tools, and how they perform together to supercharge all your customer interactions.

What is Sales Engagement?

There are a couple of ways you’ll hear people refer to sales engagement. One encompasses all the interactions a sales rep has with a potential buyer including emails, phone calls, content downloads, and meetings. The other one pertains to the software used to automate these activities.

Platforms like SalesLoft and Outreach are excellent examples of sales engagement platforms. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be focussing on sales engagement software.

Think of sales engagement as an “autopilot” that helps reps execute one to one communications at scale, with a window in the buyer journey. It allows sales reps to track important details that help them make the most of every touchpoint with the prospect.

The focus of sales engagement is on improving how sellers connect with buyers. Sales engagement allows sales reps to cast a broad net while simultaneously personalizing their outreach.

With dynamic fields and thoughtful relevant content, a sale engagement tool can help you connect with leads and prove your worth as a trusted advisor in their buying journey.

What Can Sales Engagement Do for You?

This is by no means a complete list, but what you’ll find below is what we believe are the most important features of a sales engagement tool.

Your sales engagement tool should:

• Allow reps to create and run predefined cadence communications with prospects
• Send out emails in an automated fashion and allow reps to scale efforts
• Collect information on email opens, clicks, and engagements
• Allow for personalization at scale by including dynamic fields
• Let the user to include content or links in the cadences

Keep these in mind as we shift gears, we’ll circle back to them in a bit. Now, on to sale enablement!

What is Sales Enablement?

At its most basic level, sales enablement software is designed to help salespeople sell more confidently and effectively. Its main functions include content management, training delivery, and data analytics.

Not having access to the most up-to-date content and not knowing what assets are most effective in sales conversations can hinder the success of the sales team. That’s where sales enablement really shines.

With sales enablement you can alleviate these issues by ensuring that the sales team has the necessary resources, data, coaching, and content to have the best possible sales interactions. 

Sending random or non-valuable content to prospects at the wrong stage of the buying cycle will do more damage than good. 

You want to build trust and to do that, you’ll need to make sure that you are providing your client content that delivers real value or educational insights about your solutions.

Sales enablement hosts all of your content in one place allowing marketing to update existing content and upload new content ensuring that sales reps always have the most up-to-date collateral at their fingertips.

Presto! No more searching though folders looking for files that haven’t been updated and no more sending the wrong piece of content about your products.

What Can Sales Enablement do for You?

Like the similar section regarding sales engagement, this is by no stretch of the imagination a complete list of all the advantages of sales enablement, but it hits on a few of the important functions.

Your sales enablement tool should:

• Provide relevant, up-to-date, and personalized content in one central place
• Deliver coaching and training materials
• Provide sales reps with valuable data: buyer insights, interests, personas, and pain points
• Facilitate a more effective way to stay in touch with buyers
• Align sales and marketing
• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of new hire on-boarding
• Empower content sharing
• Connect to CRM systems to suggest what content to share for opportunities.
• Allow marketing to understand their content ROI
• Enable sales teams to lead better conversations with their clients
• Allow sales users to build custom presentations

Might I have gone a little bit overboard? That’s a little more than a “few” advantages, isn’t it? Well, that’s still not the WHOLE list. 😐

Bringing Two Powerful Systems Together

Now that we’ve reviewed the key differences between the two systems, let’s review how they can be used together to help deliver better sales outcomes.

A sale enablement tool is certainly complementary to a sales engagement tool. It provides teams with the most up to date content to use when engaging with customers or pursuing opportunities in the pipeline.

When your sales engagement tool is integrated with your sales enablement tool, reps can find the most relevant content to review or use in their cadences.

Using the powerful search capabilities of sales enablement from right inside the sales engagement tool, sales reps can save time looking for content (sometimes more than 7 hours/week!). 

Based on criteria set by marketing, sales enablement content can be searched by industry, buyer persona, product type, application, or sales stage.

Powerful analytics around content engagement can provide your sales and marketing teams with the insight they need to accelerate deals and make better business decisions.

But even better, content sharing can be automatically triggered as part of engagement cadences or snippets, further allowing personalization in messaging.

Conclusion

Once you’ve determined the best sales engagement tool for your company, it might be time to turn your sights to sales enablement. By using sales enablement systems in tandem with sales engagement tools you can start reaping the benefits by gaining both customer and content engagement insights.

To learn more about sales enablement solutions and how they can help support your marketing strategy, check out our free ebook below 👇 

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https://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/6868768/eBooks/Klyck%20%26%20Sales%20Engagement%20Tools.pdf 

Or contact us for a free demo of Klyck.io, a sales enablement solution built just for B2B. 

For more information, check out www.klyck.io/resources