In this article, you’ll learn:
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is any tool, information, or aid that helps salespeople work more efficiently, be it the speed at which they can get to the required information, increased odds of closing the sale, or anything else that they might need to do their best.
Sales Enablement Tools
To that end, sales enablement software solutions do not seek to reinvent the wheel. Instead, that software exists to make existing procedures easy and efficient. They remove the bulk of manual labor and bureaucracy from the sales team routine, allowing them to focus on sales and sales alone.
For example, reporting tool Ambition translates metrics and performance scores into a digestible, gamified form. Out of its many features, Ambition makes coaching and onboarding process easier by creating template-based coaching sessions and options to track performance metrics with a glance value.
Cloze is another tool for sales enablement that helps track your customer journey by aggregating all your correspondence (LinkedIn, Slack, Email) into one, easy-to-use window.
Sales Enablement Through Digital Asset Management
Metrics, reports, and easy ways to stay in touch with new and existing clients are just one side of the sale process.
The other part is the sale itself.
Although each company and each aisles rep is going to have their own paradigms and tricks, one thing that remains consistent across all of them is visual feedback. You cannot sell a cat in a bag; you actually need to show people the goods.
So, videos, images, infographics, etc. become indispensable. Their relevance and speed at which you can get them to clients, in turn, become differentiators that can make or break a sale.
The seemingly straightforward idea, however, soon develops numerous roadblocks.
Digital Asset Management system software, such as Pics.io, solves all media asset-related problems by providing users with a sleek interface to create, search for, and share assets across multiple channels (your teams, third parties, clients, etc.)
Problem #1: Searching for Files Takes Too Much Time
When there are hundreds of assets in your library, it can be difficult to find precisely the one that you would like to share. After all, your product is one but clients are multiple, each with their needs, perspectives, and expectations.
For instance, you might have clients from the food industry and others from heavy manufacturing one. To explain how your solution benefits them in particular, it would be for the best to make the content relatable to their products and their issues. Hence, a need to have a diversified media asset portfolio.
However, when you have so many assets, it can become difficult to find the ones you need fast. Especially if you have a mix of ready-to-go, work-in-progress, and rejected assets. It would be awkward to share the internal picture because you were searching for one in haste.
Solution #1: Keywords, Visual Tags, and Metadata Search
Pics.io’s DAM sales tool has multiple ways to reduce search time by 270%. You can attach keywords to assets (e.g. “Pet Store’, “SMM”) and then filter your collection to find only assets that have the requested keywords.
You can further narrow down your search with the visual markers: flags, star rating, and color. It’s up to you how to use them but you can, for example, use star rating after you’ve determined which assets receive the most positive feedback. That way, you can lead with 5-star assets for a proper WOW effect, and avoid using low-rated or rejected ones.
Custom metadata fields functionality, meanwhile, allows you to add information to an asset without making your workspace cluttered. For instance, if you’re selling physical goods and your client says “Can you show me the products that cost $100 or less?” you can include the product’s price in its metadata and then filter through your collection as you did with keywords.
Problem #2: Using Outdated Assets During a Sale
Products, especially digital ones, have a tendency to change rapidly, sometimes in seemingly minimal ways. A software developer can change an element of UI, making previous screenshots outdated.
Pricing or ToS policy can be updated on the fly, and without a proper system in place, sales reps might not be privy to the information.
It creates an awkward precedent where salespeople present false information to clients, that they have to quickly rectify in a follow-up. Even if such an update was hastily made, it still creates a lasting impression of unprofessionalism that can reduce the likelihood of a successful sale.
Solution #2: Version Control Through Digital Asset Management
Pics.io’s version control lets the entire team quickly compare all existing versions of an asset and see which version has been approved for use. By clicking on an asset’s thumbnail in the gallery, you’ll see the comment and revision history of any asset. You can switch between them on the fly and also do a direct comparison with a slider:
The approved version of an asset will always be on the top.
Problem #3: Having Difficulties Sharing Sales Materials With Clients
There are two traditional ways to share a video or an image with a client.
You can send it as an email attachment. This is a secure option as only someone with access to an email account will get to see it. Returning to an asset at a later time, however, becomes problematic as you have to first find and then scroll through the email chain to find the asset that you need. Not to mention that if the file is large in size, then it becomes even more difficult.
The other option is to use third-party content hosting platforms like Imgur, Dropbox, Vimeo, or YouTube. Accessing assets is easier this way as you can always just bookmark a specific link. However, there might be some security or downtime issues. If you use Imgur it might go down for maintenance. YouTube unlisted links can be accidentally shared with outsiders, and there’s no way to prevent people from watching that content.
In both scenarios, it is incredibly difficult to keep track of the feedback and communication on the shared assets. Neither conventional option provides a comfortable way to keep assets and information about them in one place.
Solution #3: Share and Receive Assets Through Digital Asset Management
Whether single assets or a collection of them, Pics.io has an option to share assets with others without compromising quality or security. Most importantly, all of that can be done in a few clicks. This means that you can quickly host and share assets even during a live web demo, and clients will immediately get an option to view and interact with them.
For single assets, clicking Share in the info panel generates a shareable link.
For multiple assets, the process is similar but requires a few extra steps.
In both scenarios, you can enable password protection, and decide if viewers’ can download and or comment on assets. Including videos.
Once the client gets to an asset, they’ll see an interface that is very much like the one in Pics.io itself. Using a comment feed, they can leave comments and share feedback on what they’re seeing.
In the case of videos, they can even leave timestamps and visual highlights on the video itself, so that you can immediately understand what they’re talking about from your end.
And the most important thing is that you’ll get notified on your end as soon as somebody leaves a comment on any shared asset. So you can be just minding other things in Pics.io, see a pop-up and instantly reply to the client, which is certainly impressive.
Problem #4: It’s Difficult to Juggle All Sales Enablement Tools That I Have
Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. In a quest of enhancing your sales enablement paradigms, you end up with 10+ different software that your team has to use to keep track of everything. While these software tools might seem like productivity boosters in isolation when a sales rep is forced to use all of them every day, constant tab-switching becomes more tiresome and irritating.
Solution #4: Sales Enablement Through Integrated Workflow Stack
A multitude of Pics.io’s integrations seeks to make life easier for your entire team, not sales only. These integrations are aimed at making access to your media library as seamless as possible, regardless of whether you’re working in, Google Office Suite, Zoho CRM, or anything else.
In Google Workspace, you can use Pics.io integrations to access your cloud-based media library straight from there. So, if you have a client's proposal in progress, you can pull media assets straight from Pics.io, without switching screens.
With Slack or E-mail, Pics.io lets you set up notifications in such a way that you’ll instantly know when someone uploads a new asset, shares a link with you, or comment on an existing image or a video. This reduces the time that you would have spent checking for an update from the client.
ZOHO CRM integration helps you keep track of all the assets that you have shared with a chosen lead or a customer to avoid any potential duplicates or other types of confusion.
Conclusion
Sales enablement is a part of best practices for any company. No matter how good your product is, it would be all for nothing if there isn’t a person who can buy it. Thus, creating a robust, and thought-through sales paradigm is a crucial step to success.
The bottom line is, sales enablement software, such as Pics.io’s DAM tool, is a huge boon as it allows your sales reps to focus on developing their sales skills instead of inventing roundabout ways of searching for and sharing assets with their leads.
To see for yourself if Pics.io is exactly the thing that you’re looking for, you can sign-up for a 7-day trial or book a demo with us to ask any more questions that you might have. See you there ;)
Did you enjoy this article? Give Pics.io a try — or book a demo with us, and we'll be happy to answer any of your questions.
FAQ
Why does sales enablement matter?
Properly set up sales enablement helps your sales team realize their max potential. By providing them with training, coaching, and software that they need they ensure that they do not spend time figuring out how to do their job and actually do it.
Is marketing an element of sales enablement?
A proper marketing campaign makes the job easier for the sales team. However, that does not make marketing an element of sales enablement. The latter focus specifically on the sales team, their strategies, approach, and software that they need to use to work effectively. As salespeople rarely create and design marketing campaigns, it is not something that should be a major part of their training.
