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Sales content tools are content repositories or hubs that enable content sharing (internal and external) for sales teams. They are sometimes called sales enablement or sales content management systems. Sales content tools are frequently used to align marketing and sales messaging, maintain brand consistency, collaborate on sales content, and deliver content (such as presentations, white papers, etc.) to prospects during the sales cycle. Some sales content tools assist with content personalization or track content performance to make intelligent recommendations about which content to use and/or when to use it with a particular opportunity. Sales presentation software fits within this category. The notion of "sales communications" also tends to fit here.
Sales content tools help organizations store, create, and/or manage the content used by reps during sales cycles. Most sales content software includes a centralized sales content repository with an advanced search, analytics around content usage and content performance, and built-in best practices, often surfaced as content recommendations or smart content. These recommendations may be based on rules controlled by sales leaders, sales performance managers, or marketers, or based on predictive analytics models that use content performance, sales performance data, and buyer journey data to predict the best-fit content for a particular situation. Tools that integrate with Salesforce may serve up content “in context” of a particular record or opportunity, or may pull in details from the CRM system to personalize content.
Some sales content software is designed around Marketing-led content creation—assets are fed by marketers into a central database for their sales teams to send out—whereas other products include Sales content creation kits for reps to quickly whiteboard concepts for prospects or produce branded presentations, proposals, etc. In most cases this distinction is not black and white, but buyers should pre-determine whether Marketing and/or Sales plans to lead sales content creation in order to determine which software option will work best for their use case. Relatedly, sales content tools often include features for content collaboration, approval workflows, updating content, content file sharing, etc. These functionalities are especially useful and important for large enterprises in which branding politics are more complex and messaging is more tightly controlled.
Terminology: Sales Content, Sales Enablement & Sales Acceleration
Sales content is usually a big part of an organization’s sales enablement strategy, so sometimes the buzzword “sales enablement” is used as a synonym for sales content software. This can be a bit confusing, since the term also describes, more broadly, sales management practices and tools that support sales effectiveness by equipping salespeople with the information, assets, technology, and best practices needed to sell both well and more. In thought leadership articles and best practices tips, the latter definition is usually at play; in product-specific marketing materials, “sales enablement” usually translates to sales content software. Buyers should note that sales content management tends to be a (if not the) major component of products branded as Sales Enablement software, but that other types of tools—not necessarily comparable in function—also fit under the Sales Enablement umbrella.
The terms “sales acceleration,” “sales productivity,” and “sales automation” are also used to describe sales content tools. Features like advanced document search, CRM integration, and automatic branding can be considered time-saving elements aimed at increasing the efficiency of sales reps. In this sense, sales content software is a sort of productivity tool, but with a focus on the substance of the sales conversation rather than just the goal of automating administrative tasks.
Key Benefits of Sales Content Software
Seismic is the recognized leader in sales and marketing enablement, equipping global sales teams with the knowledge, messaging, and automatically personalized content proven to be the most effective for any buyer interaction. Powerful content intelligence and analytics enable marketers to prove a...
ClearSlide provides the leading cloud-based sales engagement platform designed specifically to meet the communication needs of enterprise sales professionals to help them close more business. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., ClearSlide is funded by top Silicon Valley investors including Gr...
Brainshark is a video presentation platform for sales enablement.
Highspot is a sales content management software solution offered by Highspot.
Upland is the world’s largest cloud provider of enterprise software for project, portfolio and work management. Upland is the only cloud software provider that offers a comprehensive family of applications that enable organizations to align their goals, projects and programs, optimize their resou...
Prezi provides presentation software. The company supports over 60 million users. Founded in 2009, Prezi is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Proposify provides a solution for delivering sales proposals.
Bloomfire is a web-based application designed to help companies who grow sales teams. It's used for ramping up new hires, archiving knowledge, facilitating questions and answers, and anything else that has to do with knowledge-sharing. Bloomfire aims to improve the relationship between people w...
DocSend gives you analytics and control on documents you send. See who opens your documents, who they forward them to, and how long they look at each page. You can turn off access, password protect, or set an expiration at any time. DocSend integrates with SalesForce as well as Box, Dropbox, Goog...
PersistIQ is a sales intelligence solution. The solution integrates with Salesforce as well as marketing automation platforms.
Tellwise is a sales content management software solution offered by Tellwise.
Postwire is a SaaS product that enables marketers to capture and organize content that salespeople and account managers can use to create a personalized resource page. Postwire merged with the Social Communications Company in 2015.
Showpad headquartered in Chicago (US) and Ghent (Belgium) provides their eponymous platform, providing sales coaching and enablement and sales content management under a single platform.
SalesHandy provides a data analytics and communication tool.
Bigtincan (ASX:BTH) helps sales and service teams increase win rates and customer satisfaction. The company’s mobile, AI-powered sales enablement automation platform features the industry’s premier user experience that empowers reps to more effectively engage with customers and prospects and enco...
Modus empowers sales success helping our customers create and distribute completing content for the most critical moments of their sales process. More than 120,000 sales and marketing professionals use Modus to conduct 250,000 Critical Customer Conversations every day. ...
Fileboard provides actionable insights when businesses conduct live presentations, send and email presentations and conduct screen shares with prospects via this sales enablement tool. Fileboard also provides analytics on how prospects have engaged with presentations.
Attach (acquired by Cirrus Insight in 2017) is a sales enablement platform that is designed to help sales and marketing teams manage, track and control documents across the whole buyer journey. According to the vendor, Attach allows both marketers and salespeople to understand, in real-time, the ...
SharperAx is a sales content management software solution offered by SharperAx.
SocialPort is a social communication management system that allows organizations share content on social platforms, enabling them to grow relationships and exhibit thought leadership in their industry. rFactr also provides social content training that prepares each individual in a business to eng...
CustomShow.com is a solution for managing a company's presentations. It allows real-time control of brand and message across sales and marketing teams with slides and videos that can be customized for each meeting. CustomShow.com presentations are portable and trackable between Macs, P...
Bigtincan (ASX:BTH) helps sales and service teams increase win rates and customer satisfaction. The company’s mobile, AI-powered sales enablement automation platform features the industry’s premier user experience that empowers reps to more effectively engage with customers and prospects and enco...
GetAccept provides eSignature software that allows users to upload, send, and track sales documents, with the goal of increasing close rate. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
iPresent is a sales content management software solution offered by iPresent Ltd..
Tilkee is a sales proposal automation software solution offered by Tilkee.