Sales enablement integrates knowledge, data, or software into business operations to enhance sales effectiveness. By automating tasks, enhancing communication, and providing valuable insights, sales enablement tools help sales reps maximize productivity and performance.
With access to more accurate data and advanced features, sales teams are better equipped to generate more opportunities, drive sales, and boost revenue growth. We evaluated dozens of software products and identified the 10 best sales enablement software solutions.
- HubSpot: Best for analyzing payment revenue
- Freshsales: Best for AI-based guided selling
- Mailchimp: Best for digital marketing
- Apollo.io: Best for cloud-based cold emailing
- Zapier: Best for creating automations between apps
- Nextiva: Best for cold calling
- Canva: Best for designing sales collateral
- UpLead: Best for B2B prospecting
- Ambition: Best for all-around sales coaching
- Showpad: Best for centralizing enablement resources
Top Sales Enablement Tools & Software Compared
Provider | Free Plan | |
|---|---|---|
 | $15 per user | ✓ Up to 5 users |
 | $9 per user | ✓ Up to 3 users |
 | $13 for three users | ✓ 1 user |
 | $49 per user | ✓ 10 export credits |
 | $19.99 for one user | ✓ 100 tasks |
 | $18.95 per user | ✕ |
 | ✓ 1 user | |
 | $74 per user | ✕ Only 7-day free trial |
 | $19 per user | ✕ Only 14-day free trial |
 | Contact for pricing | ✕ |
HubSpot CRM: Best for Analyzing Payment Revenue
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot CRM offers multifunctional sales enablement capabilities for users to organize sales data, automate repetitive tasks, engage customers, and collaborate with team members in one system. It’s especially useful for businesses that use a revenue operations structure, where sales, marketing, and customer success management functions fall under one umbrella.
This is primarily because HubSpot offers sales, marketing, content management, and customer service modules. Users can create customized dashboards like gross payment revenue to analyze sales data and overall revenue performance for a specified period. Additionally, each sub-product has an intuitive interface and a free plan for five users. Read our HubSpot CRM review.
HubSpot lets you create a custom dashboard for gross payment revenue. (Source: HubSpot)
Freshsales: Best for AI-based Guided Selling
Our Expert Opinion
There’s no better enablement tool than AI to complete tasks or analyze data for your sales reps. Freshsales stands out for its Freddy AI tool, which supports multiple functions within a sales operation. It can be used as an automated chatbot to engage website visitors, generate leads, and detect buying intent. As a result, sales teams can benefit from AI-based guided selling to manage more sales opportunities and close more deals.
Additionally, Freddy can conduct lead scoring for leads and provide deal insights to evaluate the best opportunities for reps to focus on. Finally, the CRM AI features assist with tedious data-related tasks like record deduplication and revenue forecasting. This gives you clean, accurate data to gain valuable insights for intelligent sales decision-making. Read our Freshsales review.
Freshsales’s Freddy AI uses contact insights for lead prioritization. (Source: Freshworks)
Mailchimp: Best for Digital Marketing
Our Expert Opinion
Mailchimp uses communication and automation features like a customer journey builder to automate SMS and email marketing campaigns. Automation frees up sales rep time and ensures their pipeline is always full. Mailchimp also lets users manage social media accounts where they can publish ads and schedule posts on Facebook and Instagram.
Mailchimp even allows A/B testing and has a built-in creative assistant to maintain campaign quality. Finally, users can put their campaigns on autopilot through prebuilt custom journeys, scheduled deployments, and multistep automation based on actions like clicks, opens, or purchases.
Mailchimp’s customer journey builder automates SMS marketing. (Source: Mailchimp)
Apollo.io: Best for Cloud-based Cold Emailing
Our Expert Opinion
Apollo.io has a built-in AI email generator that can help you create personalized emails, making it one of the best sales enablement tools for communication. You can mention a recent business achievement, the latest news about a lead’s company, or a mutual connection to catch the reader’s attention.
With Apollo’s AI sequence builder, you can launch cold email outreach campaigns to quickly reach more prospects and convert them into paying customers. Apollo can analyze email content and provide you with a score and writing recommendations to increase your reply rate. You can also split test subject lines to determine what best resonates with your audience.
Apollo’s AI writing assistant analyzes content for cold email outreach. (Source: Apollo.io)
Zapier: Best for Automation Between Apps
Our Expert Opinion
Zapier is a workflow connection tool that lets users easily automate between applications through “zaps.” Users can run a multistep CRM automation between tools where if a LinkedIn Ads lead submits a web form, a contact record is autocreated in HubSpot.
Then, an email is automatically sent to the contact, and a notification is sent to a sales rep in Slack. Automation streamlines your operations, and Zapier lets you both build and connect automations.
Furthermore, Zapier can even integrate CRM systems with social media. For instance, the best Facebook CRM integrations like Freshsales and Pipedrive use Zapier to manage leads.
Nextiva: Best for Cold Calling
Our Expert Opinion
Nextiva is a voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) and communications system. As a phone system, sales teams can centralize their cold calling activity by making, logging, and tracking calls on one platform. Nextiva also comes with calendar sync and meeting scheduling for reps to easily get sales meetings on the calendar after successful introductions.
Additionally, the product comes with shared contact management, notes, and internal chat tools to help team members collaborate effectively. Users can also adopt Nextiva to deploy short message service (SMS) campaigns and manage video calls. Read our Nextiva review.
View call logs in the contact record on the Nextiva dashboard. (Source: Nextiva)
Canva: Best for Designing Sales Collateral
Our Expert Opinion
Canva is a designer website where users can create presentations, social media posts, logos, printed materials, and marketing assets. It’s one of the best sales enablement services, particularly for small sales teams that need a quick and simple process to design their own materials for networking events, trade shows, and other meetings.
Canva’s AI-powered features include Magic Design (describe a design and watch it come to life) and Magic Write with brand voice (generate personalized and on-band text). These capabilities streamline designing sales materials. On top of its broad design capabilities, Canva has a free plan and it’s easy to use, even for those without any graphic design experience. Read our Canva review.
Canva provides free design templates. (Source: Canva)
UpLead: Best for B2B Prospecting
Our Expert Opinion
UpLead is an online database for purchasing B2B leads. It is one of the best B2B sales enablement tools on the market, saving sales reps time by not having to spend hours on online research to find prospects. It uses a credit-based system where, depending on the subscribed plan, users can use a credit to unlock a contact data record.
The online service also allows teams to purchase multiple leads at once, then download the list as a spreadsheet or export it into a CRM system. Once added, reps can begin cold calling or doing email introduction campaigns. Read our UpLead review.
UpLead’s B2B contact search for prospecting via cold emailing (Source: UpLead)
Ambition: Best for All-around Sales Coaching
Our Expert Opinion
Ambition is a complete sales performance management system that includes sales gamification, performance tracking, and coaching features on one platform. Managers can view metrics, such as outreach activity, revenue closed, and behavior trends, to gain insight into how individuals and teams are doing.
In terms of enablement, Ambition improves production through knowledge transfer and coaching. This sales enablement technology’s coaching orchestration module is equipped with tools to monitor sales metrics, manage one-to-one meetings, create coaching agendas, set goals, and execute plans of action for reps to improve.
Ambition’s sales coaching software for one-on-one and team coaching sessions (Source: Ambition)
Showpad: Best for Centralizing Enablement Resources
Our Expert Opinion
Showpad is built as a sales enablement platform that stores and centralizes critical sales resources. One of the modules, for instance, is the Showpad Content system, where users can store sales and marketing assets for reps to use for outreach and nurturing. It’ll even make content recommendations based on insights from other team members and machine learning technology.
Sales managers can also use the Showpad Coach module to help train and assess sales reps. With the tools, managers can upload and assign courses, develop training programs, and track improvements on one platform. These capabilities are important in various aspects of sales management, especially during onboarding.
Showpad sales coaching courses on upselling and cross-selling (Source: Showpad)
Did you know?
92% of executives say sales enablement has helped boost their company’s sales. Check out these sales enablement statistics to help you make more informed decisions on the best sales enablement platforms and strategies.
How We Evaluated the Top Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement encompasses a variety of resources, including software, intelligence, or knowledge. Hence, it cannot be evaluated apples-to-apples, so we made a more direct comparison.
- Pricing: This covered the costs of using the sales enablement technology, free plan availability, and scalable pricing options that could support growing businesses as their capacity and need for features change.
- Sales Enablement Features: Most sales enablement tool examples include capabilities, either through built-in features, third-party integrations, or additional services. Hence, we evaluated the availability and comprehensiveness of these features to compare the platforms included in this list.
- Customer Support: When evaluating top sales enablement tools, this criterion touched on the accessibility of customer support by each provider, evaluated in terms of availability hours and channels such as phone, email, chat, and self-service resources.
- Expert Score: We looked into how real users feel about each product or service provider in terms of how they like the features, product ease of use, and the value they felt they gained by using the above sales enablement tool examples.
Frequently Asked Questions
The best sales enablement platform depends on your needs. For instance, HubSpot is our top recommendation if you’re looking for revenue operation features because of its multifunctional sales enablement capabilities. Apollo.io is a good choice for cold emailing, whereas Nextiva is best for cold call outreach.
Sales enablement tactics refer to strategies sales teams implement to close more deals and boost revenue. The ultimate goal is to improve sales rep productivity and overall sales performance by accessing helpful content (like knowledge base resources, intranet, AI-generated scripts, etc.), coaching, and training throughout the sales cycle.
Sales enablement software systems help salespeople improve their productivity and performance by using centralized tools for content management, reporting, coaching, and training. Some of the best features include automation tools like predictive analytics and AI forecasting to tackle repetitive tasks so salespeople can focus more on selling.
Bottom Line
Sales teams engage in many daily activities that sales enablement software can streamline, saving time and effort. With sales enablement, sales managers can focus more on coaching underperforming sales reps, and salespeople can concentrate on improving their selling strategies. This technology boosts efficiency, analytical thinking, creativity, and client relations, contributing to sales quotas and overall revenue growth.
