How AI Supercharges Sales Enablement

Sales and marketing are often distinct departments, but executives know their outcomes are conjoined. In fact, supporting the sales team with brand-compliant materials can become a major lift for marketing personnel. Or, at least, that’s the case at organizations that haven’t deployed a sales enablement strategy.

With strong sales enablement, sales reps get empowered with tools and resources they can use to close more deals. Customers get presented with decks and messaging that build trust and drive engagement. And marketing can rest easy, knowing this is all happening in compliance with brand and regulatory guidelines.

So, what is sales enablement? And how is it evolving to become even more effective? We teamed up with our new partner, Pitcher, to give you a closer look. Or, if you're ready to dig deeper now, you can download our sales enablement playbook.

Historically, the manual creation of sales content like pitch decks was a big lift.

Plus, there was other administrative work for salespeople and the teams supporting them. That was exacerbated by the need to access several systems throughout the day (e.g., customer relationship management [CRM], order management, content management system [CMS]) to get the necessary information.

While coaching to improve the performance of reps has always been a key part of sales enablement, it often lived in a separate platform like a learning management system (LMS), if it was captured digitally at all.

Fortunately, things are changing. Sales enablement platforms streamline processes and set reps up for success. Better yet, the new wave of sales enablement — like Pitcher’s AI-forward platform — leverages artificial intelligence to save reps time on admin work, freeing them up to focus on customers. That results in an improved buyer experience that drives more deals.

#1: Content creation and optimization

With a good sales enablement system in place, reps can easily find, create, and personalize the content they need. That includes both pitch decks and follow-ups.

By facilitating content creation through the sales enablement platform, teams can build in brand compliance and pull pertinent lead details from other sources, like customer relationship management (CRM) and configure, price, quote (CPQ) systems.

#2: Coaching

As its name suggests, sales enablement enables salespeople to perform their best. That should include coaching to improve their pitches, including roleplaying so they can explore various selling scenarios and feedback on calls.

#3: Seller effectiveness

A strong sales enablement platform streamlines the administrative work required of reps — from deck creation to order taking. This allows salespeople to direct their time and energy toward nurturing leads so they can meaningfully move toward close.

#4: Customer engagement with a buyer-first approach

Leading-edge sales enablement puts resources into reps’ hands to strengthen customer relationships. That might include, for example, dedicated, customized micro-sites with prospect information like product details, meeting recordings, and chat support. It can also facilitate multichannel communication on buyers' preferred channels, like text or WhatsApp.

#5: Analytics to improve performance

Tracking how tactics and materials perform allows teams to refine their approach. Good data delivers better decision-making to improve performance and close more deals.

A sales enablement platform that sets reps up for success, streamlines the administrative side of their job, and supports consistent, brand-compliant messaging for prospects goes a long way. But with AI, it can do even more.

New-wave sales enablement — what Pitcher calls Sales Enablement 2.0 — encompasses the entire suite of what sellers need.

Specifically, this next generation of sales enablement delivers:

• Generative AI for personalized communication and presentations

• Augmented reality (AR) for real-time visualization (e.g., of in-store displays)

• Stronger brand-compliant pitch decks that can be created with a single click and allow ordering straight from the presentation

• Call prep, meeting rehearsal, and post-call feedback to direct sales reps toward success

• Video coaching and roleplay, paired with just-in-time micro-targeted learning to support salespeople’s development

• Next best action recommendations through business intelligence logic directly in the platform

• Analytics to refine strategies, content, and sales processes

Unsurprisingly, with so much functionality on offer, sales orgs in a variety of industries have moved to bring AI-powered sales enablement to their teams — and teams have embraced it.

Teams can probably imagine how Sales Enablement 2.0 can deliver wins. But you don’t have to guess at it. The Pitcher team told us how they’ve seen their platform transform sales orgs.

Take, for example, what the platform unlocked for one global snack food giant. The company had struggled to sell physical product displays to store managers, primarily because reps were challenged to effectively demonstrate how these displays could drive sales.

They tapped Pitcher to help.

The platform delivered AI-driven revenue projections, enabling reps to show each store the value the display could bring. The sales enablement platform also facilitated display recommendations tailored to each store based on the specific store’s past sales. The data was made digestible to store managers in automated dashboards.

Pitcher also delivered real-time, augmented reality displays so store managers could better visualize how the display would actually look.

The results were clear.

• Over 1,200 reps were up and running with Pitcher in a matter of days

• Over 75% of the sales team adopted Pitcher

• 30,000 displays were sold in the first six weeks

After a successful pilot program, the snack food company decided to continue using this sales enablement platform across its sales organization.

Want to dive deeper into AI-supercharged sales enablement? Check out our webinar with Pitcher's team:

Because of wins like this, our team at gateB is excited to partner with Pitcher. With AI to power the personalization of sales materials and coaching and analytics to help refine selling tactics, this platform can streamline reps’ processes and help them close more.

And we can mitigate a lot of the challenges that come with deploying a new platform for your sales org. For help with implementation, integration with the rest of your sales and martech stack, and training and support, contact our team at gateB.