Buyer behaviors are changing. While the bulk of the sales process used to happen in meetings and calls, 75% of today’s B2B buyers prefer a sales experience that doesn’t involve talking with a rep.
We totally get it: Why would decision-makers prioritize meetings with sales teams if they could make a purchase without any pressure?
But…that doesn’t mean taking a completely hands-off approach to selling. Instead, it’s time to get creative by empowering your buyers to take their own sales journey. Enter buyer enablement: The practice of equipping buyers with the right tools, content, and insights to make purchasing decisions on their own terms. Buyer enablement tools provide guidance and education while encouraging autonomy and fostering trust between you and your buyers.
Let’s review some of the best tools for buyer enablement, from AI-powered CRMs to demo automation software, that can take your sales from neutral to overdrive.
Buyers don’t want to talk to us. Harsh, but it’s true. According to Gartner, 83% of software purchases happen without sellers present.
What’s a sales team to do? Simply put: Empower buyers to buy on their terms. Implement a strategic buyer enablement approach that empowers buyers with the resources they need to make confident decisions on their own. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for buying groups to buy from you during their first purchase and any renewals or expansions.
Instead of prioritizing a sales-lead journey, buyer enablement focuses on providing customized education, product information, interactive tools, and tailored guidance. By proactively supporting their research and decision-making process, you build trust and establish your solution as the obvious choice.
Buyer enablement empowers buyers to navigate through a personal purchasing journey. It stems from buyer empathy, a deeper understanding of your typical buyers’ emotions and needs. The selling power ultimately lies with your buyers—so why put them through a process that doesn’t work for them?
Instead of making your buyers wait around for slots on your sales team calendar, put them in the driver’s seat to pace themselves through their own journey. Buyer enablement helps buyers become thoroughly informed so they can make a confident decision about your product on their own time.
The result? Shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rates, and happier customers that are easier to retain.
Buyer enablement tools come in a variety of forms, each designed to address different aspects of the buyer journey. By using the right mix, you can craft a seamless and empowering experience for your buyers.
Implementing a buyer enablement strategy requires a combination of these different tools that will help you provide the right buyers with the right experience at the right time.
Buyers experience various distinct steps from the time they discover your organization to the time they make a purchasing decision. Those stages include:
Once a new buyer is fully onboarded, they can move on to renewing their subscription and becoming a champion for your product, spreading the word about your products or solutions!
Ready to sign more deals and save lots of time? Here’s a roundup of the best buyer enablement software tools for optimized engagement.
Best for: Automated demos and interactive product tours
Consensus takes the load off sales experts’ shoulders with automated demos, product simulations, and interactive tours—all customized to fit buyer interests. Instead of waiting on stakeholder schedules and repeating the same information on every live demo, sales experts can use demo automation to support buyer enablement with interactive features and shareable content to engage all key stakeholders. Sales experts then leverage intent data like clicks from product tours to further qualify leads and determine the best path for follow-up.
Key Features:
With Consensus, sales experts close 2X more deals, 30% faster. It’s time to supercharge your revenue with Consensus.
Best for: Marketing automation
Marketo Engage is Adobe’s answer to a common need for integrated and automated multichannel marketing. Its robust analytics and campaign tools alongside dynamic audience creation and lead scoring allow teams to optimize marketing performance.
Key Features:
Pricing: Custom pricing.
Best for: Managing buyer content
Showpad enables sales teams to use a single source of truth, providing a collaborative content management platform to engage buyers with interactive experiences. Using a customizable platform, sales teams can deliver personalized and interactive experiences that respond to buyer priorities.
Key Features:
Pricing: Custom pricing.
Best for: Automating seller workflows
With a focus on creating repeatable sales processes, Outreach is a sales engagement platform combining buyer management tools, forecasting, lead scoring, and pipeline management. Through email assistance, live call monitoring, automations, and CRM syncing, Outreach provides the tools for sales teams to optimize outreach and follow-ups.
Key Features:
Pricing: Custom pricing.
Looking to improve your sales workflows and task management? Here are some of the best customer relationship management tools to improve buyer enablement.
Best for: CRM and task management
Bitrix24 is an integrated workspace with task management, CRM, collaboration, HR, and marketing features. Customizable automation triggers and an AI-powered sales assistant allow for pipeline efficiency and timely follow-ups from your sales team.
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Pricing:
When billed annually:
Best for: Customer relationship building
EngageBay allows for personalized communication and follow-ups with a free CRM built to prioritize customer relationships. Automations including appointment scheduling, email sequences, and follow-up messages keep you top of mind throughout the buyer journey.
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Pricing:
Best for: Simple sales enablement and easy integration with HubSpot CRM
Ideal for businesses using HubSpot’s CRM, HubSpot Sales Hub integrates seamlessly with their CRM to bring powerful and robust sales tools onto a simple interface. Using playbooks, call transcription, email automations, and more, HubSpot Sales Hub streamlines sales activities for smoother deals.
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Pricing:
When billed annually:
Best for: Sales pipeline visualization and automation
Pipedrive is a CRM with AI capabilities that help teams foster leads automatically, book meetings seamlessly, and set activity reminders for consistent follow-up. It’s a scalable and customizable solution gaining popularity with small and medium businesses in real estate, banking, SaaS and more.
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Pricing:
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Best for: AI-powered predictions
Salesforce Sales Cloud is an AI-powered CRM boasting heightened visibility into your sales pipeline and helpful predictions about future sales. It’s designed to boost the productivity of sales experts by automating repetitive processes and providing detailed reports to help prioritize buyers.
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Pricing:
When billed annually:
Best for: Customizable sales automation and multichannel communication
Zoho allows for an organized and multifaceted approach to reaching and communicating with buyers. Using contextual AI and an adoptable UX, Zoho brings marketing, sales, and customer experience teams onto a single platform for unified data and smart forecasting.
Key Features:
Pricing: Free 30-day trial, then $69 per user per month when billed monthly
Let’s review some other buyer enablement tools that range from customer communication optimization to revenue intelligence.
Best for: Integrated customer communications
Dialpad unifies communication methods and provides AI-powered insights for sales teams and customer support experts. From a single app, teams can call, message, and interact with customers and one another, then access and share AI-powered recaps and action items for seamless follow-up.
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Pricing:
With annual billing:
Best for: Automated notetaking
With transcripts, call recordings, and AI-powered notes, Fathom frees up sales team headspace by allowing them to engage with meetings fully, without worrying about taking notes. After each meeting, Fathom sends a recap including action items, buyer insights, and a summary organized by topic.
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Best for: Customer-centric sales engagement
Gong improves and analyzes buyer interactions to provide revenue intelligence and streamline workflows. AI recommends action items, generates call and email takeaways, and generates customized follow-up emails for an optimized buyer experience.
Key Features:
Pricing: Survey submission required for information on pricing.
Best for: Creating and managing documents
Pandadoc helps teams create, send, manage, and automate contracts and agreements. With features for collaborating on documents and branding contracts with a drag-and-drop editor, Pandadoc makes it easy to send beautiful and effective agreements to buyers.
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Pricing:
When billed annually:
You’re a pro at cooking up stellar deals—but you’re always looking for that extra ingredient to bring your process to the next level. The secret sauce? Buyer enablement tools that fit the flows and needs of your unique business.
You’ll probably need more than one tool for successful implementation of your buyer enablement strategy. Here are a few things to consider as you select the best suite of solutions for your needs.
To set your business up to scale and grow seamlessly, look for buyer enablement tools with AI and automation. These capabilities help streamline repetitive tasks, score leads, and give real-time recommendations so your sales experts can work smarter, not harder. The result? Less busy work, more time for strategy.
The best buyer enablement tools, especially CRM software, must seamlessly integrate with the rest of your tech stack in order to be useful in the long run. Evaluate your tech stack and cross-reference integrations to avoid data solos and inefficiencies.
Your team can improve and iterate at impressive speed with the help of targeted analytics and insights. Select tools that provide actionable insights so you can learn from your mistakes and move the needle in your sales approach.
For example, Consensus’ Demolytics feature shows you exactly what your buyers spend their time learning about and who they’re sharing your demos with. GTM teams can focus on the best deals by tracking and tracing engagement and then tailoring their follow-ups.
A tool is only helpful if you can use it. Opt for tools with thorough support and training materials to ensure smooth implementation within your sales and marketing teams. When evaluating software, ask questions like: What does the onboarding and training process look like? What’s the turnaround time for fixes if the software goes down? Who do we reach out to for direct help?
You want to be able to hit the ground running as soon as you sign up for the best ROI.
Imagine receiving a mass email that doesn’t even add your name to the subject line. Now imagine opening an email that not only calls you by name…but also delivers a personalized demo focusing on the exact features you care about in a product. Effective personalization takes your buyer’s journey from a one-size-fits-all annoyance to a value-packed experience that will make them eager to sign on with you.
When you evaluate buyer enablement tools, consider exactly how the tool can personalize the buyer experience. Can you craft target content? Can you adapt demo experiences to fit individual buyer needs? For example, Consensus AI creates buyer-centric product demos tailored to buyer interests and answers their specific questions in real time—all without intervention from your sales experts.
No matter the current size of your business, you need buyer enablement tools that can grow as you do. Avoid having to overhaul your entire strategy when you outgrow your current tools, and instead select tools with truly scalable potential. Evaluate price points at higher subscription levels and determine whether each solution can help you meet your future goals, not only your current plans.
There’s no doubt about it: buyer enablement is the new sales enablement. Buyer enablement transforms the way organizations engage with buyers by focusing on their needs and empowering them to make confident decisions. And with the right tools, you can shift from chasing after a close to creating a seamless, buyer-centric process. With the solutions on this list, you can build a buyer enablement machine that operates efficiently with minimal intervention, freeing up your sales experts for high-impact, high-converting conversations.
Looking for a tool that helps you engage buyers, improve workflows, save time, and close bigger deals? It’s time to leverage the power of automated demos with Consensus. Consensus users see 50% larger deals and 2X more of them. Buyers can explore tailored product experiences at their own pace, while your GTM teams can gain actionable insights into stakeholder priorities and intent, accelerating deal cycles.
Want to put buyer enablement to the test? Experience a Consensus demo—and then imagine how the platform can showcase your own solutions and products.