A tool for better sales negotiation, not enablement

What is sales enablement?

At a high-level, a sales enablement tool can do two things: help teach your sales team how to sell and enable their ability to sell by providing training, documents, and guidance. Essentially, sales enablement tools serve as a teaching aid or a repository for critical information that sales reps need to do their job.

A lot of what a sales enablement tool does is teach reps how to sell or store information they need to sell. These capabilities are a really great fit when sales managers want to choreograph how a rep should sell. Tools like these are most effective when the sales process doesn’t vary much and reps simply need a place to keep all selling collateral up-to-date and organized.

When do you need sales enablement?

If you’re looking for a sales tool that offers:

• Learning paths (guided learning). This enables you to train a sales rep by walking them through a pre-designed learning path in order to understand the topic at hand.
• On-time enablement. The idea here is that when a sales rep is working on a deal and moves it to another stage, you know it’s happened. You know a deal has been moved because the CRM has been updated to reflect that.
• AI-enabled content surfacing. An extension of the above feature, the tool will surface content that’s specific to the deal’s stage. This enables reps to access the right content at the right time.

Then you need a sales enablement tool. And DocSend is not it.

Consider what team will own the tool

Ultimately, whether or not sales teams need a sales enablement tool or a tool like DocSend comes down to which team will buy, manage, and own the tool. When marketing teams or sales enablement teams own the tool, then DocSend isn’t the right one. DocSend isn’t designed to give marketing or sales teams a bird’s eye view of reps being on brand/message, or determining which types of content should be placed at specific stages within the deal cycle.

DocSend is designed for sales reps who own the strategy and process of their deals. It gives reps the insight needed to make more informed decisions and uniquely manage each deal based on how that specific prospect is engaging.

Sales enablement tools are a better fit for large teams who are locked into somewhat of a ‘rinse and repeat’ deal cycle.

When the sales executive or team lead owns the tool, and is looking for levers to pull during the negotiation of deals, then DocSend is not only the right tool – it’s critical.

Sales enablement vs. deal negotiation: how to know which one you need

Here are a few questions to ask yourself based on your role, business goal, and other factors.

What business problem are you trying to solve?

• Train reps on how to sell & keep them on brand and on message → sales enablement tool.
• Provide competitive intel so that reps can better negotiate deals → deal negotiation tool.

Who will be owning and managing the tool (not using it)?

• Marketing and/or sales enablement teams → sales enablement tool.
• Sales teams → deal negotiation tool.

Are individual sales reps in the driver’s seat of their deals?

• Yes → deal negotiation tool.
• No → sales enablement tool.

Are reps ‘put on rails’ with pre-choreographed sales processes designed by sales enablement or marketing teams?

• Yes → sales enablement tool.
• No → deal negotiation tool.

Using DocSend as a high-impact deal negotiation tool 

DocSend is not intended to be a sales enablement tool. DocSend is critical for high-stake, complex deals. Strategic negotiations like this, when the individual sales rep is in the driver’s seat of their deals, call for a tool with robust analytic capabilities. Rather than having marketing or sales enablement teams running the show, feeding reps structured collateral, reps using DocSend are able to make data-driven decisions about their deals. 

Put simply, it’s a deal negotiation tool. With ページごと you are able to know ahead of any conversation, what questions your prospect might have based on how they’ve engaged with your sales collateral. 

 

Get x-ray vision into your deals with DocSend document analytics

DocSend gives you detailed insight into your deals and tighter control over your shared documents. It’s best when what you are aiming to accomplish follows our ESC model, meaning your document is being shared externally, it’s sensitive in nature, and critical to getting business done. 

With DocSend, you can dictate who is and isn’t able to open the document but more importantly,  you can set permission controls like block lists, passcodes, expiration dates, and download restrictions to ensure only the right people access your documents. Regardless of how the document was received, you can find out who each individual viewer is, what page(s) they view, how long they spend on each page, and whether or not the documents were shared with new stakeholders. 

This kind of insight is simply not possible with sales enablement tools. While many tools allow sales reps to see whether emails are opened or documents within their emails are viewed, they lack visibility into exactly how prospects engage with the emailed sales collateral (pitch deck, rate card, RFP response, proposal). Sales reps know that an opened email doesn’t accurately indicate prospect engagement level. Reps need insight beyond the email, directly into their lead’s business, so they can identify and prioritize the right prospects – without wasting time on dead end deals。 

The insight DocSend provides is a breath of fresh air for people in the high stakes, low volume, highly customized sales world. It saves reps a ton of time chasing down dead-end deals by seeing exactly how their prospect is engaging with their collateral.

Sales reps will tell you that ‘no’ is probably the worst answer they can receive. But most people don’t actually tell you ‘no’, they tell you ‘maybe’. DocSend eliminates the likelihood of reps getting ghosted – or worse, strung along – by prospects.

You can actually deploy strategies with DocSend that are hard to do without it, to actually figure out if your champions are championing you when they’re not talking directly to you. For example, a prospect flags that the CTO is a stakeholder in this decision. You then can flag this when sending over the proposal asking if it will be shared with them and then see if it’s indeed forwarded and viewed by the CTO. With DocSend, you get a much better understanding of whether the deal actually exists or whether you’re chasing somebody who’s just too nice to say no.

Increase your close-rate with DocSend

If you are managing complex or unique deals, DocSend is absolutely a force multiplier. The ability to prioritize and know which deals are real and which aren’t, actually allows you to hire fewer reps. People often scrutinize the cost of a new piece of software. Do we really want to spend the $30,000 on this? But in the meantime, they have inefficient sales reps and think they need to increase headcount. But, if there is software that helps reps close faster, the better question is, What does a 3% bump to your win rate do for you?. Is that worth the $20K you’d spend to equip your reps with a tool that makes them more efficient? And is there a world in which you should think about efficiency here, even with big slow deals?

You might not need to hire more reps. It’s more about enabling your sales reps to prioritize leads correctly and giving them powerful insight that they can use to tailor their conversations accordingly. 

Learn how DocSend can help sales reps build strong prospect relationships and close more deals.