11 inspiring examples of buyer enablement tools
When it comes to empowering your buyers and helping them make informed purchasing decisions, having the right buyer enablement tools is crucial.
These tools can include interactive content, personalized messaging, and data-driven insights to guide potential customers through the buying process.
By leveraging buyer enablement tools, businesses can better understand their customers' needs and provide them with the information and support they need to make confident decisions.
Whether it's through chatbots, virtual product demos, or targeted email campaigns, investing in buyer enablement tools can ultimately lead to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Helping your buyers to understand the scale of the problem their business faces, and the economic value of the opportunity if they solve it, is an essential element of an aligned revenue engine.
Gartner talks about buyer enablement tools - resources that you provide on your website and social feeds that help your potential customers to assess their situation:
Calculators - providing ways to analyze customer-provided data
Diagnostics - a framework for surveying one or more users and presenting results
Connectors - methods of aligning buyers with challenges their peers face
Recommender - a playbook or guide with step-by-step instructions for buyers to follow based on their inputs
Advisor - coaching the customer through the steps in their buying process
Benchmark - real world data for the buyer to compare themselves against peers
Simulator - more than a demo video, a personalised walk through of the customer’s usecase
I have taken a trip through the websites of leading cloud companies to bring you some of the best examples.
Hubspot
I’m putting this at the start, as Hubspot are the pioneers of what is called engineering as marketing. They build marketing products with the same effort as they do their own core product.
Here you can see the list of free tools they provide that are directly aimed at solving problems for their target buyers well in advance of them needing to purchase a CRM or marketing platform.
One of my favourites is their Website Grader - which ranks your website against those of the competitors you load up.
Who doesn’t love to see how they compare against others in their segment!
6Sense
6Sense is an intent platform - they help their customers to understand which accounts are researching their sector so that sellers can focus on those most likely to convert.
Their In Market Demand Report tool offers up the tempting proposition of seeing who’s searching for your product or competitors right now.
Demandbase
Continuing in the data realm, Demandbase provides a range of calculators and diagnostics including a GTM Assessment Calculator, a Sales Productivity Calculator, and this one, a Generate More Opps Calculator.
This is a fairly simple tool - but I am sure guides a few conversations about the value of small increases in opportunity generation.
Cognism
If you are planning your territory strategy then you are probably keen to know the size of your addressable market.
Meet the TAM Calculator.
Cognism uses the data they are sat on to allow you to define your target market by country, industry, company size and let’s you know how many potential leads you could have access to.
They then follow this up with a teaser email to see if you’d like to get access to 25 of those leads for free.
That leads to a call from an SDR who at least is calling into a relatively warm prospect.
Highspot
Highspot is a sales enablement platform - helping sellers to be more effective in the conversations they have with clients.
They have built out a Strategic Enablement Framework for companies to measure themselves against, and this quick assessment with around twenty multiple choice questions produces some actionable advice to help guide your next steps.
These types of assessments can be fantastic input into a future sales conversation where the inputs are used to direct the conversation.
Definitely do NOT call into these accounts without having their results to hand and an educated point of view ready to go!
Gong
The leading call recording and analytics platform continues in this assessment theme with their Revenue Intelligence Maturity Assessment.
A set of questions about the types of deals you do, how you structure your sales teams and the markets you sell in, to provide you with a Revenue IQ score.
The key to great assessment questions is that they are easy to answer, but also though provoking and have the buyer considering the gaps in their current situation.
Useful insight for the buyer and I am sure it guides valuable conversations for the seller.
DocuSign
The eSignature vendor helps customers get agreements signed faster.
How hard can eSignature be you might say!
Once you dive into the unique legal systems for each country - you find out it can be very hard!
DocuSign provides this Legality Guide that allows you to select each country you are trading in and get a beginner’s guide to the contract laws for the country, and an explanation for how electronic signatures can be implemented within them.
Real value that shows they are more than a software company - they know their market.
Clari
Clari is a revenue intelligence platform - helping CFOs and Revenue Operations teams to predictably land the company on the number each quarter.
But what is the value of doing that?
Clari talks about Revenue Leakage - the amount of revenue that is wasted by poor contracting, poor discounting, poor forecasting.
Their Revenue Leak Assessment tool takes in some simple inputs to provide you with a dollar figure.
It is important with these tools to ensure they have credibility.
How often have you seen a ROI calculator from a vendor that you look at and say, “Yeah right - we buy your tool and make an addition $900m!”
Clari covers this with a detailed assumptions pop up to explain their workings:
Dataiku
Dataiku is a platform enabling data and domain experts to come together and build AI into their daily operations.
They have also chosen the maturity model route to educating their customers on where they are and what to do next with their AI Maturity Survey.
I like the way that they tease the spider graph results and the personalised recommendations that you will receive - value in return for your inputs.
Note the box on the right - Dataiku allow you to ‘save your place’ which can be useful if your assessment is going to take more than a couple of minutes, or requires some data the buyer might not have to hand.
Remote
Expanding into new geographies can be a minefield for leaders.
“I just want to sell our product in Spain - why is it so hard to figure out how to hire people there?!”
Remote provide an employee cost calculator into which you can enter the country you want to employ someone in, their role and the salary you want to pay them.
Well here you go - simple outputs that educate you well before you become a Remote customer.
Rippling
And we’ll wrap up with Rippling - also in the HR and employee management space.
Similar to DocuSign’s legality guide they provide a detailed hiring guide for a number of countries - worker classifications, onboarding checklists and payroll information.
You can easily see this being a bookmarked page that is then shared within a company as they plan their roll-out into new markets.
And a bonus - RevOps Maturity Assessment
I couldn’t leave you without sharing one of my own!
If you are in a revenue leadership of RevOps role then I’d encourage you to take a run through the 22 question RevOps Maturity Assessment to validate where you sit on the RevOps Maturity Model.
It will help you consider how broad the RevOps function is (its not just systems and spreadsheets), determine how you are tracking on each of the capabilities, and give you some personalised recommendations for the future.
Creating your own buyer enablement tools
What are the key themes from all of these tools?
Designed with the buyer in mind.
All of these tools consider the world that their buyer is in at the time when they might need these tools.
They are in problem identification mode - not solution discovery mode.
They don’t need to know how your solution will solve their problem - they just want to know that you are a bookmarkable resource that helps them with their day job.
Using data the company is sitting on
These companies generate huge amounts of data, either from their existing customers, or in the cases of DocuSign or Rippling, from their internal teams validating the countries their clients work in.
Every company is sat on this type of data - but it exists in your onboarding teams, your CSM teams, your account teams - because it is used in your conversations with your customers.
Free this information and present it to your buyers.
Consider how you can consolidate customer data to enable potential buyers to benchmark themselves against the reality of what you are seeing.
Valuable and shareable
The outputs for these tools are more than a number. They provide detailed breakdowns, and personalised advice and recommendations based on what the buyer has entered.
They encourage sharing internally and externally, “Hey, have you seen this?”, “We can input this into our business case request”
Embedded in their sales process
I can’t tell you whether this is true in all of them - but the companies that do this best don’t just publish the tool on their website and see what happens.
They enable their sellers, their partners - even their customers - on these tools so they become part of the conversation.
As a seller myself I would use these tools in my initial outreach - providing real value to buyers before I ever asked for something in return.
If you have a tool like this:
How many of your sellers have been through it?
How many can describe the value of the tool?
How many use it in their daily outreach?
Build your own
I hope these examples have inspired you to build your own.
If you want some suggestions on how to go about it, check out this article I wrote recently.
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