Businesses looking to lock in deals with massive corporations need to add enterprise sales software to guarantee constant service delivery and maximize returns.
At the same time, organizations looking to purchase enterprise sales solutions for business-critical functions must prioritize features that can solve their pressing needs.
In this article, I’ll describe different types of enterprise sales software, as well as the benefits of implementing them.
Key takeaways
- Enterprise sales software gives your business a stamp of credibility, especially when you work with high-value corporations and businesses.
- Salespeople and stakeholders can rely on enterprise sales solutions to make data-guided decision-making and forecasting.
- If you know your customer’s pain points, you can tailor the functionality of your sales software to address them directly.
What is enterprise sales software?
Enterprise sales software refers to any application, platform, or cloud service that plays a crucial role in the sales delivery pipeline.
It could be used for discovery, diagnosis, development, or delivery.
Whether it’s geared toward corporations, SMBs, or case-by-case, nailing your enterprise sales strategy involves understanding client needs and building functionality to address them effectively.
Types of enterprise sales software
Your business can use different types of software to manage and improve enterprise sales.
Let’s categorize them by the purpose they serve:
- Lead generation: Solutions like OptinMonster can help businesses generate and score new leads and nurture existing ones.
- Automation: Sales automation software like HubSpot can handle redundant tasks such as renewals, reminders, and content generation. Read AI can also transcribe and summarize calls with clients.
- Document management: Platforms like PandaDoc allow sales reps to work on documents and save them in the cloud for easy access and record keeping.
- Analytics and business intelligence: Power BI and Tableau allow enterprises to collect, analyze, and synthesize truckloads of consumer data for accurate predictions, pricing, and marketing.
- CPQ (configure, price, quote): Businesses use PandaDoc CPQ to configure products and generate accurate quotes.
- Service desk: Companies can introduce customer support software such as Zendesk so enterprise customers can get faster solutions through self-service portals and automated chatbots.
- Catalog management: Businesses can automatically update and organize product catalogs using tools like WooCommerce Store Manager.
Key 8 features your sales software must have
Through my experience as well as a thorough analysis of the solutions mentioned earlier, I’ve figured out the core features any enterprise software must have.
- Integrations: Your enterprise sales management software must be able to integrate with third-party CRMs and ERPs for payments, data storage, analysis, and improved productivity.
- Analytics and reporting: The software must have a central dashboard view containing a one-glance view of critical business and customer data.
- Contact management: This feature enables B2B sales leaders to save contact information of leads, prospects, clients, and opportunities.
- Quoting and invoicing: CPQ speeds up the negotiation process by generating a quote in minutes. The customizable invoicing functionality also helps you create your sales pitch and get paid faster.
- Security features: To keep your data safe, the solution must have authentication, authorization, and encryption protocols to limit user access. Adding unique authorization protocols also allows you to monitor user activity.
- Mobile-friendliness: Enterprise sales software with mobile apps will help you increase your close rate because you have 24/7 access to the platform.
- Artificial intelligence: You can use AI-powered sales solutions to improve product recommendations, content generation, and dynamic pricing accuracy.
- Messengers and chatbots: Your self-service portal can use chatbots to decrease the churn of users who can’t get instant responses. Instant messengers can also keep enterprise sales team members and customers in constant contact to build relationships.
Why should your business use enterprise software for sales?
To survive in a competitive industry, you need to implement enterprise sales software.
I’ll share real customer success stories to highlight the benefits of enterprise sales solutions.
Improve productivity
Enterprise software can improve the efficiency and productivity of your sales reps by cutting down the time spent on redundant manual tasks such as document sorting, filtering, and generation.
For example, Trustpoint.One was able to boost effectiveness by adopting the PandaDoc platform to reduce the time spent on contract redlining.
The company has not only sped up the collaborative process around document creation; they’ve also gained greater visibility and ownership over all their documents.
Also, the presence of automation and AI increases the speed of quote generation, invoicing, approvals, and contract negotiations.
And since over 30% of all sales activities can be automated, you can boost efficiency and productivity across the value chain.
Increase sales
If you can get your quote out in time, you have a better chance of closing enterprise deals.
The logic is simple: the longer you wait before sending a prospect your price quote, the less likely you are to seal the deal.
This is especially important when working with high-value clients who might be shopping for quotes from your competitors.
Your sales team can use enterprise software to skip to the top of the queue.
Close deals faster
With an enterprise CRM or SaaS application, your company can shorten the long sales cycle by several days or even weeks.
First, you can get a quote within minutes. Then you can ping the client regularly to speed up the enterprise sales process.
Next is the negotiation process.
Since you don’t need to shuffle papers or emails back and forth, you can add account executives from both sides to the approval workflow.
Once they approve the quote and decide to buy your product, you can automatically generate an invoice to start the payment process. Boom, done.
For example, once Virtually Together transitioned from Microsoft Word to PandaDoc, the company was able to shorten the time needed to close a deal by 60% by using our enterprise document management solution to automate their payment process.
Scale gradually
Enterprise sales tools give your business the chance to scale operations while being able to handle the expanding customer base and deal value.
This feature is perfect for SMBs looking to extend their reach as well as large companies with an ever-growing customer base.
Above Green, a sustainability consulting company, was able to quadruple its sales pipeline seamlessly without any headaches by pivoting to PandaDoc for proposal software.
Boost your credibility
Working with a well-known enterprise sales software gives your business added credibility.
Let’s assume you are working with a multinational company, and you send them a proposal using PandaDoc.
The sales rep would feel more obliged to open the proposal because they can recognize the platform or have customer relationships with people who know it.
But if you opt for email, the proposal might end up in the “Spam” or “Junk” folder.
Stay ahead of competitors
As mentioned earlier, using sales software makes your sales model stand out from other competitors by getting your product to the queue on time. Be there, be first.
But it’s not just that; enterprise sales software provides you with methodologies for forecasting, outreach, dynamic pricing, and fine-tuned recommendations.
So you can tailor your quotes and proposals to the customer’s profile and needs with little or no guesswork.
Once you nail your proposals, clients will want to use your products because of the convenience they provide.
Improve customer experience
When customers have a sales platform that solves all their problems, they will be satisfied with your services and cultivate long-term relationships.
If you can save them time and deliver products that meet their needs, they’ll have an excellent experience.
And the result? They’ll become returning or repeat customers on long-term deals and recommend your products and services to other high-value clients.
Another real-world customer success story is the marketing company 2X.
They were able to improve customer satisfaction by introducing interactive documents that accelerated the onboarding process.
Centralize data
Using one enterprise sales software across the organization consolidates all sales and business data into one single source of truth — that’s a goldmine for business development.
In addition, enterprise sales software supports integrations with analytical tools such as Salesforce Sales Cloud, a CRM that extends what you can do with the available data.
You also get a centralized view of all important business processes, which you can access on the go via mobile devices.
Make better decisions
With a 360-degree view of all business data, your company’s stakeholders can make informed decisions about operations and strategy.
Automotive company Cross-Sell now uses PandaDoc for approval workflows and document tracking to gain full transparency and build trust in the document lifecycle.
This helped decision-makers improve the wording and placement of contract fields to speed up negotiations.
Best practices for implementing enterprise sales software
Putting enterprise software in the wrong hands is like giving a kangaroo a bass guitar.
Here are some pro tips to help you implement complex sales software successfully.
Know your customers
When onboarding potential customers, you must understand why they need enterprise sales software and weave it into the services you offer.
The value proposition could be that using a contract management solution can improve sales performance and approvals.
Automate the repetitive
Focus on getting rid of manual consultative and sales activities from the workflow.
Use automated payments, auto-renewals, document creation, and invoicing to make the sales process more efficient.
Track the right metrics
Use case studies to analyze user and customer data to understand churn rate, close rate, total revenue, customer lifetime value (CLV), satisfaction score, win rate, and other key performance indicators.
Simplify communication
Stay in constant contact with reps from prospects and customers in order to understand their specific needs.
This will help you understand when to cross-sell, upsell, or collaborate with them for better sales engagement.
Hire the right people on your team
You need to hire experts who deeply understand every stage of the sales funnel, as well as how to draw inferences from sales data.
Boost your sales using enterprise software
Enterprises can use PandaDoc to create contracts quickly using a drag-and-drop editor.
This document editor comes with an embedded, legally binding electronic signature solution.
With a few clicks, you can add all signatories to review and sign your documents.
PandaDoc also provides multiple proposals, quotes, and contract templates, which you can customize to your preference.
Everything is protected by 256-bit encrypted data transmission, user authentication, and role-based access controls.
Want to start using PandaDoc for enterprise sales enablement?
Book a quick demo and learn more about the platform’s capabilities.
Disclaimer
PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
