Buyer enablement tools help your buyer’s solve their buying process challenges as they travel along their buyer journey.

Gartner talks about buyers having a set of six discrete ‘jobs’ they need to complete in order to make any purchase:

Buyer enablement tools can help your buyer with each of these:

Diagnostic tools to assess their current situation
Calculators to assess the scale of the problem/opportunity
Checklists to help them define their requirements
Project plans to help them manage their buying process
Benchmarks to help them assess themselves against competitors
Simulators to allow them to see their own data in the new tool

Buyers look to your sellers for unique insight that they cannot get anywhere else - buyer enablement tools provide them with that insight, increasing the size and quality of your pipeline.

How to design and launch your buyer enablement tool

You can download a copy of the free buyer enablement tool creator template, and I’ll walk you through the main sections.

RevOpsCharlie Buyer Enablement Tool Creator Template

Grab the template

OK, got your template? Let’s go through it.

Planning your buyer enablement tool

In this section I’d recommend you have a cross-functional team in a room where you can workshop through the questions - throwing ideas on a board or flipchart as you go.

Who is the tool for and what stage of their buying process are they in?

Don’t randomly create a tool for the sake of it. Treat is like your core product. Who is the ‘buying persona’ and what problem are they trying to solve at that stage of their journey? Are they trying to understand the problem, or plan their implementation project?

How do they solve these problems today and why will our tool be better?

Do they use a spreadsheet? Do they use a tool from another vendor? Do they work with system integrators? Consider that in their buying process they are managing multiple vendors - does that add more complexity to the challenge they need to solve? Focus on solving their problem - not yours!

What type of tool do we want to create and have we seen any other tools as inspiration?

Do we want to create:

A diagnostic
A calculator
A benchmark
A survey
An assessment
A recommender
A planner
An advisor
A comparison
A timeline

What information do we need for the tool and who can provide it for us?

Might we need customer data, product data, public analyst data or benchmarks, industry information, processes or details from existing customer projects, templates or requirements lists from our onboarding teams, org charts from our customer’s buying groups?

Speak to your onboarding, customer success and technical support teams - they will have the real story from real customers.

Which customers or partners should we speak to to get data for the tool?

What is the minimum viable version of the tool?

We might have a vision of a snazzy AI agent, but can we test the output of the tool with a simple spreadsheet or in-person workshop first?

What tech is required for the production version and who can help?

Do we need updates to the website, a database back end, an AI agent, do we need integration to our CRM or marketing automation platform? Can marketing ops support this or do we need the product engineering team involved?

Need help? I help clients build buyer enablement tools that drive pipeline by following this exact process.

Find out more about my Buyer Enablement Platform.

Launching your buyer enablement tool

Now you have the rough outline of your tool, you can start planning through your initial testing and roll-out.

Is the output credible?

Your sellers, customer success teams and your buyers have to believe in the output. There is no point a calculator telling a 25 person company they will see $2bn in revenues by turning on your new product analytics tool.

How do customers and sellers use the output from the tool?

Is it a nice to have, meh response, or are your customers actively taking the output into their buying group conversations and using it to drive their discussions? If not, what would need to change for that to happen?

Are your sellers actively promoting the tool into their early stage buyers? Do they see the tool as helping them to have better more insightful conversations with their buyers? Does the tool differentiate them from your competitors?

How will you launch the tool?

Will you run press activity, a launch event, a recorded webinar? Will you have a customer talk about their use of the tool and how it helped them with their ‘buying jobs’?

Will you enable your sellers with training, coaching, and certification on pitching the tool and interpreting the results for their customers?

Will you enable your partners on the tool with training and certification? Will you allow partners to have a co-branded version of the tool they can use directly? Can the partners make their own version of the tool?

Measuring the success of your buyer enablement tool

Now your tool is out in the wild you want to learn from how buyers and sellers use it so that you can iterate and update it.

How will you follow up with users of the tool?

Do they get added to a follow up campaign? Do they get an email survey? Do they get a call? Who calls them and when? What do you want to learn from them? Did they use the tool outputs? Who did they share them with? How did they use the outputs to guide their buying process?

How will you measure the success of the tool?

What are the KPIs you want to improve with this tool? Higher volume of opportunities, higher average deal size, higher conversion from stage to stage, higher win rate, lower churn?

How will you link usage of the tool to opportunities to allow this reporting?

If this tool is a success, can it input into future buyer enablement tools?

If this tool captures data, survey responses, assessments from buyers - can these be used as the input to another tool?

Can you create a project planner from the results of an assessment tool?

Can you create benchmarks from the results of a calculator tool?

Get started with your buyer enablement tool

These questions should get your creative juices flowing and thinking about the types of tools you can create to support your buyers through their buying process.

Buyers want insight from your sellers. They want to learn something that they couldn’t learn from anywhere else.

A great buyer enablement tool does exactly that - positioning your sellers as the gate keeper to information and advice that your buyer can’t get anywhere else.

Go create!