Operations
Part of Sales enablement assets: owners, gates and expiry dates
Sales enablement tools: what to keep and what to drop in 2027
Sales enablement tools for 2027 need a hard look at which platforms earn their seat, which to cut, and how content use maps to seller outcomes.
What to take away
- Keep the sales enablement tools your sellers open before a call. Drop the ones they open after it.
- Highspot, Seismic and Showpad earn their cost through guided buyer material; Gong and Clari earn it through call and pipeline evidence.
- Judge a tool by whether content reaches an opportunity, not by how many times it was downloaded.
- Run every candidate against one live deal with the same seller, same buyer, same deadline.
- Record the plan, edition and date. Seat pricing and packaging change every year.
The keep-or-drop test
A sales enablement tool earns its seat when a seller uses it to move one real opportunity. Everything else is storage.
Keep-or-drop test
Did a seller open it in the last thirty days?
Did that use touch a live deal?
Can you name the buyer decision it helped answer?
A tool that fails all three is a subscription you pay for to feel organized. Cut it, and put the money into the two or three that pass.
What to keep in 2027
No vendor here publishes a price list, so the figures below are typical annual-term ranges as of 2026, not quotes.
What to keep in 2027
Highspot
- Core job
- Content library
- Best fit
- Large estate
- Pricing
- $40-75/seat/mo
Seismic
- Core job
- Governance
- Best fit
- Regulated sellers
- Pricing
- $60-120/seat/mo
Showpad
- Core job
- Coaching
- Best fit
- Mid-market
- Pricing
- $35-70/seat/mo
Gong
- Core job
- Call evidence
- Best fit
- Review recordings
- Pricing
- $1,200-1,800/seat/yr
Highspot (Seattle) runs content, guided selling and buyer engagement from one library. Sellers get material recommended for a deal stage rather than a folder to search. It suits teams with a large content estate and no clear way to route it.
Pricing is quoted per seat. Deals run $40 to $75 per seat per month on annual terms, and enterprise add-ons push the top of that range.
Seismic (San Diego) is the heavier option, built for enterprise content governance and compliance review. It suits regulated sellers who need approval trails before material reaches a buyer. Enterprise terms run $60 to $120 per seat per month, and module add-ons carry the top of that range.
Showpad (Ghent, Belgium) pairs content with coaching and buyer-side engagement tracking. It suits mid-market teams where managers still ride along on calls. Per-seat pricing sits between $35 and $70 per month.
Gong (San Francisco) records calls and turns them into deal evidence: what the buyer objected to, which competitor came up, where the seller talked past the question. It suits teams that will actually review the recordings. Typical contracts quote $1,200 to $1,800 per seat per year, with a seat minimum.
Clari (Sunnyvale, California) forecasts pipeline and flags deals that have gone quiet. It suits sales leaders who need a weekly number they can defend. Expect $50 to $100 per seat per month, with the forecasting module licensed separately.
Allego (Needham, Massachusetts) and Mindtickle (San Francisco) cover onboarding and practice. Keep one if new sellers take more than a quarter to reach quota; drop it if your ramp is already short. Practice seats run $30 to $60 per seat per month.
What to drop
Drop the standalone content repository that no seller opens without being told to. In most stacks that is an unmanaged SharePoint site, a Dropbox team folder or a Google Drive shared drive sitting beside a paid library.
Drop the second call-recording tool bought during a pilot that never ended. Where two recorders run, keep the one sellers open before a call. Chorus (now part of ZoomInfo) and ExecVision (now part of Mediafly) are the names to check against that rule.
Put Bigtincan, Mediafly and ClearSlide through the same test. Keep whichever routes material into live deals; drop the one that duplicates a library you already pay for.
Drop any tool whose only reported metric is downloads. Downloads measure curiosity, not selling. A seller downloading a deck for a deal that died is a download. A seller sending one page that closes a stalled deal is the outcome you paid for.
Run one equal trial
Give every candidate the same seller, the same live opportunity and the same deadline. Watch where the seller goes when the buyer asks a hard question.
| Field | What to record | What counts as passing |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | Whether content arrived at a live opportunity | One named deal, one named seller |
| Use | Which asset the seller sent, and when | Sent before the buyer asked |
| Evidence | What the buyer did next | A next step with a date |
| Burden | Setup, admin and correction hours | Fits the team you already have |
| Price | Quoted seat rate, minimum and term | Same units for every candidate |
| Exit | What leaves with you | Exportable record, no re-buy |
Keep the plan name and date beside the result. Packaging and seat minimums move yearly, so a verdict from 2025 is not a verdict for 2027.
Sources worth checking
The GOV.UK open standards guidance argues for interoperability and reduced supplier dependence. Read it as a portability prompt: can you get your content and usage records out? It governs UK public services, so treat it as method, not law.
The W3C Privacy Principles sets shared concepts for handling personal data and warns against pushing that work onto individuals. Apply it to what your tool records about buyers, then check the law that binds you. In Canada that means PIPEDA and CASL; in Quebec, Bill 96 adds French-language duties. Confirm with qualified counsel.
The FTC advertising substantiation policy holds that objective claims need a reasonable basis before you publish them. That applies to the claims your sellers carry into a call, not just to ads. If a deck says a product cuts processing time, someone must hold the evidence.
The CISA logging guidance explains why organisations keep and review event records. Use it to decide what access and change history your tools must retain. Logs show what happened; they never prove a deal was won.
Common questions
What is the first decision when trimming sales enablement tools?
Name the seller who will use each tool and the buyer decision it supports. A tool with no named seller and no buyer decision has no case for renewal. Start the sales enablement review there.
How do we measure whether a tool is working?
Track content use tied to live opportunities, then compare it with cost and deal quality. Downloads, logins and library size are activity, not outcomes. Review the numbers quarterly against your own pilot data.
What should we avoid?
Avoid measuring downloads instead of seller or buyer outcomes. Avoid keeping a tool because a pilot once looked promising. Correct the record where a claim outran its evidence, and set a stop rule before the next renewal.
