More than ever, salespeople depend on marketers to provide them with the tools to engage with their customers and their big appetites for content, whether it’s through case studies, videos, whitepapers, and more.

With the interplay between content and technology (for example, interactive quizzes and event-triggered emails), many marketers are finding themselves delving deeper into the sales process than they would have a few years ago, sometimes even taking leadership roles in sales departments, and subsequently making purchasing decisions. After defining the tech stack for the sales rep users who might not have as much insight as the administrators, here’s our rundown for the marketers taking on a larger role in sales who might not have as much insight as the users.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Say goodbye to in-person, hands-on training. Well, hopefully not completely, but the training process has definitely gotten streamlined with learning management systems (LMS), which are a repository of courses and tests to get employees up to speed. These systems will most likely be administered by someone in an operations role, but marketers may have to create content that helps salespeople use one of the systems below or get the right sales assets for the right customer. Advantages of LMS include:

• Standardizing training for all sales reps
• Saving time and money in training costs
• Evaluating sales reps by quickly distributing their performance to multiple parties
• Tracking what training content works based on sales rep performance

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Sometimes marketers own all the content within an ECM, while other times sales and marketing collateral is one part of a system that contains all of the company’s documents including financials, product guides, etc. Google Drive, Box, and SharePoint are a few examples.

Whether salespeople get content directly from an ECM solution or marketers have them access that content from a tool that’s more user-friendly, populating content for a specific sales user, marketers will want their content management tool to have the following at a minimum:

• Segmenting content by users and groups so reps have access to what they need (and nothing extraneous)
• Secure sharing features
• Ability to upload new versions of content

Marketing Intelligence Software

Marketing intelligence software takes data from different sources including web analytics and call center data, and delivers them to those that need it at your company, including marketers seeking to converts visitors to leads or sales reps looking to turn prospects into customers. While they’re called “marketing” intelligence (or more accurately, market intelligence), systems like InsideView and Radius are a boon to salespeople with time-saving contextual data about prospects.

Even if a company is using marketing intelligence solely for their salespeople, marketers will want to look into those systems themselves. There’s a lot to glean from information about prospects, which can help create and adjust messaging that will convert and qualify visitors.

Marketing Automation

Most marketers are already intimately familiar with automation like Marketo and HubSpot. And while the ability to automate emails, landing pages, and forms will generally be useful only to marketers, there are a few aspects crucial to the sales process:

• Lead scoring. Assigning numbers to leads aids marketers in determining when someone is qualified enough to bring sales into the process.
• Inbound companies. Some marketing automation suites are blurring the line of sales and marketing, including HubSpot with the Inbound Sales-side of their platform. Marketers now know how many people from a specific company are looking at their site, either passing them off to sales or creating targeted campaigns.
• Lead nurturing. Longer B2B sales cycles mean that a clean handoff from marketing doesn’t entirely make sense. Marketers can nurture leads even after a salesperson has been involved, using techniques like retargeting or more specific email campaigns.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM focuses on the front of the business and captures the details of the customer. While some marketers use CRM, if you’re a salesperson, chances are you’ve used CRM (with 91% of companies with more than 11 employees using it). CRM software is used to store information about prospects and customers; from the contact details of an individual, to the specifics about the company, notes about your conversations, or the sales stage the organization is in related to buying your product/solution.

But although it has “relationship” in the name, CRM software rarely directly enhances relationships between sales reps and the customer. Don’t get me wrong, CRM software can be a “vital nerve center” for your company, and offers up crucial information as you try to close a deal. In fact, many different parts of your sales tech stack feed information into it. At the end of the day, CRM is intended for tracking and managing the many moving pieces of the sales cycle, and though it can be used to enhance your customer interactions, it can’t do that on its own.

Sales Enablement Software

Sales enablement is probably the hardest category of any of these to define. Maybe impossible. But, very broadly, sales enablement is intended to make the sales rep more effective as they navigate through the sales cycle. Software in this space generally looks to provide tools for the sales user to ease administrative burden and ultimately sell more business. Enablement can change the way you sell, but these tools can just streamline it too.

If sales enablement is used for presentations, like with ECM, marketers act as administrators, loading and managing sales collateral for salespeople.

Customer Interactions

We’ve placed customer interactions in their own category because while many of the categories of software I’ve covered tie into the customer interaction, they’re not necessarily built for actual conversations. In fact, some of them add work before and after the discussions with a customer without empowering the sales rep for it in any way. Customers demand more than content management or sales enablement software, particularly when salespeople are face-to-face with them.

This certainly isn’t an all-inclusive list. After all, you’ve got about 4,000 marketing solutions in the tech stack—but it can be a jumping off point for marketers to take a closer look at sales solutions and how decisions for the marketing stack impact one of their most important channels: salespeople.