The Ultimate Enablement Platform Evaluation and Purchasing Guide

Before You Compare Platforms: How to Run a Smart Evaluation

Before we jump into comparing enablement platforms, it’s worth pausing on the evaluation process itself. Too many teams get distracted by slick demos or overloaded feature lists and end up with a tool that looks great in a sales pitch but fails in the real world. These best practices will help you stay focused and objective

First, build an Evaluation Grid

Start by creating a simple framework that everyone on your team can use to score vendors consistently. Your grid should include:

• Top three problems: Define your biggest enablement challenges.

• Must-haves: Non-negotiable capabilities required to solve those problems.

• Nice-to-haves: Helpful features that would be beneficial but aren’t essential.

• Top three evaluation criteria: The factors that matter most (e.g., ease of use, integrations, pricing, support).

Have each stakeholder score platforms 1–5 against these criteria. This keeps the process data-driven and reduces the risk of being swayed by “shiny-object” features.

First-Time Buyers: Don’t Buy the Watch With 12 Settings

When you’re buying your first enablement platform, it’s tempting to reach for the flashiest tool with the most features. But here’s the risk: it’s like buying a watch with 12 advanced settings when all you really need is to teach your team how to read the time and show up on time.

If your reps are already drowning in information, piling on more complexity will only make things worse. What they need isn’t hour long certification paths or courses they take and instantly forget. They need simplicity. They need clarity. They need information that’s organized, sequenced, and delivered where they work so they can take action now.

That’s why if this is your first enablement purchase, LMS platforms are a dangerous starting point. Ask yourself:

• Do you really have time to build out full courses and formal certifications?

• Will that content still be relevant by the time it’s updated, or will it already be outdated within days or weeks?

• Can you afford to have reps stepping away from their work to sit through hours of training when what they actually need is an answer in the moment?

The reality: most LMS platforms are built for compliance and long-form training — not for fast-moving sales teams. If you’re just beginning your enablement journey, your first priority isn’t advanced certifications or robust training catalogs. It’s simply making sure your reps can find the right information at the right time without digging or guessing.

Pro tip: Start simple. Focus on solving the problem of content chaos and information overload before you layer on advanced training programs.

Rip-and-Replace Buyers: Avoid “Switching Apples for Apples”

If you’re replacing a legacy system, chances are you’ve already felt the sting of poor adoption, slow load times, difficult admin or static content. But here’s the danger: many teams end up swapping one broken system for another that makes the same mistakes. If you’re already asking your reps to trust a “new and better tool,” you can’t afford to repeat history. The stakes are higher this time, because rep confidence in enablement is on the line.

As you evaluate your replacement, dig deeper than surface-level promises and ask yourself:

• What caused low adoption before? Make sure the new solution addresses those exact gaps.

• Does it integrate seamlessly into workflows? Avoid heavy portals or fragile CRM customizations.

• Are analytics unified? Look for a single view into training, content, and outcomes.

• Is it future-proof? AI-driven recommendations and real-time insights aren’t optional anymore.

• Did you involve skeptics? If the reps and leaders who ignored the old tool don’t buy in now, adoption will fail again.

Top Traditional Enablement Platforms on the market

Highspot

Highspot is a leading sales enablement platform designed to centralize content, training, and guided selling tools for sales teams. It offers advanced content storage, search functionality, and analytics, helping organizations manage sales collateral and onboard reps. Highspot emphasizes formal training programs and structured content with their LMS (be aware that it's less mature than corporate LMS platforms) and its portal-based interface often requires reps to leave their workflow to access resources.

Seismic

Seismic is another leading sales enablement platform focused on content management, automation, and personalized sales experiences. Seismic integrates CRM and marketing automation system. Like Highspot, it’s built around a robust content repository, advanced analytics, and structured onboarding programs (through their acquisition of LMS platform, Lessonly), but it can be complex to administer and requires significant setup to fully leverage its capabilities. Seismic offers an integration to Salesforce Einstein AI but requires significant implementation. 

Showpad

Showpad is a European-based enablement platform that combines content management, sales training, and buyer engagement. It emphasizes rich content presentation and branded sales portals for customer-facing experiences. A key move in its evolution was the acquisition of LearnCore, which added an LMS component to its platform. Similar to Seismic, its training and content modules are not fully unified, leading to a more segmented experience for admins and reps.

Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a sales readiness and enablement platform known for its strong focus on sales coaching, skill development, and revenue intelligence. Its core differentiator is its sales readiness focus on measuring rep competencies. Mindtickle offers features like role-based learning paths, conversation intelligence, and gamified coaching exercises.

Saleshood

SalesHood was founded by Elay Cohen, former SVP of Sales Productivity at Salesforce, and is designed with a heavy emphasis on peer-to-peer learning, guided selling, and community-driven enablement. It differentiates itself with features that focus on collaborative learning (team storytelling, video role-plays, and win-sharing exercises). Unlike Seismic or Highspot, SalesHood takes a lightweight, social-first approach to training and enablement rather than relying solely on static repositories.

Many of these platforms serve as industry benchmarks for CMS/LMS-based sales enablement but rely primarily on destination-based content access rather than in-workflow, contextual delivery.

The Downfall of Traditional Enablement Platforms: 3 Major Pitfalls to Consider When Purchasing

Most traditional CMS or enablement platforms promise a “centralized hub” for all your sales content and training. In reality, they’re often glorified filing cabinets with a nicer UI, leaving reps frustrated and content teams overworked. 

In fact, in the Sales Enablement Collective’s 2025 Impact of Enablement research report with buyers of traditional platforms like Highspot, Seismic, Mindtickle, they found that 92.3% of enablement and marketing teams believe less than 60% of their internal content is ever used. Content discovery is a glaring issue. 

Content adoption is also incredible low for marketing-produced external-facing content, in fact less than 15% of respondents believe that over 60% of their content is used.

Sellers don’t have time to hunt through static libraries.

Sheevaun Thatcher - VP Enablement DemandBase 

Let’s break down the three biggest pitfalls:

1) Clunky UI & Poor Discovery

Traditional platforms like Highspot and Seismic rely on static folder structures and browsing-based navigation that haven’t evolved beyond a basic Google Drive. In fact, research suggests that poor user experience was cited by 50.8% as a the reason for switching platforms and low adoption rates was cited by 55.2% of respondents.

• Clunky, outdated intranet interfaces slow reps down, even when wrapped in pretty layouts or custom branding. Moreover, they create an added administrative burden on marketing and enablement teams that can be distracting (creating a beautiful layout for your content vs spending time updating your outdated content).
  
  

• Reps want speed and precision, not page browsing. Modern sellers go straight to a search bar or—more often—expect AI-powered answers in the flow of work.
  
  

• Even CRM integrations touted by these platforms as great solutions for “in the flow of work delivery” are difficult to implement, creating a dependency on Revenue Operations or IT, and are often fragile and break easily when fields or workflows change.

  
  

• The problem of clunky user experience and poor discovery extends beyond just to the rep, but also to admins.

What to look for in your enablement platform evaluation to combat poor content adoption?

• In-app delivery: Content and guidance should appear directly where your reps are in need of that enablement or content, when they’re engaging with your buyers or preparing for calls (ie. CRM, email, LinkedIn, etc.) —no context switching required.
  
  

• AI-powered & context-aware: The platform should surface relevant content automatically based on deal context (ie. CRM field data, or activity) without requiring heavy integration work from your RevOps team. Instead of digging through folders, reps should receive personalized recommendations like “here’s the case study for this industry” or “here’s the email template for this stage.”

  
  

• Ease of use and taking action: The Search should feel like Google: Intelligent, fast and accurate. More importantly, once a rep finds what they’re looking for, they should immediately be able to take action, whether that’s sharing the content externally or adding that content to a deal room. No multiple clicks and tolerant of typos or partial terms. Even better, AI search that understands intent (e.g., “how do I discount for enterprise accounts?”) instead of exact keywords.

Questions to ask vendors in your evaluation?

• Can reps access and consume content and take action without leaving their selling task at hand in their workflow?

• How does your AI understand what reps need in real time?

• Does your platform use AI to proactively recommend relevant content based on deal context or activity?

• What actions can a rep take on content in the flow of work? 

• What IT requirements, integrations and mapping are required to make this all happen?

• What analytics are available on these in-workflow actions?

• How granular do your insights get on content adoption? By User? By Team?

2) Rigid structures with Static Content That’s Hard to Update

Content management remains an unsexy, tangled, messy problem. The problem is that traditional CMS tools store content in static folders and long-form documents.

 In fact, difficult content management (content decay) was cited by 60.1% of respondents as a key reason for switching platforms with 51.2% of respondents believing that over 40% of their content needs refreshing.

 These traditional content management systems, with their intricate webs of folders, subfolders, and tags, were built for a world of static, long-form content. Repurposing content, managing updates, and avoiding content decay have become herculean tasks. 

Most enablement content today lives in long, monolithic documents—120-page playbooks, dense training manuals, and lengthy PDFs. While comprehensive, these formats are hard to navigate and even harder to keep current. Updating a single change on page 15 means blasting the entire document out again and hoping reps find and read the right section.

This leads to content decay and duplication, especially when processes differ slightly by segment (e.g., SMB vs. enterprise) but live in the same file. Reps wade through irrelevant sections, get confused, or miss critical updates.

While long-form PDFs works great for a case study or research report, for internal enablement that format is less effective. 

What to look for instead:

The better approach is modular, reusable content that’s flexible and easy to update. Look for platforms that:

• Break content into smaller, modular “blocks”: Instead of uploading a 120-page PDF, each section (e.g., discovery questions, competitor positioning, persona insights) can live as its own reusable piece.
  
  

• Enable updates that cascade automatically: When you update one piece of content, it should update everywhere it’s used, across onboarding guides, playlists, or deal rooms, without duplication.
  
  

• Support both bite-sized and long-form formats: Sometimes you need a quick battle card; other times you need a full case study PDF. A modern platform should handle both seamlessly.
  
  

• Make content remixable: The same case study can appear in onboarding, prospecting playlists, or customer success guides, in different orders, without creating three separate copies.
  
  

• Deliver contextually in-app: Modular content isn’t just easier to manage—it’s easier to surface at the right time, whether that’s during onboarding or right next to a CRM field when a rep is updating an opportunity.
  
  

Questions to ask vendors:

1. Content modularity:

   • Can we break down long-form documents into reusable components that can be used across the system, across different employee experiences?

   • Can a single piece of content live in multiple places without duplication?

2. Update management:

   • If I update one content block, does that update cascade across all playlists or documents where it’s used?

   • What change communication features do you offer to drive new content awareness (and track usage) beyond the "home page".

   • How does your platform prevent content decay and duplication?

3. Format flexibility:

   • Does your platform support a mix of bite-sized training content and traditional formats like PDFs and decks?

   • Can content be easily remixed for different teams (e.g., SMB vs. enterprise) without starting from scratch?

4. Contextual delivery:

   • How is updated content surfaced to reps in real time?

   • Does it appear automatically (proactively with AI) or does it require mapping, set up or integrations?

   • Does the platform integrate directly with CRM fields or workflows so that reps don’t have to dig for updates?

5. Analytics & governance:

   • Can I see where each piece of content is being used (onboarding, playlists, customer-facing)?

   • Do you provide governance tools to archive outdated content blocks and ensure only current content is surfaced?

3) The “All-in-One” Myth: LMS/CMS/KMS Bolt-Ons

In response to these shortcomings, many CMS, LMS, and KMS vendors have tried to rebrand themselves as “all-in-one enablement platforms.” But in most cases, these “all-in-one” claims are the result of bolt-on acquisitions, not unified product design.

This shift is evident in the recent scramble by CMS companies to acquire or build LMS or KMS solutions to stay competitive. For example, Showpad acquired LearnCore in 2018, then, Seismic acquired Lessonly in 2021. Similarly, LMS platforms like Allego are building or acquiring CMS capabilities and CMS platforms like Highspot are building LMS capabilities.

But there’s a challenge with this approach to consolidation: Sure, you might have “CMS” and “LMS” capabilities under the same roof with a shared login, but often you’re left with two completely different user experiences. The best you get today is perhaps a shortcut to a course when looking at a document: 

• Inconsistent UX/UI across modules: Many of these platforms have grown through acquisitions. While this expands their checklist of features, it often leads to multiple UIs stitched together. Reps have to navigate between modules with different designs, logins, and workflows, breaking the promise of a unified experience.

• Fragmented analytics and governance: If each module is bolted on, analytics and permissions often live in silos. Admins can’t get a single source of truth across all enablement activities, making it harder to measure what’s working, enforce compliance, or manage user access consistently.

• Shallow feature execution: Instead of excelling at one core thing, platforms often do many things mediocrely. For example, their LMS module lacks the depth HR teams require, and their conversational intelligence tools lag behind dedicated Conversation Intelligence providers like Gong.

For a period, enablement platforms heavily invested in LMS modules to own training and onboarding. But many of these LMS capabilities didn’t meet HR leaders’ needs (compliance tracking, SCORM support, certification governance, etc.). As a result, HR teams have increasingly pulled LMS ownership back under centralized HR platforms like Docebo or Cornerstone, while GTM teams were left with a half-baked LMS in their enablement tool — and a separate content platform for sales.

What to look for:

Rather than being dazzled by feature checklists, focus on platforms that prioritize cohesion and usability over bloat:

• Truly unified UX/UI: One seamless interface across content, training, and analytics. No jarring module-hopping or separate admin dashboards.

• Comprehensive, cross-module analytics: The ability to see, in one view, what content is being consumed, what training is being completed, how call behaviors are evolving, and how these correlate to business outcomes.

• Granular governance controls: Robust permissions, version control, and compliance-friendly workflows that give both HR and GTM leaders confidence their teams have the right, current information.

• In-app and contextual delivery: Instead of requiring reps to log into a portal, look for tools that deliver content, coaching, and training in the moment and in the tools they already use (CRM, Slack, email, etc.).

Questions to Ask Vendors

1. UX & Consistency:

   • Was this platform built organically or through acquisitions?

   • Do content, training, and analytics share a single UI and navigation structure?

   • Can you show a single admin dashboard that spans all features or interactions a rep has had with content?
     
     

2. Analytics & Governance:

   • Can I see, in one place, content engagement, training completion, and call insights?

   • How are permissions and versioning managed across content and training?

3. LMS Capabilities:

   • Does your LMS functionality meet HR compliance needs (SCORM, certifications), or should we keep a separate LMS?

   • How do you handle compliance requirements (e.g., certifications, audits)?

4. Focus vs. Bloat:

   • Which features are most widely adopted by your customers?

   • How do you ensure all modules evolve consistently rather than being stitched together?

Where Modern Enablement is Heading

The traditional enablement model, static PDFs, portals, and bolted-on LMS, has hit its limits. Modern go-to-market teams operate in a faster, more complex environment where sales reps can’t afford to waste time digging for answers or toggling between disjointed tools. The future of enablement is defined by four core pillars: contextual delivery, modular content, unified experiences, and intelligence.

1) Contextual, In-Flow Delivery

1. Modern sellers expect the same seamless experiences at work that they get as consumers. Just as Google surfaces the right answer instantly, modern enablement platforms need to proactively deliver the right content, guidance, or training exactly where the rep is working—whether that’s Salesforce, Outreach, Gmail, Slack, or a call recording. This eliminates the need for portal logins or digging through folder hierarchies and ensures guidance is consumed in real time, not after the fact.

Instead of static links, platforms should leverage in-app delivery and AI-driven recommendations to suggest content contextually. For example, a rep opening an opportunity in Salesforce could automatically see the latest competitive battle card, pricing updates, or call script relevant to the deal stage.

2) Modular and Adaptive Content

Long-form PDFs and static playbooks are relics. Modern enablement platforms embrace a modular content architecture that breaks information into flexible, bite-sized pieces (like cards or snippets). These modules can be reused across multiple workflows and dynamically updated. A single edit cascades everywhere that snippet appears, eliminating duplication and content decay.

This modularity allows enablement teams to adapt content for different audiences (e.g., SMB vs. enterprise, new hire vs. veteran) without reinventing the wheel. It also supports real-time updates: when a product changes, a single snippet update pushes guidance instantly into all relevant contexts.

3) Unified Experience with Governance and Analytics

Instead of cobbling together LMS, CI, CMS, and coaching tools with inconsistent UIs, modern enablement platforms focus on delivering a unified, consistent user experience across all capabilities. This ensures reps aren’t learning one interface for training, another for content, and another for call coaching. It also allows admins and leaders to see comprehensive analytics in one view: which content is used, which call behaviors correlate with success, which reps are behind on training—all tied back to revenue outcomes.

Governance also becomes critical at scale. The future of enablement includes AI-driven governance features to ensure that content is both secure and accurate, especially when shared across internal and external audiences.

The Future Vision: Seamless, Intelligent Enablement

The next generation of enablement isn’t about building a bigger portal—it’s about eliminating friction and bringing enablement to the rep, not the other way around. Platforms like Spekit exemplify this evolution:

• In-app, AI-powered delivery of knowledge directly inside Salesforce, Slack, and other tools.

• Modular, reusable content that stays fresh and relevant automatically.

• A unified UI and analytics layer for visibility across content, training, and call insights.

• Governance and flexible integrations 

The result is higher adoption, faster ramp, and scalable enablement that aligns with how modern GTM teams actually work.

Top Modern Enablement Platforms on the market

Gong

I’ve included Gong in this list because conversation intelligence tools like Gong should absolutely be considered enablement platforms. While traditionally viewed as “call recording and analysis,” Gong has evolved into a critical coaching and performance engine. By capturing every customer interaction and turning it into insights, Gong enables managers to coach reps at scale, identify winning talk tracks, and surface deal risks in real time.

More recently, Gong has been advancing into AI-driven role play and skills development, allowing reps to practice objection handling, refine messaging, and receive instant feedback based on real-world scenarios. In this sense, Gong goes far beyond analytics—it’s an enablement platform that drives continuous rep improvement where it matters most: in actual buyer conversations.

Spekit

Spekit is the modern sales enablement platform that functions as your unified sales content and learning system. It’s designed to eliminate content chaos and empower your reps in their moment of need with AI Sidekick™, your Just-in-Time Sales Assistant™.

In other words, Spekit gives you both:

• A centralized, well-governed content hub for organizing and maintaining all your sales and enablement materials.

• An AI-powered just-in-time delivery engine that brings that content to your reps automatically, exactly when and where they need it.

AI Sidekick uses contextual AI agents to understand your reps’ precise needs, surfacing personalized coaching, messaging support, answers, and learning. By enabling them in the flow of work™, AI Sidekick helps reps effortlessly prepare for calls, follow-up, or create tailored deal rooms and buyer experiences—leading to faster deal execution, stronger buyer relationships, and reduced ramp times.

This powerful just-in-time enablement approach is backed by comprehensive sales content management capabilities that unite the best of DAP, KMS, CMS, and LMS features. With a robust centralized repository, AI editing and governance features, and a built-in change management solution, enablement and marketing teams can effortlessly combat content decay and ensure consistent messaging. Beyond AI-powered content automation and delivery, Spekit provides granular analytics on content consumption and buyer engagement to optimize strategy and revenue attribution.

Spekit vs. Traditional CMS: Feature Comparison

Trumpet

Trumpet has carved out a niche as a modern tool for creating polished, buyer-facing experiences. Reps can design branded microsites, embed videos, and craft sleek “digital sales rooms” that give prospects a curated view of content and resources. For teams that prioritize buyer polish and presentation, Trumpet delivers an impressive front-end experience that can help deals feel more personalized.

That said, Trumpet’s strengths are also its limitations. Unlike a true enablement platform, it doesn’t offer a full CMS or address the broader challenges of enablement like content discoverability, onboarding, and rep adoption. Reps often have to spend extra time designing rooms, which can slow down velocity when speed and repeatability matter most. And while Trumpet supports personalization, it lacks the AI-powered recommendations, playbooks, and workflow integrations that modern enablement teams increasingly rely on to scale.

In short: Trumpet shines if your top priority is impressing buyers with sleek, custom experiences. But if your team is struggling with content sprawl, inconsistent execution, or the need for speed and scale, you’ll quickly run into its limitations.

Second Nature

Second Nature is an AI-powered role play platform that lets reps practice real sales conversations in a safe, scalable way. Instead of waiting for manager coaching, reps can role-play discovery calls, objection handling, or product pitches with an AI “bot” that listens, responds, and provides instant feedback. This makes coaching more continuous, consistent, and accessible on-demand.

That said, role-play adoption is often minimal outside of forced onboarding or product launch exercises, since reps tend to prioritize live selling over practice. These tools can also be admin-intensive to set up, requiring scenario design, scoring rubrics, and upkeep. If you’re evaluating Second Nature (or any role-play solution), it’s worth looking closely at the roadmap particularly how they plan to make practice more real-time and integrated into daily prep rather than a siloed training activity.

The InMoment Case Study: Replacing Highspot

Jenna Siegel, Sr. Director of Revenue Enablement at InMoment, switched from Highspot to Spekit when her CMS became a “dumping ground” with no analytics.

Results after InMoment switched to Spekit:

• 92% license utilization and 84% extension usage in the first 30 days.

• Reps found answers in seconds instead of hours.

• Seamless migration and superior content governance.

• Feedback from reps: “Spekit knows what you need before you know you need it.”

Bottom Line: Should You Switch from Highspot or Seismic to Spekit?

If you’re wondering “Can Spekit replace Highspot?” the answer is yes—completely. Spekit provides everything Highspot does plus higher adoption, lower admin burden, and a more modern in-workflow experience.

For fast-moving teams that need knowledge and content delivered in the flow of work, not hidden in a portal, Spekit is the clear choice.

FAQs: Spekit vs. Highspot & Seismic

1. Can Spekit replace Highspot or Seismic?
Yes. Spekit provides all core CMS, LMS, and DAP capabilities plus just-in-time delivery and AI-driven guidance directly in the rep’s workflow.

2. How does Spekit compare to Highspot and Seismic?
Spekit combines a centralized, governed content repository with modular, reusable content and AI Sidekick. Highspot and Seismic are primarily portal-based and rely on destination-based access.

3. Does Spekit support long-form content?
Yes. PDFs, videos, playbooks, and other assets can live in Spekit and be dynamically reused across workflows and playlists.

4. Why do teams switch from Highspot or Seismic to Spekit?
For higher adoption, reduced administrative overhead, and in-workflow, contextual learning that improves ramp time and sales efficiency.