What Is Sales Enablement And How Does it Impact Small Businesses?

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All businesses need a sales strategy if they want to survive. However, small companies often forgo this as they don’t have time to put a comprehensive plan together. But with sales enablement, the sales process gets a lot easier.

What Is Sales Enablement?

The term ‘sales enablement” refers to the practice of giving your sales team the resources they need so that they can close more deals. 

In other words, you give them what they need to do their job more effectively. As a result, you close more often and increase revenue for your company. 

This process is very straightforward in theory. However, in practice, it’s a bit more complicated.

There’s a lot that goes into sales enablement. The practice is all about fine-tuning your sales process. To do this, you have to continuously review what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change for your salespeople to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey more effectively. Then, you need to figure out how to implement those changes. 

Many big organizations have entire teams that are dedicated to sales enablement. Owing to this, they frequently have complex, structured sales enablement strategies. In the small business world, you have a lot less time, people, and resources to make this all happen. This means that the process may look a little less formal and elaborate — but it’s equally (if not more) important.

How Does Sales Enablement Work?

Sales enablement for a small business is the act of fine-tuning a sales process through continuously reviewing what works and what doesn’t. In large organizations, a strategy for sales enablement is more structured. It requires that sales and marketing managers decide what resources sales teams need to sell more effectively and profitably by conducting a needs assessment.

The process of sales enablement for small businesses can be less formal. 

A small business owner might find they need more product training, customer-facing marketing materials, or scenario-based sales plan templates just by talking about pain points with their team. Also, they may feel they need additional software to develop, manage, and close more deals.

Once they’ve decided what’s needed, it falls on the business owner or those in charge of sales management to bring these resources to the sales team. And to make sure they use them. Additionally, they will be responsible for measuring each tool’s effectiveness to decide whether to continue using it.

Sales enablement for small businesses and additional resource development helps to make sure that a sales team is equipped with a clear message about:

• Its unique selling proposition 
• Practical answers for common objections 
• Tools to help them track their deals 

It means that while this strategy works for businesses of all sizes, it’s particularly well suited for non-transactional sales or sales cycles that require longer-term interactions.

What Are The Advantages Of Sales Enablement for Small Businesses?

The overarching benefit of sales enablement is relatively easy to understand. When you provide your sales team with what they need to do their job more effectively, your small business will close more deals. It means more revenue and customers.

Let’s break this down a bit more – there are plenty of smaller sales enablement benefits that lead to this essential goal, including:

• Equipping your sales team with ample and continuous training
• Connecting your sales team with appropriate content
• Offering flexible methods for your sales team to present that content
• Enhancing the customer experience
• Lowering customer churn
• Reaching new audiences and markets
• Shortening the sales cycle
• Closing larger deals
• Allowing for more upselling and cross-selling opportunities
• Building longer, closer relationships with clients
• Assessing all of the above and comparing with bottom-line results

How To Put Together A Sales Enablement Plan In 3 Steps

How you improve your sales process through sales enablement will differ based on your company, product, and sales cycle. Even though details and steps will vary, three main steps are involved in the sales enablement strategy. 

Below are additional details about the three steps involved in the sales enablement process:

1. Do A Needs Assessment

This does need to be a long or formal activity. If you have a small company with just a few salespeople, ask them what tools they wished they had to become more productive and sell more. Recognize their pain points. Analyze lost deals for commonalities. For larger companies, speak with managers and send out needs assessment surveys so that you can compile answers.

2. Brainstorm Potential Solutions

Based on the needs assessment, design solutions to address the issues you uncovered. Give every person on your team the opportunity to offer suggestions or make suggestions. Ask them what they would like if they were spending their own money. Also, make sure that when you ask them the previous question, you clarify that budget is not a factor. In many cases, your sales team and managers will tell you exactly what they’re missing when there are no mental money barriers in place.

3. Roll Out Or Launch Solutions

Once you’ve created or bought the solutions, it’s time to roll them out. To do this, get these solutions into the hands of your sales team. This could mean, for instance, giving them their own flyers (or electronic files of them) or their log-in information and training assets for their customer relationship manager (CRM).

According to your company type, you could have additional steps in your sales enablement process. However, you should have the three primary steps above to create your own. Use these as a starting point and customize them to meet your unique needs.

A Comparison Of Sales Enablement Software

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub is a robust and easy-to-use sales CRM. This system includes sales engagement tools, configure-price-quote (CPQ) functionality, and robust sales analytics for expanding teams. Sales Hub is constructed on the HubSpot CRM platform. Here, customer data, tools, and groups come together to create a single source of truth for extraordinary sales rep efficiency. 

Reps get richer insights, improved small business lead generation, and aligned enablement materials when utilizing the full CRM platform. This will assist them in operating at maximum efficiency and crafting an exceptional end-to-end customer experience. 

Showpad Content

The Showpad Sales Enablement Platform unites sales content management, training, and coaching in one user experience. With Showpad Content, one of the Showpad Sales Enablement platform pillars, countless customers have been helped with bridging the gap between sales and marketing. They’ve created one centralized location that allows sellers to discover, present, and share the latest, on-brand content in visually engaging experiences. 

For marketers, Showpad delivers bottom-of-funnel insights so teams can invest more in the correct content. Sellers have more relevant, value-driven discussions. They can rely on powerful conversation intelligence software to keep improving sales. 

Showpad drives rapid deployment and adoption. It uses the best-in-class technology and practices based on the success of 1,200+ customers in over 50 countries. 

Vendasta

Vendasta offers an end-to-end eCommerce platform to more than 60,000 partners. These partners sell digital products and services to over 5.5 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) worldwide. 

These partners include:

• Marketing agencies
• Independent software vendors (ISVs) 
• Media companies

The Vendasta Platform allows these groups to adopt new solutions from a marketplace of cloud-based technologies quickly. It will enable them to sell their own brand to their SMB customers. 

The platform offers AI-driven marketing automation, sales tools, and a unified CRM to facilitate go-to-market. Plus, it includes project, orders, and billing management systems to assist with scaling through robotic process automation. 

SMBs are given one login for all solutions bought under a Vendasta customer’s brand. They enjoy a single combined dashboard with prescription, context, and tracking. SMBs can manage the information and solutions that make their businesses successful online by utilizing the Business App dashboard. 

GetAccept

GetAccept is an all-in-one platform that provides video messaging, document tracking and analytics, proposal creation, contract management, and e-signature functionality. This solution is used by sales, HR, customer success, enablement, and development teams in over 9500 companies globally.

Use cases include: 

• Sales: Put together video prospecting messages, send trackable sales decks and case studies, engage prospects in real-time via live chat, discover the name and emails of all viewers, approve workflows before the documents reach the client as well as capture e-signatures. 
• Enablement: Track changes being made to content by sales reps, administer coaching based on the health of closed opportunities, facilitate training supported by video while using analytics to monitor adoption, and centrally manage and update all critical content and collateral. 
• HR: Send offer letters, candidate surveys, circulate resumés with video interviews, deliver internal onboarding/training and receive secure signatures on confidential legal documents. 
• Customer Success: Facilitate contract renewals, send trackable quarterly business reviews and deliver onboarding/training to customers. 
• Developers: Use their API to build intelligent workflows for your organization around critical documents with extensive documentation and flexibility for testing. Double your close rate by taking control of the end of your sales process. 

Start Selling!

One of the trickiest challenges that any small business owner faces is making sales, retaining prospects, and converting leads. However, this challenge is simplified entirely with sales enablement processes for small businesses. Get started today!