When you label a business a “small and medium-sized business” (SMB), it is probably because of the little capital you need to start it up and the number of employees you need to run it. For instance, you can even start the dropshipping business with no capital apart from your laptop, website, and functional internet.
However, the business landscape has become highly competitive; the “big businesses” are not interested in whether you have the financial strength or not; everybody who runs a business wants to command the market. Customers are interested in what you offer to meet their needs and improve their experiences; the business world is not a place where you go thinking that people will flock to your brand on a charity basis; it requires hard work and serious effort to survive the turbulence.
The best acronym for the business world now is “the survival of the fittest.” Brick and mortar, which were the hallmark of SMBs, especially in the retail sector, are gradually going into extinction; customers are now more disposed to doorstep deliveries.
Virtually everybody across the globe favors online transactions, and this is why you need software enablement for your employees.
What is Software Enablement?
Software enablement is the process you go through to ensure that your employees have the know-how it requires to individually understand how to utilize the hundreds of apps necessary to run a business in the new norm. The whole idea behind software enablement is to ensure that you develop the right strategy that will equip, motivate, and train your teams for better performance.
Sales enablement software, for instance, focuses on high-quality and targeted sales efforts with the support of sales content and sales intelligence geared towards the provision of an effective sales enablement strategy. Software enablement has become very critical to the survival and relevance of businesses due to the drastic changes the COVID-19 pandemic hoisted on the business landscape.
And, if you refuse to toe the line, you are automatically kicking yourself out of the business world. The business world has gone digital, and you must as an SMB follow suit.
Why do you Need Software Enablement for your SMB?
Because of the level of competition in the global market, your SMB must strive to be a market leader; that is the only way you can dictate events and enhance customer satisfaction through the world’s best practices. Some of the benefits you derive from software enablement for your SMB to become relevant include:
1. Enhancing optimal collaboration between teams
Software enablement does not only work as a tool that effects improved sales by ensuring an efficient customer base, but other departments in your organization also stand to gain from it. If you ensure a close working relationship between sales and marketing, you experience highly improved customer retention and close rates; the non-alignment of the two departments causes SMBs to suffer setbacks.
SMBs need an efficient collaboration between sales and marketing, which you can enhance with software enablement. The digital nature of the business world now means that sales and marketing can even be operating from different locations or even remotely; there is, however, the need to share audience insights in real-time; the distance notwithstanding.
The two departments must be able to share quality leads promptly and also come up with the sales enablement collateral, the sales team needs to close deals. The world is churning out technological advancements almost daily, and you must align with any new trend; your customers expect better services from you, hence you cannot afford to create any unnecessary gap between departments.
To effectively close a deal, the sales team may rely on marketing to furnish it with effective content such as proposals and presentations. An interesting fallout may be that even when the sales team has this content, it fails to use it.
In that case, the problem will not be the non-availability of content, but rather a lack of buyer insights. For instance, the sales team should be able to have access to the exact files it needs, notwithstanding the location, with document and template management software.
When you encourage versioning and co-authoring features, you effectively ensure collaboration and do away with issues such as overwriting vital information or sending the wrong file. You can also enhance the analysis of content so that marketing and the sales team will have greater oversight over their most effective resources.
Collaboration among departments reduces sales cycles, while producing the best sales content, and ultimately increasing both conversion rates and revenue. When sales and marketing are misaligned, marketing campaigns that generate tons of attention won’t result in new sales.
2. Improved customer experience
At a point in the business landscape, you could have shoved whatever you have down the throats of consumers, however, this is no longer possible. The customer now dictates the tune and calls the shots.
The voice of the customer is now loud and clear, and you must listen if you want to survive. Your customers want you to recognize them as individuals and no more as numbers.
This may sound like a tough order for your SMB, but that is the reality on the ground. How do you go about improving the customer experience?
Do you know the importance of the channels you use to communicate with your customers? Do you still send generic emails to them?
It’s a new dawn in the business world, and you must buckle up. Incidentally, you have the resources to enhance customer satisfaction that will not cripple your SMB, and you can even do it both at scale and in real-time.
Software enablement can help you to send seamless, automated, and highly targeted messages to your customers. What does a modern-day customer want, and how can you enhance it with software enablement?
- Personalized content – This has been a very serious issue but with artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time data, you can now hyper-personalize your messages to deliver more relevant content to each customer. This is taking personalization a step further.
- Quick proposal generation – to help you develop proposals, presentations, and responses to RFPs with ready-made answers.
- Enabling contract amendments in real-time.
- Delivering messages that are consistent with your core brand values at every touchpoint.
- Relevant feedback – this is enhanced with automated prompts and insights from customers’ data, hence enabling effective communication throughout the purchasing cycle.