Businesses always try to improve their productivity by improving their internal practices. One such common improvement is education. By training employees and providing them with valuable and relevant knowledge, you can increase their productivity.
Luckily, a popular solution in this sense is product enablement. While not every company is aware of this approach, it’s never late to start using it. Hence, here’s what product enablement is and why your business needs it.
What Is Product Enablement?
Product enablement is a term closely related to sales enablement – the process of providing the sales department of a specific company with the resources it needs to sell more effectively. Product enablement is similar to this but is instead applied to the entire company as a whole rather than to one of its teams or departments. The primary goal of product enablement is to help employees to gain more knowledge about the company’s products.
Product enablement can be useful for many things: from working with the product life cycle to providing high-quality customer service. Essentially, it is a method used by companies to create training programs for their teams to learn about their products. Of course, different departments will need to learn about the different aspects of the said products, so the training programs between departments may vary.
More often than not, product enablement is applied to the entire company. However, you might want to use it only for some teams working for you. In this case, it’s best to first focus on the most essential departments, including customer support, sales, and marketing among others. The better your employees know your products, the more productive and efficient they will be with their tasks. At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen companies boost team efficiency by over 40% simply by rolling out structured product enablement programs across all departments.
At the same time, product enablement can also be applied to customers. In this case, you would be using marketing and customer support to help your customers learn more about your products and understand how to use them (whether before or after purchasing them). If product enablement is applied to customers, then it most likely resembles a mix between sales enablement and product marketing. This article will focus more on product enablement that is applied to companies.
What Are the 7 Benefits of Product Enablement?
With the help of product enablement, you can inspire both entrepreneurs and regular employees because they will be empowered by their knowledge of their products. Beyond that, product enablement is used to:
- Help customer support representatives to deliver high-quality support and service.
- Allow sales representatives to create a more successful strategy to sell products.
- Encourage marketers to come up with new ways to market products.
- Enable customers to use, maintain, and fix their purchased products.
All of this is achieved through training. Product enablement will be the most useful at times when you are releasing new products, updating policies or goals, hiring new employees, or updating the qualifications of all your departments. Just make sure that the training programs you create are specific to the different teams working for you. Generic training won’t be as effective as customized training.
To better understand why you need product enablement, it’s worth looking at the problems it can solve for your company:
1. Not Enough Marketing Materials
When you are launching new products or updating old products, you need to explain this both to your employees and your customers. Unfortunately, businesses don’t always have enough marketing materials to accomplish such goals. Product enablement can be used to educate your departments and enable your marketing team specifically to create more effective marketing campaigns that can deliver relevant information to customers.
Other departments (e.g. sales team) can also benefit from this. At Growth Hackers, we see product enablement as giving your teams a fully stocked toolbox: without it, they struggle to build campaigns; with it, every message hits its mark.
2. No Visibility in Product Updates
Speaking of updating old products, there can be a critical lack of visibility in the way they happen. If your employees aren’t aware of the new updates, fixes, and upgrades made to your products, they can’t possibly market and sell them to your customers successfully. Likewise, your customer team won’t be able to deliver high-quality support and solve customer problems. Product enablement can solve this issue by explaining all the updates to your employees.
3. Unclear Explanations of Updates
In addition to the lack of visibility, explanations of your product updates may simply be unclear. This is a particularly big problem when it comes to the technical aspects of your products. Such technical updates need to be clearly communicated both to your customers and to your employees. As mentioned earlier, this can be done with the application of product enablement where you only deliver relevant information by breaking it down into simple parts.
4. Inefficient Campaign Organization
Organizing, coordinating, launching, and managing campaigns can be incredibly complicated. Moreover, problems can arise quickly if you find out that your employees are not fully aware of what they should do with these campaigns and how they should promote your products.
From sales promotions to marketing campaigns, all of these need to be organized efficiently which is only possible with full awareness of all your departments (after being educated through product enablement). Growth Hackers once helped a B2B SaaS client whose campaigns were constantly delayed and disjointed. After working with us for 5 months and implementing product enablement, their launches became smooth, coordinated, and 50% faster.
5. No Understanding of Products
Upselling is a popular technique used by multiple departments in different companies to sell more products. But despite its popularity, many businesses still don’t know how to use it effectively because their employees don’t understand how to present products in a specific light.
Upselling is about offering higher-end products and encouraging customers to buy them instead of the cheaper options. Obviously, product enablement is ideal for training your teams about your products so that they can start upselling more successfully.
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6. Reduced Personalization
Your target audience is not a monolith, so you need to understand how to personalize and customize your products for the different segments of your customers. If there is not enough understanding of the said products, the personalization will definitely be reduced. That is why applying product enablement in your company can make such a huge difference and can encourage your teams to come up with new ways to personalize your products.
7. Frequent Requests for Changes
The sales department can often request changes for products that can be improved. Of course, such changes are usually beneficial to the products because it becomes easier to sell the said products. That being said, too many requests for changes complicate everything and waste your time and resources. By educating your employees with product enablement, you can reduce the number of requests for changes because there will be more understanding of the said products in the first place.
What Does Product Enablement Involve? The 7 Key Elements
So, what exactly does product enablement involve and how can you start applying it to your own company? At its core, product enablement is about creating and running training programs for the different departments in your company to educate them about your products. Know that there are several product marketing KPIs you need to track:
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
- Churn Rate
- CLV or CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- Lead Conversion Rate
- Average Deal Size
When creating these programs, you can check some writing services to find a writer to help you with the training materials and resources, including:
1. Blog Content
Posts, articles, videos, infographics, and other blog content can be used to educate your customers about your products (which is also sometimes considered to be a part of product enablement). However, they can also be used by your employees to learn more about your products. Growth Hackers view blog content as a dual-purpose library: customers explore it to learn, and employees consult it to master every product detail.
2. Long-form Materials
Presentations, e-books, lectures (both in video and text format), white papers, case studies, and entire webinars can be used for the training programs you design to educate your teams. At Growth Hackers, we’ve helped an OEM company increase employee product mastery by almost 50% using long-form materials like webinars, e-books, and case studies as part of structured training programs.
3. Practical Guidelines
Content guidelines, templates, guides, checklists, and other materials used in practice to create and promote products. These can also be used to deliver customer support.
Besides knowing which deliverables or materials you are expected to create in the process of applying product enablement, it’s also worth utilizing the Four Ps of product enablement that are considered to be its four pillars:
4. Positioning
This includes the positioning docs that determine the positioning for the sales, marketing, and customer support departments to help customers understand why they need to be interested in the products. Before Growth Hackers implemented unified positioning docs for one of our e-commerce clients, teams struggled to communicate consistent value. After partnering with our team for 4 months, sales, marketing, and support all spoke the same language, making customer engagement far more effective.
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5. Pitch
This includes the content that explains why customers should care about your products in terms of the value they provide or the problems they can solve.
6. Play
This includes the docs explaining how your products can be used on a day-to-day basis i.e. their actual practical use.
7. Program
This includes the methods used for communicating with customers and guiding them before, during, and after their purchase of your products.
What Are the Challenges of Product Enablement?
Implementing product enablement successfully is relatively easy, but there can still be some challenges on your way. The most obvious one is the fact that it can be difficult to explain complex technical information to employees and customers.
A good solution is to explain only the most important information by breaking it down into simple processes and presenting them that way (e.g. by using infographics or explainer videos). At Growth Hackers, we view product enablement challenges like climbing a mountain: technical details are the steep terrain, but breaking them into digestible steps makes the summit reachable for everyone.
How Is Product Enablement Different from Product Marketing?
As mentioned earlier, product enablement could be considered as a combination of sales enablement and product marketing when it is applied to customers. While product enablement and product marketing may seem like they are the same thing in this context, there is actually a difference between the two.
Product marketing is not about a variety of marketing methods to simply promote products to customers. On the contrary, product marketing is used to create comprehensive resources with product information that can help the sales department which is, in turn, also referred to as sales enablement. In other words, sales enablement is a part of product marketing. Product marketing is used to figure out how to sell the products more successfully.
Final Thoughts About Product Enablement
All in all, product enablement can be incredibly useful to improve the productivity of your team. Use the information from this article to get started with product enablement and begin implementing it in your own company.
Growth Hackers is without a doubt a world-class product marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners with product enablement, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales.
We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
