Sales Enablement for Startups

As a startup finds its footing, it's building on two fronts at once. On one side, the product. On the other, the audience: early users, design partners, collaborators, pilot clients, potential investors. You need all of them, and you need them before you have a full team in place.

The challenge: with no dedicated departments, no separation between product, marketing, and sales, and still figuring out your own benefits (let alone features), how do you support the sales process at all?

Sales enablement. That's how.

In traditional companies, sales enablement is a shared process between marketing and sales to create material that moves deals forward. In a startup, it's different. It's less of a process and more of a live, constantly-updating support function. Someone dynamically generates content, iterates on the messaging, and adapts on the fly to present your value to whoever needs to hear it next, whether that's a user, an investor, a design partner, or someone you hadn't planned to pitch that day.

Depending on your stage, this falls on the CEO and the founding team. Or, if you're ready, you bring in your first product marketer to own it properly.

The short version: sales enablement squeezes the value from your product through marketing and out to the people who need to understand why it matters.