MVP for Sales Enablement: Expert Insights for Successful Sales Enablement Platform Development

Table of contents

• What Exactly is Sales Enablement? 

• Benefits of Working With a Sales Enablement Tool

• The Challenges Involved in Sales Enablement Platform Development 

• Sales Enablement Platform Development: NaNLABS' Top Examples

• How to Assess the Effectiveness of a Sales Enablement Tool

• Key Takeaways on Building Successful Sales Enablement MVPs

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What Exactly is Sales Enablement? 

Sales enablement involves equipping a company's sales team with the necessary resources to enhance its effectiveness in selling. These resources encompass information, content, tools, and knowledge aimed at improving their ability to engage with customers and ultimately secure new deals. 

Benefits of Working With a Sales Enablement Tool

By providing sales teams with the resources they need to succeed, businesses can achieve better outcomes and foster sustainable growth, which is what makes sales enablement platforms so strategic. Have a look at some of the benefits of working with a high-quality sales enablement tool:

Efficiency and Productivity: Sales enablement tools streamline processes and allow sales reps to focus on closing deals, by making content and information easy to access and reducing the time spent searching for the right materials.

Data-Driven Insights: The best platforms come with analytics and reporting features that provide insights into the most effective materials and tactics. This knowledge can serve as a base for future decisions regarding sales and marketing strategies, fostering continuous improvement.

Better Strategic Alignment: Such tools help improve the alignment between sales and marketing teams, ensuring that both departments work with the same data, content, and insights. 

Staff Onboarding and Training: Sales enablement platforms can also make it easier and quicker to onboard new sales hires, serving as a one-stop shop for all the product information and sales techniques they need to get the ball rolling.

The Challenges Involved in Sales Enablement Platform Development 

Crafting a sales enablement tool can present several challenges for an MVP development team, due to the intricacies of sales workflows and the unique demands of each organization, as you'll see below. 

1. Analytics and Reporting

A central goal of any sales enablement platform is to provide actionable insights regarding sales activities and support strategic decision-making. To meet that goal, developers will have to build comprehensive analytics and reporting features that can deliver both timely and relevant information. This often demands experience and the skill to select and blend multiple technologies. 

2. Data Security and Privacy

Since such tools deal with sensitive customer and sales information, working with a focus on data security and privacy will be absolutely critical. Even at an MVP stage, your solution must comply with all relevant regulations to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches (such as GDPR in Europe), and meet any industry-specific standards.

3. Integration with Existing Systems

Sales enablement tools often have to connect with different systems already in use, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, marketing automation platforms, and social media channels. Carrying out a seamless integration while maintaining data integrity and security requires an experienced crew and well-established protocols. 

4. Customization and ​​User Experience

Sales processes vary a lot and are not always linear or straightforward, so you'll need a good understanding of how things work before you can start building. The tool must be intuitive and easy to use, but also cater to different sales strategies if it's to be genuinely helpful and fit smoothly into reps' everyday activities. 

5. Reliability and Scalability

Sales teams rely on their enablement tools to close deals and need them to be available and responsive at all times. Hence, a robust architecture alongside rigorous testing and quality assurance protocols will be essential to guarantee the platform's stability. Certain industries also deal with highly fluctuating demands, so to ensure the right product-market fit, your MVP should be built with that need to quickly scale in mind.

Sales Enablement Platform Development: NaNLABS' Top Examples

Let's explore some MVP development examples by the NaNLABS crew, to see what building a sales enablement tool looks like in the real world. 

How NaNLABS Helped Equinix Close Multi-Million Dollar Deals With a Custom-Built Sales Enablement Solution

Equinix, a leading digital infrastructure company, arrived at NaNLABS looking for help to revamp a sales enablement platform that no longer catered to their needs and limited their growth. Built with unsuitable technology, the tool faced constant stability issues and was way too hard to maintain and scale. Enter the NaNLABS squad!

After swiftly integrating with their team, our crew spearheaded the migration of Equinix's platform from Neo4J to MongoDB with minimal downtime, boosting the tool's scalability and simplifying its maintenance. With a primary focus on security, seamless data integration, and infrastructure optimization, we took every measure to guarantee platform stability and real-time access for their global sales team. Our experts also customized the tool to match the company's evolving sales strategies, developing new user-centric features such as 'template projects' for their team to use.

Within 90 days, Equinix was enjoying the results of our collaboration, which included greater platform stability, reduced response times for bug resolution, and increased productivity for the sales team through continuous database updates. Since then, the company has also maintained a consistent user retention rate (a key internal metric), reflecting the value delivered by the tool, which helped their sales team close a number of multi-million dollar deals.

Helping Popr.ai Fuel Their Growth by Designing and Building a Killer Web App 

As a personalized GIF creation web app for sales enablement and recruitment, Popr.ai sought NaNLABS' help to go from proof of concept to a fully functional MVP within a 90-day timeframe.

Initially reliant on manual processes, Popr.ai was dealing with limited resources and significant scalability issues. Generating GIFs, for example, could take up to 15 minutes, hindering their user adoption. With a growing demand, Popr.ai needed an enterprise-level software to streamline its workflows, reduce GIF generation time, and automate tasks.

So we stepped in, bringing with us a tech stack that included tools like React.js, Nest.js, and MongoDB. Among other interventions, our squad quickly devised a solution to extract data from LinkedIn profiles as they required and leveraged Brandfetch API to support brand personalization. Remotion, coupled with AWS Lambda and S3 buckets, were the techs used to slash GIF generation time. And once the deadline was up, NaNLABS had prevailed and conquered Popr.ai's 3-month challenge!

Through our collaboration, Popr.ai reached the project's goals, which included faster GIF generation – reduced from 15 minutes to 15 seconds without manual intervention – and a custom Google Chrome extension for easy LinkedIn data extraction. The company also attracted a beta user waitlist, achieved early validation among them, and quickly scaled its business without any hiccups.

Sales Enablement Tool Rescue: Taking Fluint from Mid-project Chaos to Successful Launch in 90 Days 

Fluint approached NaNLABS with a pressing need for an MVP overhaul. As a B2B SaaS startup with an innovative sales approach, they were working on developing a unique sales enablement platform that seamlessly served both reps and buyers.

The project, initially expected to last 90 days, had stretched into a frustrating 9-month ordeal under the mismanagement of their previous development agency. The result was a codebase plagued with bugs and lacking scalability.

Once we kicked off the project, our crew's first step was to assess the extent of the issues and establish a roadmap for recovery. Taking a customer-centric approach, our strategy prioritized key enhancements over feature overload, and one crucial intervention involved swapping out their existing editor library for a more suitable alternative, laying the foundation for a scalable and robust platform. 

From cleaning and stabilizing the codebase to integrating advanced features and optimizing the user experience, every decision was made with Fluint's long-term success in mind.

Within the original 90-day timeframe, NaNLABS' relentless focus on quality and efficiency paid off. Fluint emerged with a transformed MVP – one that not only met their expectations but exceeded them. Armed with a solid MVP and the user feedback it allowed them to gather, Fluint quickly began onboarding their first paying customers and charting a course toward realizing their founder's vision.

How to Assess the Effectiveness of a Sales Enablement Tool 

Assessing the success of a sales enablement platform means analyzing different metrics to see how well it's supporting your sales team's day-to-day work and driving revenue growth. Here are some indicators that will let you know if a tool is really doing its job:

• Sales Performance: Look at how the platform impacts important sales metrics such as lead conversion rates, win rates, sales cycle length, and the average size of each deal. Compare these stats from before and after you roll out the sales tool to see if it's making a real difference in helping you meet your sales goals.

• Return On Investment (ROI): Determine if your sales tool is a good investment by comparing the costs associated with implementing and maintaining the tool against the revenue generated or the savings you might have achieved as a result of its use.

• Usage: Keep track of how your sales team uses the tool, and try to understand how relevant it is to them. You can gather feedback directly from your sales reps, and also monitor aspects like login frequency, usage duration, and which features they lean on the most. 

• Process Improvements: Evaluate if it's making workflows more efficient, enhancing collaboration between sales and marketing teams, and improving how you communicate with customers. And if the tool has training and onboarding features, check if it's cutting down the time it takes to get new sales reps ready to roll.

Key Takeaways on Building Successful Sales Enablement MVPs

As you can see, successful sales enablement platform development requires a deep understanding of sales workflows, user needs, and potential technical challenges. So, whatever you do, don't skimp on your MVP's discovery phase. And remember the valuable lessons within the case studies we've discussed! If you're looking for MVP development services, be sure to pick a team with experience in building that kind of tool, to avoid spending valuable resources on a solution that won't deliver the actionable insights a great sales team needs. 

That sketch sitting in your library? It’s time to share it with the world. From idea to launch, we can design, architect and code your MVP vision into reality in 3 months or less.

Register for free