We’ve seen so many scale ups suffer from the same problems when trying to expand rapidly. They want to increase their sales but are struggling to manage their existing sales team let alone bring on more salespeople. It's often worse for B2B tech companies where they need specialised knowledge to make a sale. Have you faced the same issue?

The solution isn’t more funding because investors will rightly question why your existing sales team isn’t performing better. Alarm bells will ring. Spending more on salespeople who aren’t generating enough revenue is a dead end. Your new hires will follow the example of those already there. You want the team’s expansion to be self-funded as soon as you can.

Instead, the focus should be on how to get the most out of every active member of your team. The best way to do this is through effective onboarding and training. When you do it right, each person will level up and produce a greater return on your investment in them. You don't want to be one of those businesses who seem amateur by relying on Google Sheets or Notion.

You must remember that failing to empower your salespeople is the same as choosing to leave money on the table. You need to set them up for success but this is difficult when there are so many other areas to worry about.

Sales onboarding might sound expensive and time-consuming to you but it doesn’t have to be. This is where EaaS can help you reach your goals for your business.

What is EaaS?

In the past, companies who wanted to empower their sales teams would need to buy empty software platforms. They would then need to invest significant time and effort into populating the platform with content so it could fulfil its purpose. This would include hiring a specialised sales enablement team who might have salaries close to six-figures. This process could take months and the quality of the content would still be low. Ironically, companies bought these platforms to save time but it often cost them more than it saved.

The largest companies could swallow up this large upfront investment but this was much more difficult for scale ups. Understandably, many questioned whether their energy would be better spent just trying to sell more instead of creating a platform which they weren’t sure would lead to the result they wanted. Investors would be wondering about the same question. They want to see fast results, not expensive sunk costs on unnecessary enterprise software.

EaaS solves this problem by offering content alongside the software platform. It stands for Enablement as a Service and does exactly what it says it does – it empowers sales teams to function effectively and for each individual to reach their highest potential. Scale ups can get proven top quality onboarding and training material they need straight away and start the process of upskilling their team.

Your most important job as a sales leader is to enable your sales team. But how do you do it when you have hundreds of other tasks to focus on and somehow hit your quarterly targets too?

How does it help?

There are three key areas where EaaS delivers results and these are goals shared by every ambitious sales team.

#1 Jet Speed

In our experience, the most common reason a scale up doesn’t have an effective onboarding process is because they believe it would take up too much of their time. They know it would help in an ideal world but think their efforts are better spent elsewhere in the real world.

They might be right for a manual process but EaaS requires almost no time to set up or run.

Creation

With modern salespeople demanding growth and being set up for success, onboarding is the first critical step to aligning your team. It’s a tricky task and it’s understandable if you wouldn’t know where to start if building your own from scratch or even attempting to re-use templates. It can become a task that’s always better to do tomorrow because it feels so disconnected from your usual workflow.

EaaS can be your saviour because it significantly reduces the initial friction. You can often build a simple and scalable onboarding journey in minutes through a drag and drop interface using tried-and-tested best practice to ramp up team members faster.

This still might feel intimidating for you and you might not be sure if your product is too complex for this to work. We ease the setup process further by providing our enablement team to customise everything based on your needs. This requires even less setup time compared to using an empty platform.

Implementation

Without EaaS, sales leaders might need to spend their own precious time onboarding new recruits or that of their senior staff. It’s no wonder that many companies feel like it’s too big a resource drain and decide they can’t justify the time allocation.

EaaS automates most processes to free up senior staff. Salespeople can find the answers to their questions independently rather than needing to ask a person which saves even more time. Managers can sync tasks to trainees’ calendars without excessive manual work. We’ve had clients who have saved 15 hours per week by switching to EaaS.

We know running a growing startup is stressful and you’re pulled in many different directions. Choosing to invest in EaaS gives you peace of mind knowing at least onboarding is being handled properly without your input.

#2 New heights

You may have interviewed young and hungry salespeople. They might be confident enough to believe they can become your best salesperson straight away. Yet B2B tech needs an understanding of both the industry and the clients as well the skills. In our experience, the top salespeople have put in the hard yards to build this with support from sales managers

Fresh talent when nurtured properly can reach these heights fast though. Good onboarding is the art of taking the new hire from 30% productivity to 100% as soon as possible. With a poor process, they might plateau much earlier than this and some knowledge gaps are never filled.

Even if you have passable onboarding, it can take longer than necessary for new employees to fulfil their potential. In the meantime, they aren’t closing as many deals as they could be which means you’re losing potential sales.

Let’s say someone is incredible at cold calling but terrible at upselling existing clients. The problem is they don’t understand how your product fits into the client's general tech stack. By helping them to improve their approach, they will deliver more revenue per client!

Through optimised EaaS, you can speed up the efficiency curve and ensure everyone on your sales team is using the most effective tactics. Imagine a sales team where everyone is working at their highest potential. Imagine smashing your team smashing sales records every month.

Another great aspect of EaaS is that it encourages knowledge sharing. It’s easy for managers to see who is performing the best and find out what lessons made the biggest difference to their performance. These can then be recommended across the team to give everyone an extra boost.

#3 No one left behind

It’s wrong for sales teams to believe a high churn of employees is normal. As we’re sure you know, the process of finding talent and recruiting them is expensive. It makes logical sense to try everything possible to keep hold of strong salespeople. This has become harder than ever with the shift in society’s relationship with work following the Great Resignation. You’re competing with other tech companies for the top sales talent on more than just salary.

The modern salesperson is ambitious and resilient. They need to be willing to face hundreds of rejections for the adrenaline rush of closing one important deal. They don’t want to stagnate or feel they’ve hit a ceiling otherwise they’ll become restless. If you don’t provide them with the opportunity to grow and upskill, you can’t be surprised when they decide to seek a new challenge elsewhere. EaaS enables you to stop such turnover because you can provide constant feedback and opportunities for them. You’ll be helping them continue to grow which in turn means they can increase their commissions!

Most scale ups don’t have the infrastructure to train salespeople to take them to the next level if they go without EaaS. You'd hate to miss your sales targets if you thought you weren't getting enough support wouldn't you? The first few months are especially crucial as the employee won't have built loyalty yet.

With Uhubs, you can keep track of each sales team member’s strengths and weaknesses. The salesperson and those around them all complete 7-minute pulses to establish the skill baselines. From there, the Pulse suggests competencies  to improve on any weaknesses discovered so that each member has a personalised learning path to meet their individual needs. You’ll also get to learn what makes a top A player sales person.

It stops salespeople from needing to take pointless training sessions about topics they’ve already shown to be exceptional in. This show of trust can make a big difference to their perception of life at your business and not waste valuable selling time.

Final thoughts

EaaS solves a significant problem for scale ups. Many don’t have the resources to hire dozens of superstar sales professionals from day one. With financial restraints, they need to maximise the sales from every hire they make. A properly onboarded team member can be far more effective than one left to their own devices.

To summarise, here are the three key benefits of using EaaS:

• Save time - Creating an agile onboarding process from scratch is time-consuming. Optimization and regular updates are faster with EaaS, which frees up your time.
• Increase sales - More knowledgeable and skilled salespeople are able to hit sales quotas faster and earn more commissions.
• Reduce attrition - EaaS can provide personalised feedback reports and custom development paths. Each salesperson feels like they are getting the support they need to improve with clear career progression