A guide to strategic sales enablement

What does it take to start or scale a successful, strategic sales enablement programme? Kathryn Aragon discusses.

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Sales Hacker

Scope and focus

When you hear the term ‘sales enablement,’ what comes to mind? Training and support for sales teams? A successful sales enablement programme does more — much more — than training and development.

The focus of sales enablement is to enable sales in whatever way it can. That includes:

• Sales content
• Playbooks
• Best practices
• Training
• Coaching
• Onboarding
• Management of technology
• Measurement, and more.

But someone needs to coordinate that effort. That’s where sales enablement comes in.

With this in mind, let’s expand our understanding of sales enablement. Not only does it resource and empower sales, but it also coordinates the efforts of the entire organisation to support the sales team.

It also creates a culture of learning, where everyone shares their expertise with one another, and, with sales.

What does this look like in practice?

Sales enablement leaders develop sales enablement strategy, optimise its execution, and provide governance. They also lead and coordinate the support of sales, engaging other teams and individuals as needed. Marketing may participate by creating sales enablement content that can be used to move prospects through the pipeline.

Sales enablement strategy

The head of a sales enablement programme is responsible for developing and writing the sales enablement charter.

Your sales enablement charter should include:

• The business case Mission statement
• What success looks like
• Obstacles
• Metrics and key performance indicators
• Implementation plan

Start with your business case

The business case is a rough framework that communicates the value of the sales enablement programme, why it’s needed, how it will operate, and who will have responsibility for its various functions.

This document is developed first, before the charter is drafted, to ensure the programme will align with the company’s key strategic priorities and make the biggest possible impact. Not only does it give you executive air cover, it helps you stay on track, pushing the initiatives your executive team cares about most.

Define your mission

Once the brief is approved, you can craft your mission statement. This short statement describes the purpose of the sales enablement function in one or two sentences.

Here are two examples:

• To provide the sales organisation with the information, content, and tools necessary to streamline sales processes.
• To deliver continuous learning and growth to customer-facing teams.

Align both up and down

A successful sales enablement programme adds value to the business, leadership, and customer-facing reps. To do that, you need to align both up and down — understanding the problems of people at every level and finding ways to help them all reach their goals.

Identify your subject matter experts

Sales enablement works best when it’s collaborative. In many organisations, Enablement is a small or one-person team. You don’t have the bandwidth to fulfil your mission without help from internal stakeholders and leaders.

It’s important for sales enablement professionals to network within the organisation. Meet with people. Get to know them. Build relationships with people you might need to call on.

Decide how you’ll measure success

You need to track two sets of metrics. Programmatic metrics tell you whether you’re hitting your team’s goals. Growth and revenue metrics tell you how well you’re impacting the organisation’s goals.

In each set of metrics, you have a lot of options. But ultimately, it depends on your programme, your organisation, and the challenges you’re trying to solve.

Sales enablement execution plan

Execution is about fulfilling your charter and achieving the results you’ve promised. It involves:

• Designing training and content
• Testing methods of delivery
• Continually organising, updating, and optimising content
• Managing technology and tools
• Coordinating with experts and other teams within the organisation
• Getting feedback to understand what’s working and what’s not

Make it accessible

Accessibility involves more than the format of your content. Content should be well organised, so it’s easy to find. It needs to be delivered in a way that facilitates learning. And it needs to be easy to consume.

Create short feedback loops

Not all your initiatives will work, and there’s no way to know until you test them. Because of that, you need to build short feedback loops into your workflow. If something isn’t working after the second cohort, update the programme or pivot to provide more value and achieve the results you’re looking for.

Think of yourself as an information broker

Bottom line, sales enablement professionals are information brokers. You need to stay alert to trends, what’s working across the industry, and what’s not. You also need to understand the challenges your team is facing. Go to all stand-ups and forecast meetings. If you can target where reps are getting frustrated, it’ll be easier to provide workable solutions.

Knowledge management

Ideally, you want to capture new ideas and lessons learned from the field and other groups, so you can share them across the organisation. And at first, it’s relatively easy to organise and tag your content. But as the program scales, content itself can become a problem.

It’s important to find the right technology for hosting content and making it accessible to everyone. As you consider options, don’t just evaluate your current needs. Make sure your technology can scale with your program. 

Leverage success 

It’s not enough to deliver training. You need to prove that your training and tactics can turn reps into high performers. When someone implements your training and starts outperforming everyone else, make a point of celebrating their success.

Sales enablement governance

Governance is about measuring and evaluating your program’s assets and outcomes. You need to validate you’re fulfilling your charter and that Sales’ performance is improving. You also need to ensure your content is updated and relevant.

Keep sales enablement content fresh 

As a sales enablement program grows, it becomes more difficult to govern all your links, connections to other data sources, and the content itself. It’s vitally important to set up systems and processes for reviewing and refreshing your content.

Demonstrate value

Everything you do needs to fall within the scope of your charter and have a measurable goal. This allows you to track outcomes and show that you’re meeting your organisation’s goals.

Track and measure results

As mentioned above, you need to track two sets of metrics: programmatic metrics that track your programme’s success, and growth and revenue metrics that measure your impact on the company’s goals.

Here are the sales enablement metrics that Jefferson recommends.

To measure your programme’s success:

• Accreditation and certification scores
• Biannual needs analysis
• Program-based surveys
• Communications deployed
• eLearning statistics
• Percentage of completed enablement requests
• Sales enablement content usage statistics

To measure the impact of your sales enablement programme:

• Average deal size
• Collateral use and frequency
• Deal velocity
• New pipeline created
• Number of closed deals
• Quarter over quarter
• Annual quota attainment percentage
• Speed to revenue
• Win and loss rates

Getting a handle on sales enablement

As a sales enablement professional, you’ll put your own spin on the function, creating tactics that drive growth for your organisation. But no matter how you approach it, your programme will need a strategy, an execution plan, and good governance.

By focusing on these three areas, you’ll be able to continually improve your programme and drive real results that make your organisation more profitable.