How can you secure executive buy-in for sales enablement?

Running an enablement council that is led by sales leaders is the best way to get buy-in. Essentially, you’ve got your sales VPs globally and you’ve got some top sellers in there, so any new program that comes in – and then we invite other groups. We invite marketing, we invite training, we invite services to come in to present and they do a focus group with the top sales leaders and massage the new program idea with them. Then when we go live to the field, the field says, ‘okay, this has been blessed by the council. These guys have made club every year, I want to look like that.’ And it is very helpful.

The obvious answer is aligning it with the business needs and driving with the business needs. But I think when you start to unpack that a bit, being able to help sales leaders see things they don’t see yet – say, ‘here’s the next corner we need to look around, here is the next change the organization is going to have to go through to achieve our goals’ – that is when you start to become a real strategic advisor to that sales leader.

Number one is figure out what kind of leader you’ve got, two is make sure you’ve got a cadence with your leader, and three is you’ve got to educate them. The fourth thing is start small and expand.