Should sales enablement report into sales?

With reporting structure, if I’m underneath the sales leader, then I’m implementing infrastructure that can be critical to the long-term success of that organization. In the event of a downturn, sales leaders will push performance and activity before design, infrastructure and programming. If you wipe out your infrastructure in a downturn, it puts the entire company at risk. The training function is under the sales leader, and so they’ll go, ‘well I’ve got a downturn, so what’s disposable? My middle of the range sales rep or my training guides?’ I think as an observation, when there’s a downturn you’ll see a retraction in enablement and training.

I think the pro of having it live within sales is that your sales leadership and the sales teams are going to have customer conversations at the forefront of their mind. You could grab any sales leader or individual contributor right now and they’re going to be able to tell you right now about the conversation that they just had with this potential customer, and that’s invaluable. If you have access to that kind of information, you can easily identify and prioritize which types of enablement materials are going to be most beneficial for helping you and your team achieve your goals