What services should sales enablement own?

I coined it down to transformational enablement, role-based enablement, and then tactical. I think at role-based and tactical, you’re much more in the front line with your managers and reps to help move the needle. I think when you’re talking about things that are going to take more than a year, which is what the annual number of the director is, then you shouldn’t be tied to that, which is often I think why we’re seeing a shift away from enablement reporting up through the sales leadership, into more transformational of what the sales organization should become.

We’ve split our enablement function into a back office team and a front office team, and the back office are more to do with the strategy of ensuring that we are the point of the spear. When you look at competitive intelligence, product marketing, sales operations, whatever other function within our organization touches our salespeople from the perspective of what they need to know, what skills they need, what needs to motivate them, and what environment they need to perform in. We are the moderators of every single communication, every single play that comes through those people. Irrespective of what it is. We are almost the protectors of our sales function. So from a strategic point of view, our field organizations aren’t bombarded by all of these operational asks around the cadence, around their sales force, around whatever it happens to be, we do that. From a tactical point of view, I would call us consultative diagnosticians. And what I mean by that is we are aligned to each functional sales leader that sits within our business, irrespective of what our role is.

If you think about the evolution of this function, what it’s gone through, enablement is going to be different to different people, different organizations depnding on the company size or the industry. You have different species of enablement that have cropped up. One species is focused purely on onboarding, it’s like a ramp team, and if you say enablement that’s what people about. How do I onboard my new hire? I feel the evolution there is going to be expanding your focus from just a moment in time, so your first six to nine months to more of that continuous learning, because especially in SaaS sales you never stop learning…When others think of enablement they might think of sales coaches, so these are the folks that are more consultative, they might focus on deal reviews and do value selling – that group, those are going to be the ones that are deployed more strategically…And then you have other folks that think of enablement as, ‘these are the people that constantly send me e-learning modules’ or ‘these are the people that are responsible for case studies and white papers and that’s it’. So it varies.