What is sales enablement?
The TL;DR on Sales Enablement:
What teams does Enablement work with? Sales leadership, success/support leadership, sales ops, finance, product marketing, sometimes product.
When do you need enablement? If you have more than a few people on your customer-facing team, you need enablement. Wait too long to establish enablement resources and you will constantly be playing catch up.
People ask me all the time what enablement does, exactly. Unlike roles in sales, marketing, or finance, enablement hasn’t been around as long and is often more nebulous. The responsibilities vary widely between companies and it often gets lumped into learning and development, HR, or marketing. However, enablement is its own category. It exists to make sure customer-facing teams are equipped with the skills, processes, and tools they need to sell and retain customers.
What is sales enablement?
Enablement departments make sure that customer-facing teams, those responsible for bringing in and keeping revenue - sales, customer success, and support - are equipped to do their jobs effectively. They provide support by designing and executing onboarding for new hires, creating and leading ongoing training, and developing and managing processes and tooling.
Pillars of an enablement program.
Onboarding
Ongoing training
Process and Tooling
Every enablement team does a little bit in each of those categories. Depending on the company and the team, the categories may be weighted differently but almost every enablement responsibility falls into those. Here are some examples of what this looks like in action.
Onboarding sales reps to get to quota quickly
Have you ever started a new job and after the basic “Welcome to the company!” meeting on your first day, you’re handed a computer, shown to your desk and basically wished good luck? As a new salesperson, you might be expected to shadow calls or join team meetings. But who do you shadow? What time is that meeting? And, seriously, can somebody please explain that acronym people keep using?
Enablement eliminates this disastrous experience and makes sure every new person is set up for success from Day One with a consistent onboarding experience. Working closely with managers and leaders to build out the onboarding curriculum is often the first thing an enablement person will focus on. This is the foundation that sets the tone for a customer-facing team. Enablement owning the development and execution of the onboarding experience is essential to keeping the experience consistent.
When enablement takes the burden of owning onboarding off busy managers and leadership teams, it allows for new people to get up to speed faster. This results in more revenue, happier customers over time, and higher retention of talent on your customer-facing team.
Ongoing training for sales skills and updates to brand and product
The “ongoing training” pillar of enablement can be broken down into several parts, but in general, it encompasses product training and launches, certifications, sales kick-off, and role-specific skill-building. Enablement often works closely with other teams for many of these activities, pulling together the necessary information or subject matter experts to make sure customer-facing teams are set up for success
For a product training or launch of a new product, enablement will work closely with product marketing, product, and revenue leadership. The goal is to ensure the customer-facing teams understand what the new product does, how they are expected to talk about it, technical information they may need to help troubleshoot problems, and internal goals like revenue targets, adoption, etc.
Another example core to enablement is role-specific skill-building. From developing and executing the training, to testing for comprehension and coaching the ideal behaviors, enablement plays a key role in making sure customer-facing teams have access to professional development. For example, if a revenue team’s goal is to increase their average transaction size, you may want to develop training and certification on negotiation skills.
By investing in their existing team, companies are able to retain top talent, promote from within, and focus on developing the skills that will help the business achieve its goals.
Process and tooling for more efficiency and scale
The third piece to enablement is supporting customer-facing teams with consistent processes and tools to make them as efficient as possible. Knowing when to do what, and an understanding of how to properly use the tools at their disposal is essential to making sure sales, support, and success teams are doing their best work and able to focus on their core job–the customers.
Depending on the company, enablement will either own the creation of processes and managing the tool stack or they will share the responsibility with a sales operations team. Either way, enablement is involved to make sure the customer-facing teams understand the “why, how, and what’ of any processes such as roles and responsibilities, hand-offs between teams, and how to use the tools available to support these processes.
Tactics of sales enablement
Creating Sales Content
Sales deck
Case studies
Quote/Proposal
Sales Team Training
Training as new product, features, and integrations ship
Competitive Positioning to block and tackle
Sales rep development
Deal Support
Customer reference calls
Deal strategy
Sales Productivity
Choosing the right tools for your company and team
Implementing and optimizing the tech stack
Continuously improving the sales process as the business changes.
What enablement isn’t
Enablement isn’t just making pitch decks and one-pagers for sales teams to send to customers. The enablement team is fundamental to the success of a healthy revenue team, from the first day a new person joins and beyond. Yes, enablement does make sure that customer-facing teams have the assets they need and work closely with product marketing and design to deliver these. However, a great enablement resource will make sure that the team knows how to use the assets, that new people know where to find the assets, and that the tools where the assets live are set up and managed properly.
I might be biased, but I think that enablement is the secret weapon to a high-achieving GTM team. Enablement is a strategic partner for revenue leaders and product marketing alike, making sure the customer-facing teams are prepared to meet all-new challenges and lofty goals that a fast-growing business throws at them.
So, do you need a sales enablement strategy?
Now that we’ve established what enablement is, when do you actually need it? The earlier you can bring in enablement resources, the better. Building consistency and development opportunities across customer-facing teams from onboarding and beyond mean that your customers will have a consistent buying process, your top talent will stick around, and you can focus on the core job of customer-facing teams: creating and retaining revenue.
If you’re looking for support in establishing or growing your sales enablement function, reach out to Olivine.
