What does it take to develop a great Sales Enablement program? It’s certainly important to create efficiency to save sellers time and provide more opportunity to be in front of customers and prospects, but truly enabling sales to execute on revenue generating objectives requires making the sales organization not just more efficient, but more effective. Smart companies are aware of this requirement, but continue to struggle with how to execute it. More and more of our customers and prospects are looking to us for guidance on how to create and govern their Sales Enablement program. Too often the word governance evokes images of workflow diagrams or branding standards and the focus starts and stops with content-level governance. While this is important, we’ve learned that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The challenge became evident with the very first customer I worked with when the champion said, “Our last sales portal was great when we launched it…and then it gradually became useless”. Nearly five years later, as the Director of Implementation, I now lead the team that is having these conversations with our customers every day and the buzz around this topic has only gotten louder. While many of the roles and responsibilities to execute a strategy are already in place, it can still be a challenge to answer questions like, “Who should own Sales Enablement?”, “How do we ensure that as our objectives change our Sales Enablement efforts remain aligned?”, “How do we know that the work we are doing is relevant and valuable for sales?”, “How do we ramp new sellers more quickly”, “How do we balance compliance with contribution”, and “Which metrics are important”, just to name a few. These are key questions for Sales Enablement: not just related to technology or content questions, but to governance as well.
Technology alone does not equate to a Sales Enablement program, but it is a powerful component. A great first step in building a Sales Enablement program is scoping a solution that allows for rapid deployment of technology to immediately create efficiency and make sellers more effective in executing against the top objectives today. From there, it is critical to consider how the organization evolves to support Sales Enablement governance and success long-term. The best part is you don’t have to change your organization in order to implement or govern a Sales Enablement program. The people already exist, and are already tasked with enabling sellers. It’s really about aligning them appropriately – in the end, the goal is not to create new jobs or responsibilities, but empower the existing team to do the things they’re responsible for today, in a smarter and more relevant way.
In my next post we”ll cover the roles involved in Sales Enablement Governance, in “The game is Sales Enablement Governance, but who are the players?”.
Truer words were never spoken!
Thanks, Sharon! As you know, ensuring that the various necessary constituents have visibility into the organizational vision and the impact they have on that vision does not just happen. In many ways an entire company supports the sales organization – both internal sales and partners. Making certain that everyone is pointed in the right direction and synergies are created is crucial, but generally seems easier said than done. Ensuring the people and mechanisms are in place to enable this needs to be deliberate, but does not need to be difficult nor wreak having on the org chart. In the end the effort is small in comparison to the reward. I appreciate your feedback!
Carla, that’s a great point. I address Sales Enablement from a content-perspective, and I always include the technology platform (like SAVO) as critical. But your focus on “governance” highlights the long-touted “people, process and technology” model of how to create and sustain value. My company may create compelling content, and your company may streamline the content and integrate it to the sale cycle–but we BOTH need to help the client with the ongoing integration and uplifting of the entire “enablement ecosystem.”