You already have a winning sales enablement team and strategy with the best technology and processes to support it? Wow! That's great! Before delving further into that, it is worth mentioning that sales enablement aims to ensure that reps have process expertise, skills, and knowledge and the best assets for maximizing every customer interaction or buyer.
Putting reps at the forefront, in this case, means that the outcome of effective enablement will remain consistent. That results from giving agents the content, competence, and confidence to engage a client or buyer. Additionally, it is interesting to note that 58% of firms have had sales enablement programs for over two years.
The only thing is that more than half of these organizations have formal sales enablement approaches. But the rest are yet to formalize the process. The bottom line here is that realizing sales enablement success without the right roles, individuals, and teams is challenging. So, if you have the best technology and processes to support sales enablement and lack the workforce to implement it, do not expect to achieve much.
You also need to understand that a particular team structure that can succeed in every entity is non-existent. As such, when determining the roles that will help you maximize the success of your team, you need to consider the following:
Identifying gaps in your existing strategy will help you determine the team roles necessary to execute your goals more effectively.
Coaching is a vital part of the professional development of sales reps. So sales enablement often works to optimize this area to ensure agents reach their full potential. That can be in the form of training programs on coaching strategies for frontline managers. However, having a sales coach as part of your team is something worth considering.
The reason is that such an individual owns the advisory component to help salespeople define their problems. Because the latter tend to circumvent actual issues.
Influencing C-suite support to gain executive buy-in is critical to the success of sales enablement. That is achievable by designating an enablement seat at the table, and you need to note that the role is relatively rare. As much as that is the case, a chief enablement officer will play the vital role of streamlining the implementation and adoption of sales enablement programs across your entity with an authentic top-down approach.
Partnering marketing with sales enablement is paramount because it maximizes the performance of sales content. You should also avoid sole reliance on the product marketing team to create content for sales enablement. Doing so will prove burdensome to both departments. Product marketing will also cease to be part of their priorities, and it results in sales enablement bottlenecks as well.
Prioritizing a user-centric design is advisable because it fosters stronger long-term engagement in platforms and programs. By doing so, you will also experience better alignment in the enablement of program outcomes and the expectations of your clients. The following are some of the things a user-centric approach requires.
If you want your sales enablement strategy to succeed, you need to align it with stakeholder goals. You can achieve that by engaging all stakeholders to get every possible point of view regarding the current state of sales enablement within your entity. The objective behind such discussions is to unearth gaps preventing your firm from realizing increased sales productivity.
After that, sales enablement leaders should share the findings with executive stakeholders. In addition to the future vision to illustrate goals and the next plan of action. The result is stakeholder headcount, alignment, support, as well as eventually funding for enablement.
A consultancy mindset with the ability to serve internal clients is the foundation of any reliable sales enablement team. That is why you should consider running sales enablement as a business within a business. In that case, understanding the needs of salespeople should precede processes, goals, as well as metrics. The expectation, in this case, is that enablement teams will deliver accordingly.
You can term correlating salespeople's consumption of enablement programs to an intended change in behavior as enablement's Holy Grail. That begins with a single metric that relates to a goal you derive through stakeholder meetings and building your enablement program around that goal. By doing so, you tie enablement success directly to things that stakeholders value. In turn, that will ensure headcount, support, as well as funding.
Hiring empathetic people who understand the audiences they serve can influence sales enablement success. Quite often, such empathy is a result of working in a channel, sales, or presales role. This gives one firsthand experience in needs, pains, as well as enablement requirements.
The right enablement individual should;
Every organization is unique, including yours. That is why there is no specific approach to sales enablement. The focus here should be defining team roles to understand your vision, mission, as well as capacity to execute against that with your existing team. Then, you can assess where some of the common roles fit within your sales enablement roadmap.
That way, you will be more effective even as your function matures and the team expands. If you need more information on building a sales enablement team, book a consultation today!