The New Sales MVP: Enablement

Sales Enablement

As the host of the Legends of Sales and Marketing podcast, I interview some of the world’s top sales and marketing leaders. I recently caught up with Erica Schultz, President of Field Operations at Confluent. She put a punctuation point next to building a great Sales Enablement function from day 1. “I see too many teams with a small Enablement team buried somewhere in Sales Operations. Think about the need to enable the salesforce on prescriptive plays and recipes to be successful. Sales Enablement is one of the most strategic levers that you have in the organization.”

As a former sales executive, I must admit that this wouldn’t have been at the top of my priority list. But, things have changed over the past decade and even the past year. Mary Shea PhD, Principal Analyst at Forrester, reports that COVID-19 and the resulting hardships it brought forth in 2020 accelerated the digitization of the B2B buying and selling process. Sales reps face a host of new challenges, including an extended remote selling environment, larger buying teams, and slower decision cycles. This means a stellar Sales Enablement leader is the smart CRO’s first-round draft pick.

When the OutSystems Board installed Bart Franelli as CRO, they expected him to start hiring reps immediately. He took a different approach. “I over-invested immediately in staffing the Sales Enablement function. Most companies will do the opposite. And it's a huge flaw, because without a pattern, without a playbook, without a common vernacular, and without a common toolset, reps are never going to hit the revenue target consistently.”

Bart and Erica aren’t alone. Stumble into any conversation between sales executives, and you’ll likely hear the words “Sales Enablement” exchanged several times. As I’ve followed these conversations, I’ve picked up a few tips.

• Hire people with street-cred. When the sales enablement crew has carried a bag at some point during their career, they instinctively know what will move the needle and what’s fluff. What’s more, they’ll quickly win over the field team since they’ll relate in a very personal way to the unique challenges sellers face.
• Set the plan, then scale it--not the other way around. Effective sales executives give their enablement team the space to nail the sales motion (i.e., processes, playbooks, and tools). This won’t happen overnight, but it can be accelerated if sales leadership aligns with the initiative and gives it the attention it deserves. When you talk to organizations that run like clockwork, chances are, there were few all-nighters during which leaders locked themselves in a room to hammer out and then refine the sales program.
• Showcase the right metrics--focusing on the wrong numbers not only inhibits but, in some cases, blows up a sales organization. Reps are savvy, and if they feel that management is collecting data simply to micro-manage, they’ll push back hard and eventually quit. On the other hand, when companies can zero in on the leading indicators that define future success, reps tune in. They’re looking for every advantage they can get to win over customers, close deals, and maintain long term relationships (if they’re not, you don’t want them). Focusing on the handful of numbers that predict those kinds of results will resonate. But to figure out what matters, you need a team that has the chops to sift through the data and operationalize it. Your Sales Enablement team needs to be equally comfortable swimming in data riding shotgun with reps.
• Give it time--Tom Levey, Chief Go To Market Officer at Datarobot, cautions companies to avoid short-term thinking regarding building a successful enablement program. “You may not see results for a year or more. But when you do, the impact is massive.” Sales organizations have to think short and long term simultaneously. With expectations built around quarterly earnings, they don’t have the luxury of chewing up months sitting in planning meetings. That said, if they’re not investing in their sales foundation quarter in and quarter out, they’ll never hit and sustain the inflection point that characterizes high growth companies.

Sales Enablement has been catapulted to the top of the CROs priority list. I’m now seeing companies divert dollars away from other revenue facing budget items to fund more ambitious enablement programs. As companies start to vote with dollars, initiatives that were once side projects become table stakes. Moving forward, I anticipate that Sales Enablement will sit at the foundation of every well run B2B Sales organization.

Written by Justin Shriber, Chief Marketing Officer at People.ai