Three Must Haves for Any Sales Enablement Team

Jason Brett, Business Development Consultant, EMEA, Mindtickle

As a business development consultant in sales enablement, I have had hundreds of conversations with enablement leaders across EMEA. Talking to these professionals each day means I tend to hear similarities in the challenges they face and the questions they ask.

When I first started, enablement was still a fairly new concept in the EMEA market. There weren’t professionals dedicated to enablement or with “enablement” in their title. Rather, they were focused more on sales training or learning development and often reported to HR. This meant many of their goals and key performance indicators were around completion and adoption.

Over the last year, I have noticed a shift in the EMEA market, seeing additional roles created in enablement and sales training roles evolving to support the larger go-to-market teams. (If you’re new to sales enablement and revenue enablement, check out these blogs, which explain it all in detail.)

After reviewing over one hundred conversations that I’ve had with enablement leaders, I summarised their concerns into the three most common questions I get asked and how I answer them.

I don’t have a sales enablement department. Where do I start? 

This is a fairly loaded question, as it depends on what department and roles currently own training and content for go-to-market teams. But, whether you have 50 employees or 10,000, you can follow these steps to create a true enablement function in your revenue organisation. 

Step 1 - Define and align

The first step to creating a sales enablement function is to define the people, roles, and organisational goals this department will own. This requires alignment across your executive leadership, and often means defining new roles, determining or allocating budget, and hiring additional resources if necessary.

Step 2 - Training content assessment

Once you’ve determined the roles and responsibilities of your enablement function, you need to determine what training and sales collateral can be utilised and where there are gaps. Document what training you have today and map it to the roles you are tasked with training. Then you can create a plan for creating new training content to fill the gaps. Onboarding is typically where most organisations start, check out this podcast on how to individualise and scale onboarding.

Step 3 - Training & content delivery

Sales teams today need to stay connected, and whether they are global or local teams, your training and content needs to be available on demand, through some sort of digital channel. That’s why SaaS platforms for sales enablement are what leading organisations use for onboarding, ongoing training, and content delivery.

Step 4 - Reporting and refinement

Based on your defined goals of the enablement function, you can start analysing the performance of your teams and continually refining your enablement strategy. You want to make sure the metrics you are reporting on are not just adoption metrics - like courses completed - but rather impact metrics - like the improvement of win rates and quota attainment. Check out our eBook, the Enablement ROI Blueprint, on how enablement leaders prove the impact of enablement at their organisations.

How do I prove the impact of enablement on revenue outcomes?

Oftentimes organisations have invested in enablement, but I hear the department struggles to show the true impact it has on the bottom line. If this is the case, you need to be as data-driven as possible. The best place to start is to establish competency profiles for the different roles that affect revenue in your organisation.

By adopting a competency-based approach to enablement, you can understand the top skills needed to be successful for each role, train and upskill against those competencies, and correlate competencies with performance in the field. For more on how to get started, check out our video on creating ideal rep profiles.

With the right competency and performance data you will be able to start correlating data and answering questions like:

• Are you seeing a low pipeline velocity for reps with low negotiation skills?
• Are you seeing a high conversion rate from reps with great discovery skills?

These insights are invaluable to a CRO and establish enablement as a key department to the organisation's success.

How can I best harness AI as an enablement leader?

• Launching enablement quickly
  Enablement is constantly trying to keep up with changing markets, evolving competition, and new product/service offerings. AI can help quickly create engaging enablement content so teams can get updates out to the field fast.
• Prepping reps for every conversation
  Role-playing or practicing pitches is often tasked to a sales manager. But, we know sales managers are busy and don’t have time to prep with every seller before a call. With AI role-plays, enablement can deliver realistic pitch practice scenarios so sellers can practice before every big meeting.

• Making training and collateral easy to find
  Providing a layer of AI on top of existing search functionalities makes it easy for reps to find the information - whether its training content or sales collateral - when they need it. No longer reliant on keywords, AI-powered search unlocks the ability for reps to ask more open-ended questions and get answers based on approved training and content - like ‘How do we compete with Company ABC?’

• Establishing a structured enablement function requires clear alignment across teams, content delivery systems, and a focus on performance metrics. 
• To prove impact, it's crucial to take a data-driven, competency-based approach that ties skill development to business outcomes. 
• AI offers significant potential for enablement leaders, helping streamline content creation, support reps through AI-driven training, and improve access to critical information.