Do we need a charter for our sales enablement organization?

In talking with fellow sales enablement practitioners across the industry, I'm hearing a common theme.

Those groups that have a specific, agreed-on, published amd circulated charter are more strategic, productive and relevant. Sales enablement Pro reported four years ago that organizations with a defined charter and formal approach to sales enablement improved win rates against forecast by 12%, and I think that dramatically understates the problem.

Before we discuss a specific framework for an effective and rock solid sales enablement charter, let’s explore why it’s necessary. You know…take a trip down the pain funnel.

Think of it this way...if you set off on a cross country journey, without a map, without being able to describe your destination succinctly, not only will you get lost, you will not even be able to ask for help along the way. You would not know what to ask for!

You will be incapable of reaching your destination. You will give up somewhere along the way and keep busy doing things that you find along the road.

Sound familiar? Then I’ll bet you don't have a sales enablement charter. You probably do have multiple constituents who repeatedly ask your team to undertake unrelated tasks, some strategic, many quite mundane and unrelated to the strengths of the people on your team.

Without a charter, you don’t have a destination. No north star.

I've seen enablement teams became the “project drop off” team. "Hey, let's give this to the enablement team...they'll do anything we ask..." And the good corporate citizens in enablement take on task after task. After all, we’re people people and we love to help others. ?

And sadly, this becomes their brand.?I saw this happen at a global company where senior management should have known better. Not long after the group became the “we’ll do anything” team, the entire sales enablement organization was blown up. It had no strategic impact, it had no support from sales leadership. Sales, by the way, decided to take on much of their own enablement. SThe group became irrelevant. It had no justification for existence, certainly not at the pay rates of the senior people in the group. And now it is gone.

Here’s the problem. Most other people in the organization don’t understand what sales enablement is or what it is capable of. They don’t understand its power, its leverage, its ability to act as a force multiplier to improve relationships between customers and sales people, to drive increased customer value, to improve sales effectiveness, increase revenues, profitability and lifetime customer value.

But they think they know what sales enablement is. They believe that sales enablement is training or onboarding. And many people think that sales enablement is a reactive group, firefighting, the fixers of broken things, fixing problems rather than taking on proactive projects.

Onboarding and training are obvious needs. With annual sales turnover at 35 to 50% or higher, and annual rep tenure of 18 months or less, onboarding and training are constant requirements for any organization.

But onboarding doesn’t improve the ability of the sales person to engage fruitfully with customers. Onboarding should be a holistic introduction to the organization, with the participation of HR, product management, marketing, finance, sales operations and sales enablement. Why the heck does sales enablement own onboarding, even sales person onboarding?

And traditional training doesn’t change behavior.? Asking reps to sit through hours of videos and then taking a test does little for capability or skill. While it’s easy to certify that a rep has completed the training, that certification does not mean that they should get anywhere near a customer. You don’t learn to ride a bike by watching a video and taking a test. You learn to ride a bike by trying, falling, getting some support, some coaching, and then trying again.

We know enough about adult learning theory to know that micro-learning and role playing and gamification can be effective… But that’s hard and time intensive, and the factory model is easier to build and operate.

Here’s a quote by one of my favorite learning theorists ” students pass a test on Friday and the material is forgotten by Monday. Nonetheless grades have been entered, seat time noted, time clocks punched and therefore learning has happened as far as school is concerned.“ John Holt said this fifty or sixty years ago and discussed the concept of unschooling – allowing students to learn in the wild rather than in factory education settings.

Holt said, (paraphrasing) Walking, talking, socializing, counting, reading, writing—all are learned by young children, often just with help when they ask or show signs that they need help. John wondered, “Why can’t adults let children continue to learn in this same successful manner as they get older?” And why can’t we help sales people learn in a similar manner -- on the job, on demand ,as needed.

But…we still haven’t figured it out and sales people continue to sleep through their online courses.

I’m pretty passionate about this issue as training tends to consume much of the sales enablement bandwidth and we still get it so wrong. I’ve seen the damage that traditional training can do and the positive impact that in person coaching and role playing with immediate feedback impact can have. Shoot, if you're concerned about scaling targeted training...RNMKRS offers AI based role playing that offers coaching, immediate feedback and appropriate leveling. Your scaling concern should be off the table.

The purpose of the charter

The purpose of the sales enablement charter is to define sales enablement, the group’s mission, its focus, how it measures success, the key stakeholders and internal customers. It sets the boundaries of what the group will do and importantly, what the group will not or should not do.

Let me state that more clearly -- The charter is a tool to help communicate what others should and should not expect from the sales enablement team.

For instance – should the sales enablement team help product managers prepare their presentations for sales kick off? Absolutely. Should we be responsible for editing the video recordings of their presentations? Nope. Hire professional videographers for that or train interns to do the work. Every time we ask the sale enablement team to do things that don’t directly align with improving sales results, we are reducing the potential impact of the sales organization. What a waste of expertise and time. Each off topic request literally takes money out of the company’s accounts.

And here’s another twist…senior sales enablement people need to be able to engage at an equal level with their sales leadership, marketing, finance, sales operations peers. And others. As a sales enablement professional I’ve engaged with senior leaders in customer organizations, VPs of operations, chief marketing officers, sales operations executives, business unit leads. It’s part of the walk the talk that brings credibility when engaging with sales leadership or the individual strategic account manager or field sales rep or even the BDR. That’s why some organizations look for sales and sales leadership experience when hiring senior sales enablement people.

The more junior people need to align to key priorities -- short and long term goals and the engagement model. Maybe this is why so few organizations actually have charters…aligning the people to the charter, rather than the people to the tasks thrown over the wall, is hard. It requires foresight and planning.

What does a good sales enablement charter look like?

There's the?living document...the mission statement, the services supported/provided, the groups enabled, the funding sources, the strategic/leadership/executive support, the expected results, the things not included.

And there's the?reality...the mindset, the actions, the relationships with sponsors and stakeholders that create the brand and deliver the results.?

Interestingly, my group at Oracle was able to function with a strong brand (the reality of our work) and a passable document. For many years our executive sponsor continued to fund the group with not much more than verbal requests from sales leadership stating "they helped a lot last year, please keep them around."

We knew exactly what we wanted to accomplish each year. As we were embedded in the sales organization, we had strong awareness of what needed to be done and how to do it. We worked closely with our key stakeholders and they trusted us to recommend/deliver what they needed (even though they usually didn’t know exactly what that was) We also carved out a 20% slush fund...20% of our time set aside for the ad hoc requests from product management or marketing that we couldn't necessarily predict, but knew would be coming regularly.

But...when our executive sponsor moved on, the lack of a strong, agreed on sales enablement charter caught up with us. New sales leadership didn't understand the charter or the value of the group and we lost both funding and autonomy.

To be successful, you need both the charter and the brand

And it's getting more complicated today with "revenue enablement" threatening to overtake or subsume sales enablement as a function. Frankly, I’m not sure what revenue enablement is. Sales enablement focuses on sales the people, helping them to perform better, and sales the function, helping it to operate more effectively and efficiently.

Revenue? Revenue is money. It’s a measure of outcomes. How do you enable that?

Revenue enablement has a broader scope, one that I think includes customer success management and sales operations. But what I would do differently as a head of revenue enablement rather than sales enablement? I dunno, maybe report to the Chief Revenue Officer rather than the Chief Sales officer.

Some of the distinctions I’ve seen sound like the difference between sales enablement and good sales enablement. One source suggests that revenue enablement includes “data and analytics, such as customer feedback, website traffic, and social media engagement.”

That’s a bit of a stretch. Data and analytics are core to any good sales enablement operation. As a sales enablement professional I need to be able to evaluate the impact of specific enablement activities….looking at correlations between investments and changes in leading or trailing metrics. Website traffic and social media engagement are largely the bailiwick of marketing.

Sales and revenue enablement are largely the same thing. Then there’s sales readiness, which is related to sales enablement, and narrowly focused on the sales person’s skills. And some talk about customer enablement...but that's a different set of issues or activities.

Build your impact!

To increase your impact in 2024, you must have a strong sales enablement charter in place before the end of the year. And to develop this charter, you must have:

• Strong understanding of the developmental needs of your customer facing people, with a multi year view
• Understanding of the direction your company and its products and services are going, with a multi year perspective
• Comprehensive inventory of your group's skills and knowledge of the gaps
• Executive sponsorship
• Stakeholder agreement on the goals and outcomes for 2024 and beyond (noting that sales leaders don’t usually have goals beyond current year)

And it's the last one -- the stakeholder agreement -- that is the most challenging. You can't simply ask the CSO or Sales VP what they need from enablement...they usually don't know how to answer the question. It's the role of the enablement team to conduct the discovery and propose the activities that support the needed outcomes...you know...like a trusted advisor.

The charter is a business plan for the organization. And while it needs to be in alignment with sales leadership, we need to lead the sales leadership, to act as trusted advisor making recommendations based on experience and data. And we need to push back if sales leadership or product management, or marketing proposes ideas that run counter to strategy or are unworkable.

When I was launching a new autonomous, self-running data warehouse, the field marketing people suggested that we bolster the attendance at field events by offering certification to attendees. They were focused on putting butts in seats, providing more prospects for the sales organization.

I pointed out that certifying technical people on their ability to run an automous, self running product just might run counter to our other positioning and provide fodder for the competition. And they dropped the idea.? This was a situation where pushback was important.

While the field marketing people were intent to meet their goals or metrics, the context of the offer was lost.

And we need to work in partnership with sales leadership, and product marketing, and field marketing, and HR and others…but the charter is our north star. It tells us where we should focus and the direction we need to go. It also needs to be persistent quarter to quarter, year to year. While some of the details might change, the overall direction and focus should remain the same. Or we’re not thinking strategically.

And sometimes we do things because it’s useful to the group strategically, like sales kick off. Event planning and management is not typically a strong suit of sales enablement professionals…but …if we leave SKO to marketing, sales will not get much value from the event. The content will not be targeted to their needs. So…we suck it up, we use our experience or our project management skills and design an event that adds value to the sales team.

Here are the critical components of any good sales enablement charter.

• Group mission statement - your focus, your north star
• Team structure, roles and responsibilities
• Key priorities
• Internal customers - who do you serve, what are their needs
• Stakeholders, both receivers and supporters (thanks to Hubspot for this distinction) (and a communication plan to stay connected to those stakeholders)
• What is outside of scope
• One and three year goals of the group
• Metrics - how will you measure the success of each of your priorities, initiatives, investments and activities, leading and lagging indicators
• Engagement model – how will you work with stakeholders? How will you scale across sales organizations, territories, globally
• Review of past projects, metrics and feedback from key stakeholders

I use a two page version to kick off discussions with product management, marketing or sales leadership. The reinforcement of our focus, priorities, scope and goals tends to keep the conversations focused on how we can help versus how they think we can help, or what they think we should do.

?It also has to be a document that can stand alone as it will get forwarded around.

The good folks at Seismic also recommend three companion items:

• Build an enablement board to provide guidance on direction and focus
• Build an advocate team -- cross functional partnerships with internal enablement customers who will champion the group internally. They will be formal cheerleaders, and you must enable them to be successful…literally tell them what to say
• Build an enablement council that provides insights into other key initiatives and priorities from throughout the business. The sales enablement team cannot afford to be blindsided by an acquisition, new product introduction, geographic expansion, or significant organizational change

For instance, I learned that a specialty sales organization (from an acquisition) was going to be mainstreamed into the larger primary field sales organization at the beginning of a new year. Oh, and this was in early December. I said to senior management – “we’re going to change their reporting structure, their portfolio, their comp, their sales operations processes. If we don’t show them some love, we’re going to lose many of them, either physically or mentally.”

And I planned, rolled out and managed a global weeklong bootcamp for them, across three regions -- EMEA NorthAm and Asia Pacific -- to help with the transition from their specialty organization to the larger field sales organization. It came at a critical time, and if we hadn’t done it, we might have lost a good number of the specialists.

Key takeaways

A strong sales enablement charter will help your organization to focus on three things

First, it will help you to focus your efforts, and to defer those that are secondary or tertiary to your mission

Second, it will help you to align with key stakeholders and establish value with them, so that you get time and access with them, and their support when necessary

Third, it will help you to have strategic impact, so that you can achieve your personal and organizational goals.

If you want help developing/supercharging your sales enablement charter, let me know. We can review your existing charter, help build a new charter framework and work with you to develop the mission, the story and the details. And we will facilitate the conversations between the enablement team and the stakeholders to ensure that you set appropriate expectations, target key goals, KPIs or OKRs, and gain the necessary support.?

With a strong sales enablement charter, you will have a much more successful, enjoyable, fruitful 2024.

Thanks,

Lee