Enabling Your Go-To-Marketing Teams (Chapter 6: RevOps Handbook)

This handbook on Go-To-Marketing (GTM) Operations provides a roadmap on how to build a full-funnel Operations team.? GTM Operations is often referred to as Revenue Operations but, because that term can refer just to Sales Operations, I prefer the GTM Operations term which clearly includes all Operations teams that optimize customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, customer success, support)

If you are still wondering why you need GTM Ops, here is a great post.

While I am passionate about the value of having a single Operations team supporting all Ops functions across the customer journey (see Chapter 1) the practices in this handbook are useful for any flavor of Operations team and are written for four audiences.??

• C-Level: Who want to have strong Operations capabilities for the company
• GTM Leaders (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success):?Who want to know how to fully leverage Operations
• GTM Operations leaders:?Who desire to build a great Operations function to amplify their company
• GTM Operations teammates:?Who want a roadmap that can guide them in their role and career?

The theme that runs through this handbook is “Amplify”.?This concept is a core value at Culture Amp and is central to the role I see Operations playing in a company.?This handbook is broken into six articles to allow a deep dive into each topic.

• Chapter 1: Team
• Chapter 2: Systems
• Chapter 3: Data
• Chapter 4: Stakeholders
• Chapter 5: Capacity
• Chapter 6: Enablement (this article)

Bonus (two of the most comprehensive Ops deep dives I've seen)

• CSOPS : CSOps handbook from 'nuffsaid
• MOPS: MOPS handbook from MadKudu

Chapter 1 looks at the team, mission, scope, organizational structure, and leader you need in order to have a solid Operations team.

Chapter 2-6 focuses on each of the five core pillars of a successful Operations team.?Think of these as things “outside of your direct control” which you want to make sure you keep visible for your executive team.?Each quarter our team meets and rates how we stand on each of the following pillars and discusses what is holding us back from our mission of amplifying the company.??

Finally a few caveats.?This handbook is focused on:

• Operations foundations, not strategy: We have left the strategy for specific areas of GTM Operations for future articles around each area of the Go-To-Market motion.
• Scaling SaaS companies: ?This article is written with a SaaS / B2B perspective and focuses on how to scale companies.?We focus on companies that can budget for their first full-time Operations hire, typically a few million in ARR.

Chapter 6: Enablement

Enablement is a function that is critical to the success of Operations.?For the purposes of this article we define enablement as training (both at initial hire and constant updates) customer-facing teams on the product, tools, messaging and data they need to execute their job at an expert level.

Depending on how your Operations team is structured, you may or may not have Enablement within your team.?This Chapter is written to guide you on what a great Enablement function looks like and can be used regardless of whether it is within Operations or a business partner.

Operations can build the best systems and processes in the world, but if your GTM teams don’t know how to use them, you will fail.?Enablement is a critical role to ensure that your go-to-market teams:

• Drive consistent execution
• Reduce time to ramp new hires
• Upskill reps on areas where they can improve
• Have the knowledge and assets to succeed
• Allow managers to focus on coaching

Enablement Non-Negotiables

Enablement gets asked to plug so many holes. To succeed, it is critical for your enablement team to be able to push-back and force tradeoffs. They need to be proactive and leverage data to prioritize where to train teams. And, it is important to agree early on what are the non-negotiable foundations for your enablement team to deliver at a world-class level. This is a good list to start with:

• Onboarding: A great onboarding program to ramp new hires quickly
• Product Skills: A deep partnership with product and product marketing to train GTM reps on how to use and position the product
• Competitive Intel: Intake of competitive insights from reps, calls and loss analysis. Developing competitive positioning and enabling reps
• Manager Coaching: Up-levelling your managers (particularly the ones promoted from ICs) on how to coach and grow their reps. Managers are your best partners in successful enablement
• Collateral: Providing reps with the right assets to communicate with prospects and follow-up on key questions
• Sequences: Working with product marketing and managers to maintain great sequences for outbound communication
• Playbooks and Plays: Building a library of common plays
• Methodology: Having a consistent methodology as a baseline foundation for how your teams engage and deal with objections
• Tools Training: Having a strong library of recorded trainings on tools and periodically shadowing to spot opportunities to improve

Make foundational investments?for Enablement to succeed

To do Enablement right, there are several foundational investments you will need in place:

• Manager Leverage: The quality of your line managers is critical to the success of your Enablement. You need managers that will understand the value of enablement and reinforce with their teams.??Enablement's core customer needs to be the manager, not the Rep. Rep's won't retain knowledge if their manager isn't reinforcing it and managers need to be enabled too so they know how to coach, review calls, and scale their teams and themselves. Coming soon - article on the foundation of roles & responsibilities between enablement and managers that is so critical
• Knowledge management:?You need a source-of-truth for curated information.?People can’t search in Slack.?Generally, this is something like Confluence or Guru. Regardless of the specific platform,?there has to be a location that someone actively curates.
• Learning Management System (LMS):?While you can do in-person lessons and YouTube videos, this doesn’t scale very far.?You will eventually find that your teams aren’t retaining the information you teach them.?Invest in an LMS early to scale your enablement efforts.
• Enablement Team: ?You need to hire people to build and deliver training.?Many companies make the mistake of having a junior person with no enablement experience.?I strongly advise hiring a director-level leader that has seen what great enablement looks like.???

“The best folks I've seen in this role, specifically Sales/GTM Enablement, are naturally curious, and they want to know the why and how before the what. This ensures they can deliver training and field associated questions.”?Matt Belitsky, Sales Operations @ Brex?

• Cross-GTM Alignment: ?Many organizations start with sales.?That makes sense for many reasons (see below) but if you don’t think early about the common training needs across Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales you will likely end up with a mess on your hands as you scale.

Start with Sales

Within GTM functions, Sales is the first place you will need Enablement.?This is because:

• Sales ramp up is critical to go-to-market success.?Having an Enablement team that can quickly ramp your new sales hires is important
• The pitch is critical.?This takes training at new hire but also regular updates on the product and positioning
• Sales systems tend to be the most complex.?We give Sales the most firepower in terms of tools and we want them to be able to use it
• You need to train Sales on how to enter deals accurately!?Get this wrong and your revenue doesn’t flow!

Enablement best practices

Hopefully by now you’ve hired a great Enablement leader, but if you haven’t here are some strategies I have picked up over the years:

• Standardize how you teach:?You don’t want an Enablement team that just books training sessions with people from all over the business.?Great Enablement works with each group that wants to train and guides them on the format and the level of detail that is valuable for their teams.
• Pull vs. push: ?Great Enablement is proactively reaching out to guide on what training is needed vs. just being a conduit when others are ready to train.

With everything we’ve shared in these six chapters, I hope you have a great foundation for go-to-market Operations in your company.?