The Great Sales Enablement Identity Crisis

At a time when...

• There are over 10,000 people on LinkedIn with sales enablement in their title (according to Paul Krajewski, we reached this milestone in November 2019)
• 61.3 percent of survey respondents have a sales enablement function (CSO Insights)
• 28 percent of companies employ seven or more full-time sales enablement staff. This figure rises to 43 percent for top-performing organizations. (SiriusDecisions)...

... many in the profession seem to be exploring new naming conventions.

Does this strike anyone else as odd?

What Exactly Are We Enabling?

Sales Force Enablement?

Look, I'll admit it. I've always felt that the term "sales enablement" was a misnomer. I prefer "sales force enablement." We don't enable sales, per se; we enable our sales forces to better serve buyers and therefore, get better sales results (such as improving win-rates, sales productivity, and sales velocity).

Like Zig Ziglar always said, you get what you want by helping enough other people get what they want. This is the great paradox of selling, I think, this need to focus on others to achieve your results. But as enablers, we need to focus on our sales forces to help them do this.

I still don't think this is the time to tinker with naming conventions, but at least "sales force enablement" is still recognizable, when compared to sales enablement. There is a problem with the limited focus on the sales force, however, for some. I'll come back to this.

I'd place "commercial enablement" in this bucket, too. The word "commercial" is used by some organizations as interchangeable with the word "sales." At GE Capital, for example, I worked in the Commercial Development team and the Commercial Excellence function. GE had a centralized Commercial Excellence CoE (Center of Excellence) as well as localized Commercial Development staff inside their business units. "Commercial force enablement" doesn't quite work (who says that, right?), but "commercial enablement" would. While I understand it, I'm not sure how it helps the profession, though, or clarifies anything for those considering added or evolving their sales enablement function.

Is it Revenue? Can You Enable That?

The name with the most steam now (or the one I'm hearing the most about) seems to be "revenue enablement." This is being recommended by some analyst firms as well as some visible leaders in the space. Titles are popping up.

This follows the trendy theme of the Chief Revenue Officer title (I still don't see that many but it's trending up) and Rev Ops. When I see "revenue enablement," I always wonder whether, in those organizations, revenue without profit is acceptable? It reminds me of the old joke, "How do you lose money on every deal and still stay in business? Volume, volume, volume!" We enable more than revenue production.

Proponents suggest that we need to enable client-facing staff across all functions and that revenue is a more applicable term than sales, for that purpose. Yes, I do completely support that all client-facing personnel should be "enabled," especially Customer Service/Success. So do that. (And here, I wonder, "Are your training departments or talent development teams asleep at the wheel, or what?") Sales employees are like the Olympic athletes of the corporate world or the astronauts of business. While I respect and love our marketing and service counterparts, I'm not sure they need to be as fully "enabled" as our sales personnel. I also think that our training departments and talent development teams could be handling that, while we piece all the building blocks together for sales enablement, which is already a rather large and unique performance improvement effort (which does require cross-functional collaboration with the other functions I mentioned and quite a few more).

Scott Santucci, one of the founders of the Sales Enablement Society, posted some concerns about this revenue-focused terminology and its implications on LinkedIn, which you can read here.

Probably more troubling for me, I think this term is still inside-out and doesn't move us any closer to being buyer-centric, so I'm not sure what the point is. Making a clear buyer-centric shift is the only reason I'd consider a radical name change.

[Note: for interested readers, my book on The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement launches officially on September 14, but is available for pre-order now.]

Buyer-Centric Names

I've seen the term "buyer enablement" tossed around, too. I very much like the intention here, but I don't think we truly enable buyers, either. We might create materials like buyer engagement content or collateral and implement processes and develop skills to help our buyers make good decisions, but we aren't working with them or training them. We work with our own sales forces. We do help our reps enable buying, but unless we start doing things directly for buyers, we're not enabling them. Buying Enablement, in that regard, makes more sense to me.

Why Not Enable Everything?

This may be the simplest recommendation I've heard. If we're going to enable market-facing, buyer- and client-centric employees across disciplines, perhaps this is the simplest term: just "Enablement." We can enable the various marketing teams, pre-sales/sales development reps, sales engineers and solution consultants, sales hunters/account executives, sales farmers/account managers, channel sales reps, business development reps, and customer service or customer success staff.

As mentioned previously, though, what I find somewhat amusing about this, having been in a blend of the sales and training professions since dinosaurs walked the Earth, is that the T&D / L&D professions have been edging toward Organization Development and Performance Consulting practices for years. What we do in enablement, with the cross-functional collaboration and focus on multiple performance levers (not just training), is not any different than what a great OD, performance, or training department should be doing. But okay... we can be "enablement."

The good news, in this case, would be that all those roles and various functions should all be aligned around your buyers and customers. It does have the potential to be very buyer- and customer-centric. Having an enablement team weaving a needle and thread consistently through all the roles and ensuring alignment could be a powerful thing for the business. This is already a known benefit of sales enablement charters and good cross-functional collaboration.

Depending on the size of your business, however, and given the differences between sales and service competencies, this might require various subgroups under an enablement leader. At some point, you might have to question the business case for this, and simply have the sales enablement function collaborate with T&D / L&D team to support the other functions, and ensure alignment and good communication across them (which can be done in a variety of other ways, rather than expanding an enablement team).

What's That Glowing Over There in the Corner?

For me, while I see the allure of "evolving the profession," I believe what we're doing here is akin to what we accuse many organization leaders of doing that hampers our success with our sales forces: we're succumbing to bright shiny objects and using "flavor of the month" thinking.

If I were making this decision for the profession, here's what I'd consider:

• Selling and front line sales management are some of the most difficult jobs in companies today. (Hence my earlier reference to them being "the Olympic athletes of the corporate world.")
• The cost, difficulty, risk, and importance of hiring and training/enabling effectively for most roles pale in comparison to doing it well for sales. This is why sales enablement started in the first place. The old "way we do things around here" simply wasn't good enough.
• Selling, as well as leading, managing, and enabling a sales force, require a very specialized skill set and the stakes are high.

Given all that, with respect to the importance of other functions, I'd keep the disciplined and specialized focus on sales (force) enablement, and collaborate closely with T&D / L&D / OD and/or Talent Development teams to ensure the continuity and alignment discussed earlier. Merging departments and calling the function by another name, is simply moving the deck chairs around on the same ship.

Thoughts?

So, that's what I think. More importantly, what do you think? I'd love to hear, so don't hold back.

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Thanks for reading, be safe out there, and by all means… let’s continue to elevate our sales profession.

Mike

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