Sales Enablement Should Be the Activator of Your Growth Strategy

• The executive teams of B2B companies are repeating the same prescriptions to boost sales productivity and keep experiencing the same disappointing results – it’s time to start talking about alternative approaches.
• Today, a variety of activities to “help sales” cascade from many different departments including: Human Resources, Information Technology, Marketing, Business Units / Product Units, Sales Functions, and Finance.
• Sales enablement professionals feel more like “VP’s of Broken Things” who have been asked to fix the problems associated with the “random acts of sales support” rather than leaders of a business function that can drive measureable business results.
• Addressing sales productivity issues is more of a business process problem than it is a deliverable, output, or training issue. This means the scope of sales enablement must be cross functional.
• A typical, hierarchical organizational model won’t support driving business results; a “business within a business” model is required to drive sales enablement success.

A diverse group of fourteen Washington DC area sales and marketing leaders met on March 11th to discuss the state of the sales enablement function.  The group’s overall mission is to bring clarity to the sales enablement function and to develop the role.  If there was one overarching sentiment from the group, it would be to agree with the famous Albert Einstein quote “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result” when applied to the approaches businesses are taking to drive sales productivity.   

In the meeting, participants were broken into three teams to answer these questions:

• What business problem does sales enablement solve and how do you measure it?
• What activities and functions are in scope of sales enablement and what isn’t?
• What should a sales enablement organization look like?

The assignment of each working team was to spend 20 minutes and put down on a sheet of paper their answer to each question and present findings to the rest of the group.   In the first group setting, the audience was only permitted to ask clarifying questions to make sure the intent of each team was understood. 

The process was continued where each team took the findings of a different group and critiqued the output of the previous assignment through the lens of defending the work to a CFO or COO in a company.

With this kind of open and collaborative format, you can imagine a lot of the value of a meeting like that is learning from and listening to the perspectives of different people from different backgrounds coming from different companies.   Organizing the learnings from a format like this that is sharable with people who were not there is very challenging.  Please keep that in mind as you read through this summary and ask questions in the comments field.  Our group is definitely a lot more interested in promoting discussion about this subject rather than having the definitive answer yet.   Please also read the comments, we’ve asked participants to share their thoughts in observations so we can create a more effective way to share lessons learned.    

Here are some of the highlights from both discussions for each of the topics.

What business problem does sales enablement solve and how do you measure it?

There was a lot of discussion about this issue ranging from a litany of symptoms; the way businesses are organized into silos contributes to the problem; and a whole slew of different ideas on what and how to measure things.   Through the discussion, the group arrived at the following conclusions.

• At a high level, the core problem associated with sales enablement is overall inefficiencies with how sales and marketing (and other) resources are invested and how they are not manifesting into the productivity goals of senior leadership.
• When the business strategy is set (and all of the tactical requirements to execute that plan are created) marketing and sales leaders are rarely at the table making these decisions. As a result, the more organic realities what drives results in the trenches gets overlooked.
• Responsibilities to carry out the tactical requirements are distributed across the organizational matrix resulting in a massive amount of activities and programs that create more waste and inefficiency than actually solving the problem.

So what?

• A sales enablement function could step up and address these issues, but it would need to help the executive leadership see these problems first. Therefore, to move from being “VP’s of broken things” to leaders who can drive business results; sales enablement executives will need to develop more consultative skills to complement their operational ones.
• In order to address the productivity challenges, sales enablement must be looked at more holistically and like a business process. This is going to require a different orientation to managing expectations and thinking about the purpose and scope of a sales enablement function.
• Therefore, sales enablement leadership must work more diligently in creating, communicating, and getting buy in for an organizational charter.

What is in scope of sales enablement and what isn’t?

Our group unanimously agreed this topic required its own discussion and a lot more focus.  Our group included people with sales leadership, sales operations, product marketing, corporate marketing, training, and business operations roles.  With such a diverse group, each brought their own view of what sales enablement meant.  Here are some of the key highlights of this discussion.

• What was considered “In” scope of sales enablement: on boarding, content marketing, systems and tools, messaging, business development, proposals and contract management, product marketing, lead generation, social media, and targeted promotions/ advertising.
• Considered key inputs: sales channels, compensation, quota, sales strategy
• What was considered out of scope: corporate marketing, facilities, benefits

So what?

• It’s extremely unlikely that a CFO/CEO would agree that one function would own all of these activities / functions and even if they did – the degree of internal political revolts over resources would create more pain than business benefit.
• What makes more sense is to carve out a define a business problem in terms of an end to end business process, highlight how business results of that process are not being met today and demonstrate how currently no one owns it. One example we referred to was the human capital for sales business process (hire to retire).
• In order to get the right focus, sales enablement leaders should take inventory of all of the random acts of sales support (to illuminate the enormity of the problem) and apply a RACI-type model to show the different organizations who claim ownership of a topic are not aligned around an end to end process. 

 How should the sales enablement function be organized?

Our group also agreed this topic required a lot more focus in the future and it requires the outputs from the previous questions as prerequisites to fully answer.  However, here were some of the highlights of the discussion:

• Today, a sales enablement function is unusually structured as a hierarchical organization where headcount and budget for functions are moved into one reporting structure.
• This creates a lot of pressure on the sales enablement leader to drive all of the deliverables and output from all of those functions, meet a lot of different expectations, and produce results.
• What is required to be successful is to pool all of those budgets into a new funding source and focus those resources on the few integrated programs that can produce measureable business results that than spreading resources across so many things little value can be created.

So what?

• Sales enablement leaders will need to move away from a traditional hierarchical organizational model to an operating model that can function across a n organizational matrix. This model resembles more of business within a business approach.
• The “investors” would be comprised of an executive sponsor and represented by the other functional leaders impacted by the business process. For example, the “hire to retire” process might have the VP of Human Resources as an executive sponsor and the other key investors would include: business unit leaders, finance, and sales groups.
• The services the business within a business would offer are end to end programs with specific measureable results. For example, an onboarding service (which specific metrics of when that process begins and ends and provides and agreed upon specification of what exactly and on boarded sales person looks like).