Why you need to shift to proactive enablement - and how to do it
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Many enablement teams find themselves stuck in a constant state of reactivity. They are faced with seemingly never-ending shifts in learning plans due to perpetual requests to do last-minute training or are asked to create resources for whatever is top of mind for their go-to-market teams that week.?
When an enablement function operates like this, it has a diminished ability to create structured, long-term enablement plans with a measurable impact on the business.?
In this article, Katie Van Hoomissen covers:
Reactive vs proactive enablement
In organizations with reactive enablement functions, resources and training sessions are often developed in a rushed manner and the enablement team consistently has to "put out fires."?
Additionally, revenue team feedback is needed to initiate action, and while feedback is always valuable, this means that enablement may miss opportunities to address needs before they become pain points.
Scale is also not prioritized within these functions, which can make it challenging to keep up with needs as the organization grows.?
While reactive sales enablement has the potential to be more effective when an organization is new and less mature, a strictly reactive approach does not set enablement teams up to maximize their impact at any stage of an organization.?
This is why many teams choose to take a more proactive approach, which is based on long-term planning, aligning resources and timing with key moments for the business, and anticipating needs before they impact productivity.
In organizations with proactive enablement functions, enablement teams build plans that are closely aligned with broader business goals and tend to have more time to develop content, tools, and resources in preparation for upcoming initiatives.?
These teams also use data to identify patterns and trends to predict what materials or training will be most beneficial, balance strategic programs and continuous learning opportunities, and adapt programs based on ongoing feedback loops and data insights. They also collaborate closely with departments like product, marketing, and revenue operations.
Benefits of proactive enablement
Shifting from reactive to proactive enablement helps enablement teams transition from being a support function to being a key partner in a GTM organization’s growth strategy.?
Benefits to enablement
Proactive enablement teams benefit from this transition by:?
Benefits to the organization
Enablement teams are not the only group that benefit from a more proactive approach. Their organizations benefit as well, by:
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How to move from reactive to proactive
To start to make the move from reactive to proactive enablement, enablement teams must take deliberate action. Here are a few ways to get started:
Be realistic about your business
Even in the most proactive, strategic enablement teams, there still needs to be room for flexibility and adaptability to meet evolving needs of an organization. The right balance between proactive and reactive enablement will vary from organization to organization based on maturity and context.?
That said, an 80/20 split can be a great place to start, meaning that 80% of enablement is proactive within a given timeframe (e.g. year, quarter, month) and there is a 20% buffer to capture any reactive needs of the business and market.
Understand company GTM objectives?
It’s great to have enablement play a role in company planning motions at the GTM cross-functional leadership level.?
If planning has already been completed within an organization, enablement can sit down with GTM leadership to understand the organization's current priorities and learn how often priorities are revisited to determine the frequency with which enablement plans will also need to be adjusted.
Get alignment across teams?
Understanding the timing of field-impacting programs coming from other GTM teams (e.g. marketing and RevOps) can help enablement get involved early, when needed, and be mindful of customer-facing team capacity for change and learning when building our enablement plans.
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Align goals with GTM objectives
Define enablement goals and milestones and align them to company GTM objectives.?
Use your understanding of business priorities and the timing of planned programs to map out enablement efforts that support those needs, while flagging key dependencies and needs for alignment with other cross-functional teams up front.
Prioritize the list of ideas?
There are countless ways enablement teams can lean into supporting GTM organization goals and the enablement teams want to find the most impactful way to engage.?
To rightsize the enablement team's effort and maximize impact, consider weighing the expected level of impact against the perceived effort for both the enablement team to build the program and the customer-facing teams to learn the information.?
Additionally, there is a limit to how much information customer-facing teams can consume in a given period of time, so flagging where the teams may feel overloaded can help the broader organization make tradeoffs and be thoughtful of program timing.
Build an enablement roadmap?
Check out this article to learn how to create an enablement calendar to manage your learning journey. A calendar can help you synthesize your plans and outline a schedule for training, resources, and support materials that map to anticipated product releases, campaigns, and company initiatives.
Measure and evaluate success
Identify the key KPIs for planned enablement programs and the ways in which these ladder up to the company’s overall goals.?
Then establish a process to revisit and evaluate your enablement plans. This can be done through additional company planning motions, data review, and feedback loops with GTM leadership to gather insights into what’s working well and where adjustments are needed.?
Final thoughts
Switching from reactive to proactive enablement is an ongoing process and finding the right balance between the two within an organization requires a strong understanding of the organization’s level of maturity.?
Even enablement teams who already have a proactive motion in place are at risk of slipping back into reactive mode.?
Therefore, it is important to revisit the level of proactive vs. reactive enablement within an organization regularly to ensure the approach is the most impactful for both the enablement teams and the organization as a whole.?
Katie's article was originally published here at Sales Enablement Collective.
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Senior Enablement & Performance Leader | Operational Excellence Expert | Change Management Specialist
2 个月Great article outlining the positives to proactive enablement. I often compare the two approaches to house building - Reactive Enablement would be showing up on site without a fully baked blueprint and full agreement on what is being constructed and you beginning building with the owners, but as you move along feedback is provided, "Room #3 is not big enough," "the 2nd bathroom actually needs to be next to the entry way," "we read an article about radiant heat and now want that," etc. - your time and resources are pulled in various directions and there is no clear plan to execute. Proactive Enablement is showing up with a full blueprint, full stakeholder agreement and tools and resources in place. As you are building certain feedback will come in, the blue in the bedroom looks a little too dark, can we change the fixtures on the kitchen cabinets. These modifications are smaller and much more controllable but do not impact the overall work and ability to build a solid house with full functionality. The keys to success are the plan, stakeholder alignment and an understanding that building the house takes time and we need to be allowed to follow the process, trust the process and learn as you go for continual improvement.