Tamara Schenk
Strategic Advisor
We are living in volatile and unpredictable times—no doubt. We experience very fast changes and unexpected turbulence in almost all areas of our lives. Think of politics, the financial market, natural disasters, economic challenges, and paradigm shifts.
Leading sales enablement initiatives effectively in a turbulent world is not an easy task
Staying relevant and ensuring a steady flow of revenue are key challenges for every business these days.
And that brings you as an enablement leader into the spotlight. More than ever before, you must deliver a well-thought-through business case that clearly shows how your sales enablement initiatives impact your company’s business goals.
Let me ask you this:
- Have you derived your sales enablement initiative directly from the business goals?
- Did you go through a detailed analysis of the root causes of the current challenges in sales and marketing that stand in the way of achieving these goals?
- Did you set up your sales enablement charter (i.e. business case)?
- Did you define the leading indicators for each of your enablement use cases?
If you did not answer yes to every question, then read on. Learn the four main steps for you to get from your organization’s business strategy to the sales enablement initiative that will create measurable results.
Why is this more important than ever before? Because we are living in turbulent times, and budgets are limited. So, if a business leader cannot recognize that you are making a substantial contribution to the business, your sales enablement initiative won’t survive. But we can work on that.
If a business leader cannot recognize that you are making a substantial contribution to the business, your sales enablement initiative won’t survive.
What’s the main challenge for enablement leaders these days?
The main challenge is not often “how to create more content or training” for the sales team. In fact, deciding what not to do is equally important.
One of the biggest challenges is how to set up enablement from a business perspective so that you are able to leverage technology wisely—only then can it unfold its magic.
That requires you to effectively address the root causes of your sales challenges and make your solutions measurable in the context of the larger company business goals.
Introducing the business impact framework
Not only will the business impact framework help you set up your enablement strategy in the most effective way, but it will also help manage the balance between time pressure and impact pressure.
This is not a simple process. If it was, everyone would do it perfectly, and we would only see highly mature enablement initiatives.
But we don’t.
Based on our Sales Enablement Maturity Calculator (SEMC)—with data from companies all over the world—we can clearly state that the maturity level is typically not established or adaptive, but it is emerging.
Now, let’s dive into the business impact framework worksheet and connect it to common sales enablement use cases.
Four steps to tangible and measurable enablement success
Step 1: Know your business goals and how they are measured
Every successful sales enablement initiative starts with business goals. Make sure you not only understand the main business goals of your organization, but also the more specific sales team’s goals.
Is this a pure revenue or ARR goal? Is this a growth goal? Is it specific for new logos and existing customers? Or, is it developing an entire new market from scratch?
Ensure you identify these goals and fully comprehend their context. To get started, understand the company goals, the main goals of sales and marketing, and the specific circumstances.
As an example, let’s focus on two sales goals:
- Reduce ramp-up time for new hires, measured in weeks/rep
- Increase average deal size, measured in $/won deal
Step 2: Diagnose the root cause of the observable symptoms
This second step is critical, but often overlooked or overrun by hyperactive leaders who tend to throw in technologies and training modalities without a proper diagnosis.
Imagine if your doctor prescribed a therapy without analyzing your blood, measuring your blood pressure, or running an x-ray depending on your symptoms. It could be considered malpractice.
Now, you wouldn’t want to have any malpractice occur within your organization, right?
Take the time and deeply assess the symptoms to get to the root causes of the current challenge. Sometimes it’s obvious, but more often, it is not.
What I see so often is that long sales cycles stress out the sales leadership team. It’s easy to prescribe negotiation training to fix this because they “cannot close.”
But if you look deeper, you can ask: “How well can the sales team get to the core issues of the buyer and diagnose a business problem? How well can sellers tailor a solution that solves precisely the buyer’s problem and create tangible results? How well did they communicate this unique value to the different stakeholders so that they could see the importance, and by showing the costs of doing nothing also the urgency?”
Take the time and deeply assess the symptoms to get to the root causes of the current challenge.
Looking deeper can make all the difference between adding a training that simply covers up a symptom, and identifying the root problem in order to create a solution.
In this case, we probably have a dysfunctional value message, a lack of practice, a lack of business acumen, or all of the above.
Clearly analyze the root cause of the challenges and capture them. In our example, we came up with:
- No onboarding
- Small deal sizes
- No sales methodology
- No sales coaching
Step 3: Derive your enablement strategy
By now, you have an idea of the central challenges you will solve with your enablement strategy.
In this third step, we only want to define the headline of your sales enablement strategy: What’s the central theme, and what’s a powerful name?
In our example, we go with “Awaken the sales power.”
But what exactly makes this an essential step?
Whatever program or sales enablement initiative you map out, it needs a powerful name. This helps to prepare the first steps of identity alignment for all your enablement communication later on. A powerful name is one that resonates with your company’s culture and points to the goal of the initiative.
This is very important for any communication later on. Too many initiatives fail to succeed because they cannot be effectively communicated, and that requires a name that inspires people.
Step 4: How to get from strategy to enablement workstreams and action plans
Now the real work begins: The goal in step four is to identify all the necessary enablement workstreams in each enablement use case. A workstream covers all the activities, resources, tools, budgets, timelines, and the related cross-functional collaboration model, which need to be defined.
Make sure that you define how you measure success for every workstream in all use cases. Ideally, identify leading indicators that tell you early on whether you are on track.
The essence of your enablement strategy resides in this step. Let’s see what we came up with in our example across four key use cases.
Sales content management
In this use case, focus on sales content management and the sales content tailored or mapped to customer journey phases.
You need at least these workstreams:
- Get content clarity. Identify and note the variety of content types, formats, target groups, and purposes currently available.
- Run a content assessment. Check what content has to be retired, what content has to adjusted or improved and what assets are ready to use.
- Implement a cross-functional content management process.
- Implement the best enablement platform to achieve one source of content truth.
Seller effectiveness
In this use case, you need a tailored onboarding program to solve the main selling challenges.
Ensure you don’t only add a bunch of product training in this step—that is not an effective onboarding strategy. Establish a solid value message training that is supported by continuous coaching from sales managers. The best onboarding programs work because of fully aligned sales managers.
Your onboarding program should also include buyer insights, customer journey insights, foundational selling skills, and training for your selected sales methodology and processes.
Buyer engagement
Closing bigger deals faster is practically every sales leader’s desire. Effective buyer engagement is the key to achieve this goal. Every interaction along the customer journey counts, and great buyer engagement helps to close deals faster, because your sales professionals know how to effectively address all members of the buying team with the right messaging. State-of-the-art buyer engagement also leverages enablement technology to provide a space where sellers and buyers can easily and quickly collaborate to grow a deal much faster.
Diagnose honestly where you currently are with effective buyer engagement in your organization, and define the necessary next steps. These steps may include training to teach sellers how to best lead larger buying teams, implementing technical prerequisites, and revisiting your value messaging.
Analytics and Insights
Define this use case based on the previous ones. For example, if you focus on sales content management only for now, use this use case here through the lens of sales content management.
Always make sure that you understand the questions you want to answer for enablement purposes, and the questions your senior executives are asking you.
Important: don’t boil the ocean and try to start with all four use cases simultaneously. Begin with the use case that’s most important to you. Then, take the next. This ensures focus, attention, and senior executives’ engagement.
Final thoughts
By mastering these four steps, you are already doing much better than most other enablement leaders.
So, where to go from here?
Follow along the on-demand video session to continue to build out your business impact framework and then your overall sales enablement charter. You can also find a template and detailed process in my book, “Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force.”
