The Current Sales Enablement Landscape - 2024
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is an evolving field that plays a crucial role in supporting sales and revenue teams. As someone who has worked as an enablement professional at both a startup in the demo space and a fintech company, I've seen firsthand how this role can transform and adapt to meet the needs of various organizations. The field has shifted from a focus on sales enablement to a broader scope known as revenue enablement, reflecting a more comprehensive approach to supporting the entire go-to-market (GTM) team, including marketing, sales, customer success, and account management.
My Journey in Enablement
In my experience, working in sales enablement initially involved supporting sales reps by providing them with the necessary tools, training, and resources to succeed. This role gradually expanded to revenue enablement, which includes a wider range of responsibilities and stakeholders.
Three Key Aspects of Enablement
1. Enablement is Not a Quota-Carrying Role: Unlike sales reps, enablement professionals do not carry quotas. Instead, we empower sales and revenue teams to achieve their targets by providing structured support.
2. Project Management for Sales Leaders: Good enablement acts as a “packager” for sales leaders. I see myself as a project manager for the sales leadership team, who often lack the time to train their teams, build new processes, or create collateral due to their focus on deal strategy. My role is to manage these tasks effectively.
3. Knowledge in Learning and Development: Enablement professionals should focus on gaining and improving skills in learning and development principles and documentation.
Overcoming Challenges
One of the key challenges I've observed in my role is that sales managers, especially in smaller companies or startups, often find themselves in scrappy situations. They lack templates, processes, best practices, and clear expectations, making it difficult to coach their teams effectively. Similarly, sales reps often struggle without frameworks to guide them, hindering their ability to hit their numbers and demonstrate readiness for leadership roles.
My goal is to remove this ambiguity and foster better working dynamics. When everyone understands expectations and has the resources to meet them, that's when the magic happens. Quotas are exceeded, leaders excel in coaching, reps deliver their highest output, and an amazing sales culture is developed.
The Role of Enablement
Enablement professionals serve as project managers for supporting sales organizations. Our job is to identify subject matter experts (whether frontline reps or product experts) and provide the structure for teams to learn what they need to know. We focus on how knowledge is transferred rather than the actual knowledge itself.
We enable the team through content creation and the dissemination of best practices. Our job is to help reps ramp up and develop more quickly using systems we create. We don't teach reps how to sell using our own knowledge and skills, but having sales experience certainly helps. Our role is to create processes and assist reps through those processes.
The Enablement Function in Action
In practice, the enablement team organizes various activities and supports the sales organization in multiple ways:
Event Organization: We may be in charge of organizing Sales Kickoffs (SKOs) and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), handling everything from speakers to team activities and cross-functional team-building events.
Announcements & GTM Team Communication:*We facilitate announcements of new product releases or sales decks and push out newsletters with high-level information that affects the team and the organization as a whole.
Onboarding and Training: We provide support during onboarding for new hires and those transitioning from other teams, ensuring they are well-prepared to succeed.