When looking back at my professional sales enablement career, I have seen lots of great learning and enablement programs. Overall, the produced enablement content was good and it seemed as if there would be no doubt of running a successful learning program for the field.
However some of those programs simply failed for the following reasons: adoption of the learning activities has been low, there was no way to measure any business impact, and, most importantly, alignment with key Decision Makers was lacking.
The latter is especially important, as Decision Maker are shaping the overall rational of a specific learning and enablement program. They give guidance on the following key success factors of a learning program:
- What skills and competencies are expected from the target audience after completion of the program?
- What is the key business benefit?
- How will the success being measured?
- Is the training mandatory?
- What are potential barriers for this program?
All those specific questions need to be discussed and answered from your Decision Makers, that requested a specific learning program from your Sales Enablement team. At the end, you will need their buy-in as well as commitment to run the training. Right after you got all the answers from the questions mentioned above start building the following:
- Create a business case: how much time needs to be spend, which budget will be allocated to build the training, who is accountable for the success of the program etc.
- Content structure: what content is already available, what needs to be developed in addition.
Once you have finalized your learning needs (including business case and content structure), get back to your Decision Makers and sign-off the program. After this, you will be able to develop a detailed training design and development plan.
In every step during the definition, development and implementation phase, make sure you are involving your Decision Makers for review and sign-off.
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