Normally, when being asked as sales enablement professional, if you drive your Sales Enablement holistically, you would by nature answer this question with: Yes. This would comprise the following elements:
- Jointly define your Sales Enablement strategy with your sales team based on their strategy
- Define activities in order to support sales to reach their goals
- Start with enabling sales managers in order to make sure core elements are cascaded down within the sales organization
- Define metrics in order to measure the success of you Sales Enablement activities
You might now argue that you have been already aware of all elements above and might simply add 10+ additional ones. That’s actually a pretty straight forward exercise and I am sure you will be successful.
In one of my previous blogs I discussed the need for cross functional alignment within Sales Enablement. Here I emphasized on alignment between solution management, marketing, and operations. This observation is still true, as all the mentioned functions above provide important insights and content to your enablement activities.
However, from my previous observations you might think about extending your target group. I recently led an enablement program for a new services portfolio area. My focus here, was to build an enablement program that should encourage our sales forces to immediately sell and provide at the end tangible sales pipeline results for the remainder of the year. Very soon, I noticed that I need to expand this program to our delivery/consulting unit as well. In a nutshell that meant we needed to expand our target group for approximately 10k colleagues. So why has this been so important?
On the one hand side we wanted our sales team to sell this new services offering. On the other hand, we wanted to make sure we could deliver on our promise. So our thinking was to include delivery/consulting colleagues in the enablement activity as well as they at the end implement our services. Another reason for this approach was, that we wanted to make sure that sales and delivery are aligned closely in order to share any project Best Practices, road blocks at the customers and define joint engagement models at the customer side.
