Business
Hello, everyone. A listener Ron sent me a question and asked me “Hey, my company doesn’t have a sales enablement group. Do we need one?” That’s a good question, Ron. The need of sales enablement depends on your sales team and who is doing what to support sales. Chances that you already have sales enablement type of functions in your company, but it’s really not called sales enablement. Does that make sense? It’s probably part of Sales Operations, it’s part of Marketing, or it’s part of the Product Marketing team. They are jobs being done, it’s just not being called Sales Enablement. For example: most of sales enablement is about training sales how to sell, and training them to know about products, or even onboard them when they start. Someone or a group of people are probably already doing that to support sales. In some cases, marketers are working closely with sales to supply them messaging, sales collateral, sales deck or email templates to enable sales team. Maybe you have marketing people pretty much stay on top of that, and doing a certain function or portion of the sales enablement job, but they are not part of the sales team. Part of sales is about making sure that sales have necessary sales tools and processes so that they can do their jobs. And that can also be part of sales enablement or sales operations job. Possibly somebody’s already working on sales tools and sales process sourcing and also implementation. I’d suggest that you check who is doing what and how the sales team is supported to determine if you need a sales enablement group. Like I said, sales enablement is defined differently by different companies. Also, many companies have sales supports being done by different internal groups—kind of like a virtual team. Marketing is working on collateral, finance may be helping on sales forecast, HR is working on sales incentives. They are doing their jobs in supporting sales. You need to identify the gaps that sales need help, then, determine who should do it. If you can get other stakeholders to do it, GREAT. If not, do you need to hire someone or build the team? And that’s pretty much a headcount and budget discussion with the management. I hope I answer your question, Ron. Do you have a sales enablement team in your company? What do they do? Share with me. If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast. Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week. Be well. Let’s connect again next week.