Key Components of Successful Enablement

Some of my hardest lessons as a sales leader came when figuring out how to setup and run training (learn from my mistakes!) Me as a new leader: "Great we have 10 topics we want to cover... let's do 1 a week. 2.5 months later we will have covered SO much ground!" 🙃 Training was more of a "box checking" exercise. Someone shared feedback on what they wanted to learn, and it got added to the list Having one 30 or 60 minute training on any topic is never sufficient, and I did the team a disservice So what was missing? And what did I seek to add later? 👉 Focus Instead of 10 topics, we might go into a quarter with 1-2 priority focus areas. The deeper engagement on a narrower topic is not unlike narrowing your focus on a smaller set of ICP accounts This creates room for practice, follow up sessions, different voices delivering the material, and ultimately makes the content stickier 👉 Engagement from other departments Where applicable, involvement from other departments can add incredible value to your training program. For instance, when you are training on a new product category, it is valuable to: - Hear firsthand from Product how it's built - Align your training timeline with Product Marketing so that materials are ready to go as the training commences - Work with Marketing so that messaging aligns to how you can sell it and everyone has the same talking points from day 1 - Work with Rev Ops to identify a market opportunity to apply your learnings - Have Sales Enablement help prepare uses cases in your sales tech stack 👉 A system to encourage accountability Once the trainings are delivered, how do you know that the sales team was paying attention? That can take many forms: - Group activity like pitch practice - Measuring adoption through tools like Gong - Contest/SPIF to encourage initial matching sales activity - Knowledge tests in your LMS (my least favorite) 👉 Repetition There's a reason Sesame Street used to repeat episodes during the week - once wasn't enough to get the message home! While your sales team isn't full of 3 year olds, similar principles apply Bottom line: instead of thinking about any topic as a single "training", think about creating "training programs" for your team 🎓 Tying it all together for a training on "New Product A" Week 1: Product & Product Marketing introduce the new offering Week 2: Outside expert/marketing/leadership deliver the industry POV Week 3: Team gets together to identify prospects and practice the pitch Week 4: Team provides feedback on material and prospecting plans are built incorporating the training Weeks 5-8: Measuring adoption through Gong. Shouting out strong adoption and privately helping laggards identify gaps in understanding Week 6: Short contest to encourage cross/up-sell opportunity creation Week 12: Revisit/Feedback #SalesEnablement #SalesTraining #LeadershipLessons #CorrCompetencies

Most Enablement efforts fail. It’s usually because people focus on the wrong parts. Figuring out the problem isn’t that hard.  Figuring out how to fix it isn’t that hard.  Getting people to change what they do every day is really, really hard. Let’s say you’re trying to get 30 reps to change how they do discovery, or qualify, or whatever.  That’s like getting 30 people to quit smoking all at the same time. Even if they want to do it, it’s hard to make it work.  Why?  People revert back to their ingrained behavior.  It’s been good enough so far.  It’s what got them to where they are now.  Every part of your body and mind is wired to preserve homeostasis.  Establishing a new pattern of behavior requires the application of intention and effort over and over again, until the new pattern becomes the default. If you want your Enablement efforts to succeed, you can’t just design and launch a new approach.  Your efforts will be wasted unless you do the following: 1) Be inclusive when diagnosing the problem:  If you go look at the data, figure everything out, and tell everyone, no one will be on board.  They haven’t been through the diagnostic process themselves.  You have to bring them along with you.  They have to come to the conclusions themselves. 2) Be inclusive when designing a solution:  Similar to above.  If you come up with the solution and tell everyone to do it, there will be immediate resistance. Even if you’ve already figured everything out, you need to create a cross-functional team to help design the solution. 3) GET MANAGER BUY-IN!!!! - If the managers aren’t committed to the change, it will fail.  Literally, the whole things lives or dies with the managers. 4) Overcommunicate:  Your change needs to be everywhere.  The bigger the change, the more everyone needs to hear about it.  Multiple avenues of communication, for longer than you think you probably need to. 5) Create avenues for accountability and reinforcement:  You and the rest of leadership should be committed to reinforcing the change for at least a month, possibly a quarter.  It’s tempting to move onto something else, but if you don’t consistently reinforce the new behavior, you’ve wasted everyone’s time.

Stop Building. Start Driving Business Impact. (aka: Why it’s time to get serious about Field Activation) Most enablement teams are great at launching programs. But not enough are tracking if those programs actually work. That’s where Field Activation becomes a game-changer — not just an operational add-on, but a strategic lever that ties enablement to revenue. Here’s why this matters more than ever ⬇️ When built right, Field Activation connects three critical capabilities: 🔹 Field Plays – Orchestrated motions that drive behavior change and adoption 🔹 Analytics – Clear insights into what’s working (and what isn’t) 🔹 Strategy & Execution – Cross-functional planning and communication These three pillars together transform enablement from a cost center into a revenue-driving function. And that’s the language execs understand. 💰 ✅ You can track pipeline growth tied to specific plays ✅ You can measure deal velocity where behaviors changed ✅ You can show how collaboration across the Buying + Value Journey increases retention Here’s the truth: Enablement won’t get a bigger seat at the table until we prove our programs move the needle. And we can’t prove anything without: – The analytics muscle to tell a ROI story – The collaboration infrastructure to break silos – The activation team to translate intent into field adoption So I’ll ask... 💬 Do you have the right structure in place to do more than “launch”? 💬 Can your team tie enablement to outcomes — not just activities? 💬 If not, what would it take to build it? This is how we move from "building enablement" to operationalizing impact. 🚀 #EnablementLeadership #FieldActivation #Enablement #SalesEnablement

Maybe the biggest problem right now with enablement? Front-Line Managers. I'm hearing this alot on calls lately - directly from CROs who are seeing it themselves. It's a major gripe they have (especially new CROs just getting the lay of the land of the org they're inheriting). If front-line revenue managers aren’t fully bought into the enablement efforts, you might as well be throwing money out the window. Often enablement is about giving reps tools, training, and processes—and who’s responsible for making sure those things stick? Your managers. Unfortunately far too few companies embrace this. Instead... 🚫 Managers treat enablement as an “add-on” 🚫 Reps are sent to trainings, only to come back and be told, “That’s nice, but here’s how we actually do it.” 🚫 Enablement teams create amazing resources that never get used because managers don’t reinforce them or place importance. If your managers aren’t aligned with your enablement strategy, things are rarely going to really work how you want them to. They COULD still work. But rarely. So the question shouldn't be whether you need an enablement team or better tools - it’s whether your first-line managers know how to turn those investments into results. Here’s the simple formula: ✅ Train your managers so they understand how to coach reps effectively ✅ Make enablement part of their performance metrics (for example, track how often a certain new concept is used in Gong calls) ✅ Align enablement with what managers care about: pipeline health, productivity, and hitting targets. Managers are last-line enablement team. Critical piece of the puzzle.