Hiring for a Sales Enablement role? Here’s something to read in between interviews
I find those conversations with entrepreneurs and leaders most enjoyable and productive. When looking back and examining the common denominator of those conversations, I realize most of time we circle around the role & responsibilities of the Sales Enablement function and “what engagement tools do we need?…”
When comparing where we are today and where we were 10 years ago, I clearly see these significant trends:
1) More and more businesses realize the benefits of having a training function dedicated solely to the Sales Org.
2) The need is arising sooner than before; a few years ago Sales Enablement would only be considered when the businesses has reached some level of maturity, whereas today businesses with 10-20 reps realize they need a Sales Enablement function while hiring and/or fine-tuning their Product-Market Fit.
3) This is the best part – more businesses today admit they would benefit from having a sales trainer with “Jonah Hill” capabilities, or as the Job Description says –
“You will be responsible for identifying revenue gaps and report to Executive Management“.
It all makes sense, after all technology evolves extremely fast with a strong tailwind fueled by COVID, hence inevitable competition forces businesses to move faster.
Consequently, when those Startups decide it’s time to hoist the sails and grow their selling force, in most cases leaders realize they can’t allocate sufficient time to train the newly joined reps.
Things become even more complicated when they factor in business-critical tasks such as picking the right sales engagement stack, creating effective onboarding programs that won’t kill the pipeline , tracking reps’ engagement to justify the investment and surfacing success & performance hiccups that might lead to a negative impact on the business.
Who’s going to orchestrate all of that (and other areas I did not cover yet…) ? Where do we start? What should we take into consideration when we build our Enablement plans?
To simplify the answer(s), I designed the enclosed infographic in hopes it would serve as a reference when building a sales enablement function from the ground up (or enhancing an existing function).
This is actually a taste of a more comprehensive framework that I started to develop 10 years ago and never stopped fine-tuning it, thanks to attended workshops, tips, ideas and best practices I learned from the very best.
Enjoy, share or tag a colleague who might find it useful.
I’ll happily spend time with those who wish to learn the bits & bytes of the entire framework.
