Maximizing Revenue: A Strategic Framework for Structuring Your Sales Enablement Team
Structuring a Sales Enablement Department WELL requires careful planning and consideration of various factors, such as: size, maturity and complexity of the revenue organization, the types of products or services being sold, and the revenue team's needs (which, hint, doesn’t just include Sales Reps!).
To help you create a winning Enablement team, here are some general considerations to follow:
1: Define Sales Enablement's charter at your company
“The most important aspect of a sales enablement charter is accountability
—for both the sales enablement team and the broader organization.”- Ben Cotton, Sales Enablement Directer at Automation Anywhere
If you asked 5 people in a single company across Sales and Marketing teams “what does Sales Enablement do?”, you’ll get five different answers.
Sales Enablement can be a catch-all for many different projects and desired outcomes of an organization - from training, to field content creation, to sales operations and more.
Before you start hiring for your Sales Enablement team, you need to make some decision on what the Charter of the team will be - What do they do? How do they operate? Why do they matter to the org? And more.
By creating a clear definition of Sales Enablement for YOUR company, you can set the team up for success as it grows and help ensure that the organization as a whole, understands the team's function, responsibilities, and cross-functional intersections needed for total revenue effectiveness.
While creating a Charter is the first objective for establishing a Sales Enablement Team that rocks, you’ll need to include all the other considerations in this article within your Charter, to truly design a department that will have a positive impact from the start.
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FYI: Here is a link to a Hubspot Template for creating your Sales Enablement Charter.
2: Identify the Impact of Sales Enablement in Your Company
“How Sales Enablement teams tell the story of their value can really make a difference in how that information is received, particularly by executive leaders, and presenting key metrics and data is definitely important, but there’s a component of that storytelling element that is just absolutely critical.”
- Shawnna Sumaoang, Vice President of Marketing Community at Highspot
Your Sales Enablement team should only work on projects that are irrefutably focused on achieving a revenue department objective.
In order to define what parts of the org your team will influence, it's essential to assess the current performance and capabilities of the sales team today, and then use this insight to identify measurable gaps and areas for improvement, as they align to a larger business objective.
For instance, if your yearly revenue goal is to increase new business logos by 30%, you want to deep-dive into the team's past years performance to understand what has been holding them back from fulfilling the potential required of the latest goals. If you could close those gaps of process, skill, and/or resources hindering team performance, how would that accelerate the teams output and help them better achieve this objective?
By taking this approach, the Sales Enablement team can create an impactful roadmap of deliverables based on their team's goal-driven Charter, with associated metrics for easy goal tracking.
The idea is to always “work backwards” from the goal. Ultimately, this will help Sales Enablement be a truly impactful strategic partner to the revenue org and prove it at every step of the way.
3: Determine the Reporting Structure
“The most important question you should ask yourself when securing a place for sales enablement is ‘what stage is my company at right now, and what do I need sales enablement to accomplish?’. Answering this question will align your sales enablement team to the correct reporting structure.”
- Elay Cohen, CEO of SalesHood
One thing that is rarely discussed when creating an Enablement team is the impact of team reporting structure on the effectiveness of the department.
Well, I’ll make a bold claim here that many people won’t admit - The success of your Sales Enablement Team heavily depends on its reporting structure, regardless of the quality of your Charter.
Why is this? The reason is simple - department heads are naturally focused on achieving specific outcomes and goals that relate to their specialization, and if the operational structure, processes and strategies aren’t aligned with the Enablement Charters’ goals, you’re on the road to failed initiatives and frustrated enablement team members (hello turnover!).
For instance, if you place your Sales Enablement Team under Sales Ops (maybe because some of their defined projects are around Sales Process creation), but over 75% of the team’s day-to-day work is in developing sales skill training and learning content, your team is going to struggle without the necessary functional expertise of training and development leadership at the helm. They’ll be immersed in a culture of “figure it out”, with “the blind leading the blind” and this will never lead to predictable team success.
Ultimately, Sales Enablement can sit under a specific department of the Revenue Org, such as Sales, Marketing, Operations, or Customer Success, or it could exist as a stand-alone department with C-Level representation, alongside a CMO and CRO. There is not one right or wrong answer, but there is a right and wrong answer for YOU based on how you want the team to function.
When making this choice, consider your team's Charter, focus, and prioritized projects. Align the structure with the team's goals to support the organization's broader objectives and you’ll see quick and reliable positive outcomes pour out of your Enablement team.
Here’s a great article from SalesHood that dives into detail on how to make this important decision.
4: Define Sales Enablement Individual Contributors' Specialties
“Organisation’s with a formal Sales Enablement approach, supported by a Charter,
see win rates improve by 19.2%” - Miller Heiman
Since Enablement can be a bit of an umbrella term, it’s important to be consistent on what your team does from the top-line messaging of a Charter, down to the bottom-line operational structure of your individual contributors within the team.
If you don’t define what each team member does, with a consistent line of projects they work on, you risk making your enablement team ineffective or worse an impediment to team success.
What types of problems can occur from unclear “swimlanes” or operational ambiguity?
A “Lopsided” Enablement Team: This means some team members contribute more high-impact work than others, have too many or too few projects compared to their peers, or have no focus at all - making enablement success hard to measure and increasing the chance of team turnover
Lack of strategic impact: This means your enablement team doesn’t have the focus to think of the “forest through the trees”, resulting in an inability to guarantee Enablements positive contributions beyond production volume
Wasted resources: This means your team risks working on redundant projects, missing opportunities to leverage skills or contribute to high-impact projects across the team and wider org, and may, be poorly allocated across projects due to lack of good operational management at the helm
“Rogue enablement”: This means those in non-enablement roles spend their time and resources on enablement projects (because they think no one else can own them) instead of doing of their main job! This impactis the effectiveness of both teams (Enablement and the Non-Enabler) and creates a culture of Enablement ineffectiveness that permeates across the whole GTM
And many more…
So with that - how should you define the role of your IC’s?
Small Enablement Teams of <5 Members…
If you have a small team of less than five Sales Enablement professionals, you likely have a group of “wears many hats” employees taking on a diverse array of projects that impact multiple audiences of the GTM. This is incredibly important to have during the early phases of a revenue orgs maturity, because at this stage, much of enablement in the day-to-day is on-demand, tactical, and rapidly evolving.
However, even in a world of chaos, you can bring some predictability by clearly defining the areas of project delivery your team services within the revenue org, and then assign your team members as “specialists” for those projects (even if that means that a single person has five “specialties'').
For instance, if your Charter has the team delivering on Sales Process, Onboarding, a Monthly Skills Training Program, and a Sales Enablement Newsletter, those are four areas of “specialty" that you could assign ownership to. Perhaps you need to break those into subcategories of delivery (i.e. “research newsletter content” vs “create newsletter”) and further divide and conquer between the scrappy crew, but either way, this ensures clearly defined projects that can be managed! By doing this, you can confidently communicate your team's role and impact across the entire go-to-market and eliminate the risks of ambiguity for everyone in the company.
Larger Enablement Teams of >6 Members…
On the flipside - for mature orgs of six or more Sales Enablement team members, you’re more likely to already have defined strategic needs of enablement across different, established, teams within the go-to-market org. This means you have the opportunity to hyper-specialize your Enablement crew.
What is hyper-specialization? Well, it means not just thinking about a one-off project, but instead, about the skill and focus of total outcomes a team member delivers. This could mean a functional specialty like content creation, tool management, trainer, etc., or an audience specialty, such as CS, Sales, or Marketing Enablement. At this level, you can hire for specializations to really get-off-the-ground quickly on high-impact projects.
The point of hyper-specialization is to have true-blue experts at the helm of a core enablement offering, creating a streamlined process of operational effectiveness that your revenue org will greatly benefit from.
Regardless of your org maturity and the structure you choose, make sure it’s consistent, clearly communicated across the entire GTM, and based on your Charter, goals, and objectives.
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Overall, structuring a Sales Enablement Department requires a thorough understanding of the organization's revenue objectives, the sales team's capabilities and needs, and the resources available to support the your enablement function.
By following these steps, you can create a Sales Enablement Department that truly supports the sales team and drives business success.
Need more help creating a Sales Enablement team that WINS? Contact GTM Enabler for a free consultation today!
GTM Enabler provides emerging B2B software companies with highly customized Revenue Enablement services, covering: strategy, content, training, and more. With GTM Enabler's expertise, clients experience increased win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better go-to-market operations. Choose GTM Enabler as your trusted partner for accelerated business growth.