At Shift 2023, experts from our award-winning Professional Services team led breakout sessions designed to help our customers navigate complex enablement journeys. In our “Shift into the New Year” series, we’re continuing to share best practices to help you develop plans for this year and beyond. If you haven’t checked them out already, earlier posts in the series covered change management, building a sales enablement roadmap and measuring enablement success.  

To continue with the best practices for scaling your enablement program, Dean Perry, Principal Strategic Consultant at Seismic, will share insights from an executive panel discussion with top Seismic customers who have experienced success and continued growth, and how you can too.  

Before we start, take a moment to reflect and honestly answer this question: is your company unlocking value from sales enablement or struggling to scale success? It takes a growth mindset to build a culture of excitement behind enablement efforts, and we are committed to turning that attitude into action and unlocking outcomes for your business. In a previous blog we have already reviewed how to build a roadmap strategy, now let’s discuss how to scale that plan successfully.  

Research shows the direct correlation between sales enablement and revenue.  The Aberdeen Strategy and Research Group found that companies focused on investing in a sales enablement tool achieved a 32% higher overall team sales quota, with 24% more individual sales reps achieving quota. When applied correctly, effective enablement strategy results in meaningful revenue, increased buyer and employee engagement, and enhanced buyer experience. If you don’t have a strategy to scale and optimize your efforts, you’re already falling behind your competition. 

When scaling your enablement efforts, here are some best practices to keep in mind: 

Decide how you’re going to measure the progress of your key initiatives
No matter where you are in the process of scaling your maturity, you need to understand your baseline and how to track progress. This can be done through stakeholder surveys, goal setting, and KPI evaluation.  

Define a group of stakeholders to keep informed and get sponsorship
Make sure you have a key influencer at the executive level who can sponsor and articulate the value of enablement. Also, align all stakeholders before you try to grow. This will mitigate unexpected blockers and clearly define ownership and responsibilities. For example, one customer carved out time during quarterly leadership meetings with stakeholders in sales, marketing, revenue ops, and enablement to outline their progress on initiatives and shared regular reporting and recommendations.

Identify technology that enables transformation and solves a variety of needs
Try building around a key piece of technology that is highly valued by sales and marketing teams to help anchor your efforts. Proactively review your technology stack to ensure sellers have access to the right tools. One of our panelists also recommended involving procurement earlier in the vetting process. Getting their input at this phase helps identify any similar technology under review or potential blockers to implementation before going too far. 

Plan to expand your sales enablement budget
Gartner predicts sales enablement budgets will increase 50% by 2027. Cost is a major factor in selecting and maintaining a successful sales enablement program. Continued and thoughtful investment in these systems and processes will be paramount in maintaining their effectiveness. 

Ensure dedicated support or build out a bigger team
Organizationally, it helps to have dedicated departmental resources aligned exclusively to supporting enablement. Organizing the function in this manner treats enablement as a mission-critical priority and helps customers achieve their goals. 

Here are additional best practices for teams of all sizes and varying levels of resources: 

Team of 1  

• Know your limits and set clear expectations. 
• Evaluate the end-to-end process for enablement and prioritize use cases that are most impactful for your delivery teams. 
• Look around the organization for shared resources you can leverage. 
• Define the scope of enablement and the technologies you have the capacity to own. 
• Be a Swiss army knife – with limited enablement resources comes added workload and the need to deliver for many people. Try and be flexible to change.   
• Document your capacity and build a case for expanding your team! 

Team of Few  

• Establish a clear intake request process to become more proactive to emerging needs. 
• Meet regularly with your team to delegate tasks and check progress on initiatives. 
• If you are the leader, always shine a light on the impact of enablement efforts with company leadership.  
• Track the success of business outcomes through meaningful KPIs and report regularly to leaders about why they matter.  
• Build a business case to show growth and expansion of the team designed around how you see the future, strategically – not how others tell you it should look. 

Team of Many  

• Use your size to get involved in multiple areas of the business. A large enablement team can effectively become an intersection of cross departmental transformation and a de facto center of excellence. 
• Connect your team’s work to specific revenue focused initiatives.  
• Stay organized and use a detailed project planning process to keep everyone efficient. Break tasks into clear workstreams. 
• Develop levels of specialization within your team and create subject matter experts.  
• Never lose a startup mindset. Stay open to innovative ideas on how to improve, and don’t get bogged down with antiquated processes just because “it’s the way we’ve always done things.”  

The benefits of scaling your sales enablement program are not limited to delivering more enablement. When applied correctly, scale will allow you to target more use cases to improve the effectiveness of how your company delivers products and services to market.   

As we conclude, keep in mind these words of wisdom from last year’s panel discussion: 

• Enablement is a journey, not a destination. You will need to iterate and change your plans as you grow and scale.  

• Select your business outcomes and use cases for sales enablement wisely and always cater to the seller’s experience. They will become your best advocates – or worst opponents – when it comes to adoption. 

• Be accountable to measure what matters for your business. Report on those metrics early and often, and make informed, data-driven recommendations based on those insights. 

If your organization needs recommendations on how to scale your enablement efforts, please reach out to your account team at Seismic today – our Strategic Advisory consultants can help.