Over the years, we’ve partnered with thousands of organizations on their journey toward enablement maturity. Through these relationships, we’ve developed a maturity framework for what makes good enablement. This blog is the third in a series of five posts that will outline the Seismic Maturity Growth Framework. You can read the first post here and the second post here.
In our previous post in the Enablement Maturity Growth series, we discussed the first stage in growing your enablement program: Controlling Chaos. We learned that the most critical components of this step are to examine your content processes, gather feedback, and form an enablement steering committee to help define and drive outcomes for success. In any transformational roadmap, it’s important to take a deep breath and remember that you don’t need to eat an entire elephant at once!
In this post, we’ll explore what it means to take your enablement strategy to the next level by Understanding Impact. Businesses must ensure that their sales teams have the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed and remain competitive in an ever-changing market. This is where enablement comes into play. We define sales enablement as the process of providing your go-to-market (GTM) teams with the tools, resources, and training they need to sell more effectively. However, simply having an enablement program is insufficient. Companies must constantly work to improve the effectiveness, relevance, and maturity of their enablement initiatives.
Enablement maturity means taking your program to the next level. Mature enablement programs focus on continuous improvement and change management, prioritizing the needs of the GTM teams, aligning with business objectives, and adapting to changing market conditions.
Understanding the impact of your enablement program
With consistent and strategic effort, your enablement program will reach a point where your efforts and results will become more predictable. Even with adaptable processes and a feedback loop, you’ll need a better understanding of which enablement initiatives have the greatest impact, effectively change the behaviors of your customer-facing teams, and identify areas that require improvement.
To achieve this level of understanding, you’ll need to establish, implement, and adhere to repeatable processes. This allows you to assess the effectiveness of your enablement program. It’s not enough to know what you’re doing You also need to assess how well you’re doing it and improve as you go to make a lasting impact.
You can track and measure the success of your enablement initiatives with a clear process in place. This includes:
1. Setting clear objectives
2. Defining key performance indicators (KPIs)
3. Reviewing and analyzing data on a regular basis to determine which initiatives are successful and which need to be improved (learn more about analytics in Seismic that will help you understand the impact of your enablement efforts!).
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
Having clear processes in place with regular reviews and data analysis also supports a culture of continuous improvement. This allows you to act and implement strategic changes that will improve your enablement strategy.
Incorporating repeatable processes into your enablement program and analyzing their performance over time is critical for achieving predictable outcomes and understanding which initiatives have the greatest impact. Understanding impact will also help you move into that final phase of enablement maturity, where you Drive Transformation (more about that exciting phase in the next post in our series!)
If you’d like a guide on your sales enablement journey, we’re here to help. Contact our award-winning Seismic Services team of Enablement Experts today!
