The pressure for go-to-market (GTM) teams has never been higher. The current economic climate and remote work have fundamentally changed buyer engagement forever. These changes have required revenue-driving teams to pivot, update priorities, and look for ways to be more productive with fewer resources in order to hit their revenue targets.
In the midst of these changes, we’ve heard from companies that missed earning goals quarter after quarter. Despite their best efforts to adapt and keep pace, their rate of growth significantly slowed over the past fiscal year. While there are a number of factors that could go into these shortcomings, many of these organizations attribute their high-profile misses to poor enablement and the need for better training.
This is important for many reasons. First, it means that C-suite executives are increasingly turning to enablement leaders to help their organizations drive more predictable and profitable growth. It also means that they need to invest in the tools and resources that will help drive greater productivity. In order for either of these initiatives to be successful, organizations need sales enablement to be strategic.
Enablement in a digital-first world
To interact with today’s increasingly savvy buyers and clients, best-in-class organizations rely on enablement to prepare sellers to put their best foot forward in every interaction. This provides sellers and customer-facing reps with the right content, training, playbooks, and skills needed to navigate any situation. To do so, organizations need tools and systems that allow them to meet buyers and sellers where they are in a highly personalized way.
While enablement teams put in a great deal of effort to create these programs, they often fall short of the desired goal. This is due to the fact that there’s a disconnect between their enablement strategy and their GTM team’s initiatives and goals. Therefore, if enablement teams want to be as effective as possible, they need to create a strategy that brings everything together.
Enablement is a strategic business function
Like every other aspect of business, sales enablement has drastically grown and evolved over the past few years. At one time, effective enablement included three distinct pillars: enablement, engagement, and improvement. However, modern and effective enablement now also requires intentional strategy and planning.
By connecting your organization’s enablement efforts with your entire GTM strategy you can best determine what initiatives are most needed. This could encompass anything from creating new playbooks, refreshing existing content, or delivering crucial skills training. Because a company has multiple products, geographies, personas, and ongoing initiatives, an effective enablement strategy helps organizations prioritize actions that will drive the most meaningful results.
This is important because enablement teams are being challenged to relate everything they do back to key business goals and initiatives. Instead of focusing on siloed departmental objectives, it shifts enablement to becoming a strategic function that better aligns revenue-driving teams. As a result, there’s greater collaboration and buy-in across the organization so that essential GTM initiatives can launch faster. This elevates the role of enablement to be more efficient and strategic than ever before.
Connecting the dots between enablement and outcomes
In order for enablement to truly be strategic, organizations also need to link all of their enablement efforts into one, seamless workflow. Many organizations rely on tactical solutions that address one area of enablement, such as sales content management or buyer engagement. But when it comes to figuring out a starting point for their enablement strategy, they need to rely on a platform and data that brings everything together.
By investing in a solution that allows them to design an entire program from start to finish, enablers are better equipped to determine their most needed tasks, prioritize efforts, and allocate resources accordingly. Then, they can execute on their plans, measure progress, and tie their efforts to business outcomes rather than simply hoping for the best. This will make it easier to identify which content and training initiatives move the needle and where there’s an opportunity for future improvements.
When enablement teams successfully connect the dots between their enablement strategy and business outcomes, they can focus on the right things at the right time, and at scale. This is crucial for organizations that need to refine their efforts, find the right path forward, and move quickly in an ever-changing marketplace.
The time for transformational enablement is now
Enablement software is mission-critical for any organization that needs to prioritize enablement as a strategic initiative. That’s why we’ve invested in our enterprise-grade platform. This includes all of the capabilities your GTM team needs to transform enablement, prioritize efforts, and drive smarter growth. If you’d like to learn more about the Seismic Enablement Cloud™, click here to see the product in action.
