I speak with a lot of folks about revenue enablement and undoubtedly a question will come up regarding stakeholder alignment: “How the (insert expletive) do we keep our stakeholders and enablement aligned on the most important work?”

There are a lot of options that swing from pleading to punishment. Neither end of that scale works.

From an Enablement perspective, we get asked to be the Fixers of Broken Things (thank you Scott Santucci for that pithy expression). Hey! Give it to Enablement! They’ll do anything! In addition, our role is inherently to be in service; it’s hard for us to say “No”.

From a Sales perspective, we get drowned in learning programs that may not provide us any assistance when it comes to working with our customers. New product release? Certify everyone on it! New integrations? I know, let’s give a live presentation on 10 technical integrations that no one cares about right at the moment! Glug glug glug

Sales and Enablement as a Partnership

It’s the partnership between Sales and Enablement that is so important to ensure effective programs that benefit everyone, most notably our customers.

So, I have my 5 favourite questions that I will ask anyone, my enablement team included, who want to initiate an enablement program of any type - from informational to must-know.

1. How is this Program aligned with the Go-To-Market and who’s the Executive Sponsor?

The assumption here is that folks actually KNOW what the current Go-To-Market is. It is a function of the revenue organization leadership to ensure that decisions made at the top, make their way through the whole revenue organization. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen enough. Regardless, this is an opportunity for knowledge transfer from Enablement to our stakeholders to help work through alignment of the request to GTM.

2. How are we going to measure the outcome for this Program so that we have an impact goal?

There are vanity metrics that are important to the enablement team, like who took the course, what was the average score, and what was the survey result. However that is not what I’m talking about here. Our revenue leadership stakeholders care about 2 fundamental measurements; is performance going up and is attrition going down. Both are very expensive if not going in the right direction. The outcomes we measure here are the KPIs that would give us indications of one or both of those fundamental measurements.

3. What is the priority for this request compared with all the other programs on our docket?

Typically there are a lot of programs running within any enablement organization. Not all can have top priority otherwise none have top priority. So, what are we going to stop or delay in order to add this? Or do we add this at all? This question gets tricky when you have multiple revenue leaders vying for priority. That is why the partnership between enablement leadership and revenue leadership is so important. More on that at another time.

4. What is the due date for this request?

The answer to this question and its importance will depend on a few factors, such as where are we in our fiscal year and how is our performance doing. The closer to the end of the fiscal year, the more we need to focus on due dates right in front of us that will help us move the needle sooner rather than later. If this request is for a later time, then it can likely get put into a queue.

5. Which roles in our GTM business need to be aligned with this and what exactly do you want them to DO?

“Learn” is not an answer. If this program doesn’t request some action item from the salespeople, then why are you doing it? Do you want to Increase connections? Share new capabilities? Inform our customers of new ideas? Test automations?

As with all things, there can be many permutations of The 5 Questions.

These 5 questions are the ones I use and encourage my teams to use. They are straightforward and give me the ability to partner with my revenue stakeholders and focus on what’s important to the business.