What do I consider to be the most important keystone for enablement success? It is the strategic partnership with sales leadership.

I’ve spent thousands of hours speaking with sales leadership working out how to implement this keystone concept. I’ve honed it down to #R2N4 which stands for “Responsible To, Not For”.

Responsible to who? Not responsible for what?

How do we balance the insight and initiatives of enablement with the impact of success? The proliferation of our programs and even our teams is dependent on proving success. We’ve all experienced, either personally or by association, the complete devastation of Enablement by companies who eliminates those roles seemingly indiscriminately.

In a nutshell, #R2N4 means that Enablement is responsible to provide the best and most aligned GTM support to the customer-facing (usually Sales) employees, but not for the sales motions themselves. We create the programs, and sales executes on them. Sounds simple right?

Yeah, not so simple.

So here’s how I've made it work…

On a regular basis (monthly or quarterly) In collaboration with sales leadership, you determine the gaps (insights) that are seen within the customer-facing roles. Could be process, product, skills, account management, pipeline, whatever it is. You get aligned and agree on what is needed and how to prioritize the needs and wants. I wrote an article about The 5 Questions to assist with this effort.

These needs and wants are what enablement is Responsible To provide. We determine how best to craft and deliver that enablement.

Then it’s Sales leadership’s turn.

They are responsible for the execution of those chosen programs. If it’s a role playing exercise, the FLMs are the recipients and coaches for execution of those programs. If it’s a product training, the delivery may be by Enablement or Product Marketing, but the assurance that sales attends and participates is again the responsibility of sales management. You get the gist.

This partnership is critical for a variety of reasons:

Enablement cannot be the disciplinarian otherwise the culture of learning will be destroyed; it will become a CHORE and not a CHOICE.
Sales management collaborated on what is required so must be involved in completion of these programs. They are the ultimate coaches.
Enablement must have assurance that the work they are doing is effective.
We must measure the impacts and outcomes as it pertains to performance and attrition metrics. Those KPIs are really what our internal investors are looking for.
We do not have the resources in Enablement to gather insights, create all the initiatives, measure the impacts AND coach the sales teams.

Sales managers will be accountable if they are taught how to coach their team, which is why sales manager enablement is so important.

Sales managers will be accountable if we can help control the noise that is hitting their airspace. In other words, if someome wants to put something in front of sales, they need to come through Enablement.

Sales managers will be accountable if we minimize the time in seat so as not to monopolize their selling time. Create an agreed upon set # of hours per month or per quarter and stick to it!

Sales managers will be accountable if we honour the sales calendar and don’t run programs in the last few days of a month, the last week of a quarter or the last month of the fiscal year.

Sales managers will be accountable if they see the relationship between the programs and the GTM strategy.

Sales managers will be accountable when they see the behaviour change in their sellers resulting in larger pipelines, higher sales velocity, larger ASP, shorter sales cycles and better NPS and CSAT from customers.

Sales managers will be accountable if they know their leadership team has also taken accountability.

TOGETHER as a strategic partnership with mutual accountability, this can all be accomplished. I’ve done it. I know it works.

So, put #R2N4 on a sticky note and look at it every day.

We partner, we focus, we strategize, we prioritize, we execute, WE WIN!