When should a company start thinking about creating a separate sales enablement function?

Sales Enablement is now seen as a new functional area in many organizations separate from Product Marketing.

Answer

5 Answers

Sales Adoption Sales Enablement

Jeff Beckham

Gem VP of Marketing & Partnerships | Formerly Mixpanel, Slack, BlueJeans, Cisco • 6y

That’s a tough question, and unfortunately, I think it does depend on your organization. I’ve usually seen enablement added as a separate function when a company reaches the 150-250 employee range. The common change-driver is usually a big push in sales hiring, which often comes with globalization. This creates a need to decrease ramp time for each rep, build custom learning paths by level, segment, and/or region, and run trainings in more places. It can be hard for product marketing to scale to ...Read More

1,575 Views
Axel Kirstetter

Guidewire Software VP Product Marketing | Formerly EIS Group, Datasite, Software AG, Microstrategy • 5y

Budget wise, PMM is a straight up expense. Sales enablement on the other hand more of a Sales opportunity cost. THe function sits in Sales and that department needs to decide if it wants more 'feet on the ground' or 'hands in the air'.

If ability to make revenue is slowed by complex non-documented processes or if there is a wave of new hires or a transformational product launch coming up, its definetly worth investing in a stand alond department

647 Views
Madeline Ng

Google Global Head of Growth Go-to-market, Google Maps Platform • 4y

Sales enablement is a function that helps scale learning within an organization. I've seen sales enablement focus on topics as broad as: Market/competitive intelligence Sales skills development Deal structure Product or solution launches Sales compensation and more As with any function that exists as an organization scales, you will most likely want to think about bringing on the function when you have a large enough sales force with a complex enough offering changing at a reasonable rate. With ...Read More

916 Views
Molly Friederich

Sanity.io Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • 4y

Great question! I am biased, but I LOVE having a dedicated Sales Enablement partner, so I'd say the sooner the better.

They're able to focus entirely on the enablement strategy, what's working well for sales, what isn't, the biggest opportunities for impact, balancing their cross-team learning priorities, etc., and share that back to PMM to optimize effectiveness.

PMM will always be juggling sales enablement with product messaging, core positioning, customer research, etc.

295 Views
Hien Phan

TigerData Head of Marketing • 6y

This is a harder question to answer because I have seen it both ways. However, as a rule, sales enablement scales as the company scales, and as a result becomes a separate function. At a company where the sales team is 5 to 10 sales reps, it makes sense for sales enablement to be with product marketing. In this scenario, sales enablement is mainly supplying content and providing positioning and messaging as salespeople sell against use cases and persona. For the other portion of sales enablement ...Read More

757 Views