Where would you start if Sales Enablement was new for a company?

Ah, this sounds like a fun prioritization exercise! If sales enablement was just kicking off, I'm assuming that generally marketing and PMM functions are relatively new as well. There's probably a lot of marketing and enablement debt that you're working through right now.

I would be really disciplined about identifying initiatives that are going to meet your business goals-- and you'll hate this answer... but it's going to be different for every organization.

But in general, I would assess:

• Readiness for sales reps
• Readiness for sales engineers
• Readiness for customer success
• Readiness for other channel teams and supporting functions

I would think about their readiness across:

• Baseline product knowledge
• Pitch
• Demo
• Baseline industry / market knowledge

Ask Sales

What a nice tactic is to go directly to your sales leadership and ask "If you had a magic wand and could enable your sales team on one thing, what would it be?"

A lot I could go into here, but I'd oversimplify the steps into a few areas:

1.  Sales strategy and sales model: Start with understanding how this works at your company. How is sales structured - e.g., is it all direct sales, or a mix of direct and indirect? What is the sales coverage strategy - e.g., generalists vs. generalists + specialists? Inside sales vs. outside sales? Do you have named account coverage or do the reps cover territories? These factors play a big role how you'd structure your sales enablement strategy.  
2.  Messaging and content: Based on the above + your understanding of the target customers, insights you have around them, and the products/solutions that your company provides - think about developing buyer/solution/product messaging that can resonate and create it! A great thing to do is to get feedback from sales on this as they'll understand what are common customer objections that the messaging should pre-empt. I like to do this during my meetings with the sales teams (or even better, during customer calls where you can be a fly on the wall).  
3.  Training, technology, and measurement: If sales enablement is new to the company, it's likely there isn't a protocol around this. Consider the basics from content repositories to store sales tools all the way to training/coaching programs to help upskill sales reps. Lastly, start thinking about reporting processes and technology enabled solutions to measure your sales enablement efforts. Three simple buckets of measurement are (a) Usage (usage of tools), (b) Quality (sales rep feedback), and (c) Impact (correlation to biz results, deal closure, revenue).  

There are three key elements you need to consider:

• Your story and the constituent “story-lets”
• Your internal audience - sales being the most important, but you need to address the needs of other customer-facing professionals (customer success, support, professional services, etc.)
• Their audience (and how you can enable them to communicate better with them.

To begin with, you will need to be in the thick of the action with the sales team. Listen in on sales calls, have weekly/monthly calls to collect feedback and reinforce your message. Over time, you can evolve strategies to scale your approach. In particular, think about developing training programs that you can deploy to the team.

I have summarized a lot of my thoughts in these three posts:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141028002202-1469522-product-marketing-in-three-words-part-i/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-ii-rajendran-nair/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/product-marketing-three-words-part-iii-rajendran-nair/

To be hiring sales enablement at all, the sales team is likely a size where scaled processes & training is needed. There are likely marketing resources in charge of things like content and collateral. There are likely already other resources on staff who can speak to the technical aspects of the product and implementation. So, even though I'm in product marketing, I'd actually advise against starting with product training.

If I were to make my first-ever hire in Sales Enablement, here's how I would prioritize what they tackled:

1. Go on a listening tour. Talk with every sales leader and rep 1:1. Gather what's working & what's not. Assess onboarding, processes, sales methodology, tools, content, etc. Shadow some sales calls, follow-up AND what a rep does in the system to log activities and move deals forward.

2. As you start to scale your sales channel, creating efficiencies with the headcount you have is critical before you hire a lot more people. Start by partnering with sales ops to document clear, efficient processes that make your funnel really clean. Funnel hygiene will be important for making strategic decisions as you grow.

3. Partner with PMM to make sure reps are well-educated on the target buyer, pain points they have that your product can solve for. Create a pitch certification program. (Note that this is NOT demo training but higher level persona/value training)

4. Evaluate and roll out a sales methodology like MEDPICC, Challenger, or Sandler that the whole team will use - anything that creates rigor and clearly defines the what's needed to move a deal into the next stage. This will help your entire salesforce speak the same language, and will help your sales managers enforce consistent requirements.

5. Before ramping up BDR/AE headcount, get an onboarding program in great shape.

6. Now that you have your fundamentals in place, you can start to get creative by enabling the team with fresh sales plays, larger-scale events like SKO, and product boot camps.

Full disclosure, I've never 'started' sales enablement in a company so I'm just going to tackle this from my point of view but it's not based on real world experience! I would keep things very simple and frame them up the same way you would with a GTM for a new product/solution/service. What is the value proposition, messaging, competitive stance etc and how do you in turn ensure your sales team(s) understand that. Also, who is the customer what is their pain point and why will your solution be a great fit for them? You'll likely have built out a pitch deck (or similar) and leverage that to enable sales first and foremost. From there try to plan out a semi-regular cadence of sales enablement activities. i.e monthly or quarterly 'brown bag' or 'office hours' for instance. Get sales folks to present as peer-to-peer is always hugely beneficial. Try 'art of the deal' (deal deconstruction) from a leading salesperson to help train their peers on what actually works! Over time you'll start to build up a catalogue of assets and materials along with your regular sessions that will work itself into an enablement plan!

I would map out the customer journey and identify stages where either there are leakage in leads, or the conversion process is not as efficient as it can be. To do this, I would listen to recorded sales calls if they're available, or ask to sit in on a few calls. Ensure that the calls cover a variety of customer types.

Then, I would identify priority stages in the journey where enablement would be most helpful. Then, you can identify the assets or processes that could make the biggest difference in each stage, and sequence them by level of priority based on effort required vs. impact.

I will assume this question is meant for a growing startup who has just started hiring a more formal enablement team. Sales enablement at its core is meant to ensure the business is providing the right training at the right time, that is aligned to the company's objectives and future direction.

This calls for a bit of discovery to help you validate that you are building a curriculum to solve the RIGHT problems. In order to understand the areas of opportunity, a bit of discovery is in order:

1- Talk to Sales leadership: understand where they believe the gaps are and push for a stank ranking if the list gets long :)

2- Shadow reps: sometimes you can learn the most from listening to some phone calls or ride along in mtgs with some of the best performing and some of the worst performing reps. Reps themselves are also a good source of information on where they are struggling.

3- Audit current content: how are reps learning about your target buyers, product messaging, competition, etc? Who built that content? Is there a new team that can help define that content (ie Product Mktg!)?

At the most basic level, your reps need to know who they should be selling to (prospect characteristics) and what that messaging should be (founded in your company differentiators). If you can start there and ensure there is a proper onboarding, you can stop the bleeding as new reps join your company. Once that's set, you can think about tackling more complex training.

The first thing I would do is take the time to deeply understand what the biggest gaps are for the sales team, and what their immediate needs are. Enablement is such a broad program, and the last thing I want to do is waste cycles building things that the team won't find useful. Where are the quick wins that can jumpstart my enablement efforts?

The second thing I would do is make sales enablement a reliable ritual with the team. Set time aside to be in direct contact with the team regularly (perhaps once every two weeks, or even once a month). Own the agenda for those meetings, and use them for whatever purposes are most impactful. You can provide product launch updates, do deep dives on competitors, hold open forum feedback sessions, and more. The benefit is two-fold: 1) It's a forcing function to start developing and delivering those needs you identified in step one, and 2) It is the foundation of trust with sales that is crucial to the success of product marketing at any company. If the team can rely on hearing from product marketing at a regular cadence, and you are delivering assets that create value, then they are more likely to give you feedback on how your messaging/positioning is resonating in the market, which sets you up for ongoing growth across all areas of the function.

I'd start with an initial Sales Confidence survey to see how confident your current team is with selling whatever you are selling. The survey will provide you with the necessary insights to draft your first Sales Enablement strategy. Ultimately, the Sales Confidence Survey is an outlet for the Sales team to share their struggles and challenges with you, and for you - to act on these insights strategically.

When I joined my current company a few years ago, sales enablement was something referred to as "creating beautiful presentations" and "producing datasheets". But Sales Enablement is much more than that.

When I first measured the confidence of the team to pitch and sell our products, I identified the gap in technical knowledge as a whole and set out to solve this with the educational program. The lack of communication about current and upcoming product changes was another area to amplify, and my team and I launched several projects like Sales Newsletter and Monthly calls for Sales to keep them informed and therefore confident, enabled, and prepared for conversations with the prospects.

I started doing Sales Confidence surveys a few years ago and found this to be a valuable resource for crafting the Sales Enablement strategy. To this day, I continue running this survey on a regular basis.

Here is my tried and tested, simple process for measuring Sales Confidence:

• Step 1 — Define Your Survey Goals

• Step 2 — Create the Sales Confidence Survey

• Step 3 — Launch The Survey And Get Answers

• Step 4— Follow up with the attendees to get deeper insights

• Step 5— Write a survey report

• Step 6— Start acting on the plan

You can find the explanation, templates, and pro tips for each of these steps in my Ultimate Guide to Sales Confidence Survey on Medium: https://medium.com/@sashajjang/an-ultimate-guide-to-sales-confidence-survey-73a941ceb1f4

In my mind, there are two aspects of Sales Enablement: training and arming. So, the first question is which of these is more needed: Do you have naturally great salespeople that need some additional resources to best accomplish their goals, or do you have a fairly green salesforce that needs more formalized development processes?

Narrowing it down there will help a lot, I think.