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

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/

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).  

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?"

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.

I would encorage you to check out the Sales Enablement Society. There is a wealth of information and good discussion threads on everything sales enablment. Note that they are very cautious on vendors that sell to sales enablement pitching their products on the website.

https://www.sesociety.org/home