AMA: Salesforce Director, Sales Leader Excellence Coach, Grant Glaser on Sales Enablement

One word: outcomes.

Sales enablement should (and needs to be) tightly aligned to business objectives & desired outcomes of the business/sales organization. When you tie learning programs to tangible outcomes & KPIs, you get more accurate success measures. This translates to happy learners and happy business units: win-win.

Great question & cross-functional support is paramount to success. My best recommendation:

• Find common areas of overlap or shared interest
• Align on the outcomes you both want to impact
• Setup a 'stand-up' cadence (weekly/bi-weekly)

On more extensive efforts, a project manager can be helpful. For smaller steps, stay aligned on an end goal, divide & conquer workstreams, and hold one another accountable.

There needs to be a problem to solve. Begin by finding out what problem exists.

Then,

• Create a clear problem statement
• Define the current vs. desired future state
• Outline KPIs/metrics you want the program to impact
• Build an MVP to shop around with sellers & sales leaders
• Ensure you have sponsorship & buy-in from your sales leaders & teams
• Deliver the program
• Capture feedback
• Iterate & repeat

You'll get many enablement requests from a vast number of sources. I recommend triaging using this flow:

• Inbound request for enablement
• Substantiate with data (where & when possible)
• Identify outcomes to measure & impact
• Understand if the gap is: skill, will, or knowledge
• Define learning outcomes
• Decide if the program is necessary
• Execute the program
• Capture feedback
• Report back findings

I enjoy companies that operate from a set of core values & principles. Step one is to call out learning as core to the business's success. 

Next, you should consider:

• Praising knowledge sharing
• Driving a learning culture from the top-down
• Offering easy ways for people to share their learnings
• Embedding learning where sellers & leaders need it most

Many of the large research firms (ex: Gartner) and other smaller societies exist. They put out interesting reports, whitepapers, and findings that showcase new enablement technology, sales trends, and changes in the learning space.

I'd recommend:

• Check-out new & topical books
• Subscribe or review these firms/sites from time to time
• Join a community (Slack or LinkedIn) with like-minded folks

Without feedback, you're building & delivering learning in a vacuum and not setting yourself up for success. To mitigate this:

• Collect feedback early & often
• Send a 5 question (or less) survey after a learning module
• Host a debrief where learners can provide topical feedback in-person (or remotely)
• Take the feedback & make meaningful changes & tweaks to your training & programs
• Repeat each time there is a significant change - better, better, never best