How do you bring other departments together (e.g., marketing, product) to support sales enablement efforts?

I'll be honest, I've been in the Sales Enablement industry for a while and this is something that takes so much time to master and has so much nuance depending on your organization's structure. Here are some tactics I use that have helped me get 80+ people in my last annual strategy review. It boils down to these three things:

1. What you did: I LOVE quarterly business reviews. Now let's be honest, I HATE writing them, but they are very effective in getting engagement. The two questions you want to ask here are: 1) Who's the audience(s) I'm trying to activate? 2) What information are they looking for that would gauge proof of investment return and guidance? For me, I typically stick to a common format:

• Divide the document by program
• In each program, share objectives that you've set at the beginning of the quarter/year, what major projects were activated to address these, achievements, key insights and feedback, and next steps (how you're building on it, how you're pivoting away from it, and what you need help with by cross-functional department)
• Tag specific people you know that would be interested in areas that pertain to them
• Create a read-through event and ask folks to add comments and tag others who would be interested
• Leave room for discussion of key themes at the end

2. What you're going to do: In addition to the quarterly business review, I do an annual review that considers any strategic plans for our key audiences, mostly this will be Sales Leadership's north stars. If you don't have these plans, go off of the business goals and vision for the year (team restructuring, market expansion, change in target audiences, etc). Here's my typical format:

• Goals and objectives from the previous year and share loosely what your team achieved
• Key insights that are going to guide you in the new year - changes in team habits, cross-functional partnerships, industry changes
• Identifying those business objectives and the strategies (the direction, not the roads) you'll be taking to get address them - focus on why you are doing this from an enablement professional perspective
• Divide the following sections by quarter, refer back to the objectives and strategies and key initiatives. Make sure to call out dependencies, financial/cross-functional resources needed, priority levels. This is a great place to be clear about who you need these from and ask for DRI's from their teams through comments
• Give gratitude to your partners for making this happen and look forward to the collaboration needed to make this happen

3. How it's doing: These are weekly or monthly updates on those objectives and key initiatives. Share your current state in achieving those objectives and the deliverable progress for key initiatives. I also include some key themes and insights that we see in the data and feedback we hear from reps. This is also a great place to share what you're hearing from the industry/enablement world and how you plan to integrate them.

All of these have really jumpstarted interest in our programs by being clear on guidance for why and how your partners can help will get it going. Make sure that you secure clear partners, project owners, and recurring times set to meet with them.

Hope these help!

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.

Better Together - Collaboration with other departments and Sales Enablement

If you have not already started to build out councils with your core heads of department this will allow for set times for you all to meet to collaborate on the enablement priorities and build out RACIs to outline who is responsible during each phase of each project.

Below are three steps that can help you start one

1. Meet with all the key department heads that you need to collaborate with to effectively manage or
funnel all the information that is required for sales enablement to build strategy and enablement for
the field. Explain what your organization is responsible for and how you can partner together

2. Schedule regular cadence with one representative from each group and form your sales enablement
governance council - this allows each head of the department to delegate someone to represent that
group in any or all projects that require you all to work together.

3. Keep it documented, share the successes, take input and build together

The above is the most efficient to build credibility, trust and collaboration with your department heads, remember they will be talking to the sales leaders in other meetings just like you so building your collaboration and trust will help you all partner better together for the benefit of the sales and the organization.

To foster collaboration and support sales enablement efforts effectively, it's crucial for enablement leaders to grasp the goals of other departments and their alignment with the company's overall vision. By creating enablement strategies that not only empower the sales team but also benefit other departments, we can foster alignment and cross-functional collaboration.

For instance:

- Marketing: Marketing focuses on lead generation and the quality of leads that convert into opportunities. By collaborating closely with Marketing, enablement can provide sales teams with insights on how to effectively engage with marketing-generated leads and convert them into opportunities. This alignment helps achieve both Marketing's goal of lead conversion and Sales' goal of generating and closing pipeline.

- Product Teams: Product teams possess deep expertise in the solutions we sell. Leveraging them as subject matter experts allows enablement to equip sales teams with comprehensive product knowledge. In turn, sales teams can provide valuable customer feedback and competitive intelligence to product teams, enabling continuous improvement and innovation.

By aligning enablement efforts with departmental goals and fostering collaboration across functions, we can optimize our support for sales while contributing to the broader success of the organization.

PMM and Product have traditionally been my strongest cross functional partners, and I believe they are vital for any enablement team's success. The way I get their buy-in, and bring them into the fold with our approach, is all around maximizing the work they do and serving up only what we expect sellers to know. Nothing is worse for content creators than not having anyone consume their content. So, since Enablement should understand the needs of the sellers more than most cross functional teams, we work to be very clear to PMM and Product and help them understand what sellers care about regarding any launch - and that is 'What's in it for me the seller? (how can I make money) & 'What's in it for my customer?. If content from cross functional teams can answer those 2 questions, sellers will sit up and take notice.