Contributed by Christopher Kingman
Spring Cleaning! A time to declutter, minimize, and reorganize. Much like at home, I make a point to “clean house” and reorganize my Enablement priorities to make sure I am aligned with what my business needs so I can continue to scale my team’s efforts to match.
Even more relevant in our digital world, maintaining an understanding of the current business objectives and challenges your sellers face is critical. How you or your team will address them is the differentiator between Enablement success and failure. So how do you do it? I have come to leverage an easy-to-implement strategy for the majority of my Enablement career to ensure I stay connected to my business. This strategy is also critical in scaling your efforts, as it can serve to demonstrate a consistent track record of improvement. Below I break them down in three simple steps.
Step 1:
Identify all the challenges impacting your sales teams. This can be easily accomplished by simple 1:1 video calls with Sales Leaders and Sellers themselves. Keep the focus simple, I like to ask only a few questions around what is preventing seller success or goals from being met. I can tell you from experience, you will get A LOT of feedback. Use what you collect and put it in a spreadsheet for analysis.
Step 2:
Determine the nature and priorities of problems. If you take your anecdotal feedback from your conversations, quantify it, and use categories like impact, ease of solving, functions involved, and priority you’ll quickly see a list of actionable items appear.
Step 3:
After you order the challenges by priority, I also recommend you highlight quick wins as well, as they can help bring attention to your function and your good work. Once you have stakeholder alignment, you now have your Enablement roadmap.
This document can now be continuously revisited to track how your team is solving problems and more importantly provides clear visibility into the value you provide. By conducting this exercise, and simultaneously “cleaning house” of old or irrelevant items, you are taking a very proactive approach to your enablement function and ensuring constant alignment with your stakeholders.
Now you may be wondering, how do you use this exercise to scale your enablement function? I’m a firm believer that Enablement strategies are not rigid or static, but organic. As practitioners, we need to consistently “check the pulse” of our business to ensure we are aligned. Alignment leads to solving the right problems, and nothing scales better than a track record of solving the right problems. Maintaining a consistent approach like the one above is a simple and effective method for continual feedback on how best to enable your business. Over a short time frame, this method can lead to numerous quick win victories and progress on many long-term organizational changes.