What is Sales Enablement? And Why You Need the Function in Your Organization

Finally, sales enablement is taking its rightful place
as a part of a successful go to market strategy.
Let’s dive into the intricacies of this function
and find out why your organization needs it.
On this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning in to Closing Time, the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, VP of marketing for Unbounce and Insightly.
Today I’m joined by Danny Wasserman.
He is director of sales enablement at. Databricks, a data intelligence platform.
Thanks for joining us, Danny.. Great to be here, Val.
Thanks for having me. Awesome.
So to set the stage for our talk,
can you walk us through exactly what sales enablement is
and how it fits in with the go to market teams like sales and marketing.
Yeah. For sure.
I think that there’s a lot of misconceptions about enablement,
and that cuts both ways.. That can be great.
And that can also kind of pigeonhole the craft and the profession.
So at baseline, people hear enablement, the easiest way to demystify
what is encapsulated in that moniker is training.
Right.
Whether you’ve got sales enablement, whether you’ve got field
engineering enablement, you’ve got customer success enablement.
We want to even the distribution of success across
all of those individual contributors and even the leaders, because it’s a hard job.
So as you evolve in the maturity curve of enablement, you get more role specific.
I think to your point about, well, how do we fit in with go to market?
How do we then partner alongside marketing?
In so many ways,. I think we are the conduit to the field,
to that last mile of the people that are on the front lines, and IC
or an FLM capacity, we are the translators between
what is in the ivory tower, what is being cooked up in the lab for strategy.
And actually when the rubber meets the road,
how does that land and resonate ideally with those constituents?
Yeah.
I often talk to our enablement team here
at our organization to find out, like.
Okay, we’ve presented something.
What’s the feedback?
What are you hearing from the sales team?
Because I’m coming from the marketing side.
So that word conduit,. I think, is really a good one.
I think that oftentimes as the conduit,
if you’re not careful as you partner in enablement alongside
marketing as an example, then you can be perceived as gatekeepers.
And that’s never the intention of enablement.
But I think that if you have an enablement team
that has a former sales pedigree, oftentimes
just the natural vocabulary, the lexicon, the vernacular you come by,
you speak with a different form of authenticity than marketing
as they’re attempting to run really well crafted, well-intended campaigns.
But there is oftentimes that disconnect or that stigma that even follows marketing
and all enablement is trying to do is make sure that with an ever so slight
modulation, it has the highest probability of landing and resonating with sales.
Got it.
So why has sales enablement not gotten the respect it deserves in the past?
And what have enablement professionals done
to turn the tide, sort of?
Yeah.
I mean, we can go to the timeless adage, those who can do, those who can’t teach.
And again, to be tongue in cheek about it,
I think historically you had a lot of enablers.
I’ve sat through them. They get on stage.
This is their time to pontificate and espouse
whatever their sort of instinct or theory about what successful sales looks like.
And yeah, I think for a lot of years sellers, where time is money
and so critical to their success, suffered
through these uninspiring sessions.
And I think that there were people that chose to break away from that
and maybe break away because they were more theatrical
or they were more comedic, or they were more dynamic and captivating
in their facilitation that got them to a certain place.
But in the last few years, and I think largely accelerated because of Covid,
the technology investment that has been poured into
revenue technology in particular,
has elevated the sophistication of what enablers can do.
So if you had historically a theory about what constitutes great sales,
it was a he said – she said.
I think that you should have a first call that sounds like this.
No, it should sound like that.
And whose opinion is right?
The end of the day, it was really hard to abstract.
Well, that theory was put to the test and we saw success.
But there were a lot of other vectors that were in place.
So at best, maybe this is a correlation.
It’s not causal.
And now because of things like conversation intelligence,
you were able to pinpoint exactly when your hypothesis, your theory
about what behavior should look like in a sales capacity.
You can see when it’s applied in the wild.
And then because that’s integrated through CRM, you can track
with a scientific degree of certainty, if in fact your theory was applied,
did it yield higher win rates, did it even compress sales cycles?
Did it add any size to your average order price?
Those are all things that before
were really, you know, spitting into the wind conjectures.
Now we have that level of microscopic visibility that we never had before.
So we’ve earned a place to actually hold a seat in the Cabinet War Room.
Before it was kind of,. I don’t know, the whipping boys
and whipping girls of go to market like, oh,
let’s just lob it over the fence and enablement,
and then they’ll put lipstick on a pig and that’ll be that.
Now we actually are blurring the lines between what we can do
with this technology and what I think Rev ops has always had the edge over us,
which is being much more in tune with the numbers in your ERP or CRM.
So it sounds
like technology definitely has a place in how,
enablement leaders have been able to get buy in in the sales org.
You mentioned Covid as well, in terms of maybe
we’re onboarding a lot more salespeople in a remote environment.
Maybe that contributed.
So in terms of getting buy in, at the highest levels of an organization,
is it that technology and the changes that are just happening in the world,
or is there anything else that you point to that says, yes,
this is how, enablement has really placed its stake in the ground.
Yeah, as far as like Covid’s role, going from a paradigm of sales
where by and large, if you were a B2B. SaaS company, you had especially for early
career folks, an inside sales team that was in the office five days a week.
As you’re cultivating this talent to determine, are they being productive?
Are they reflecting what we expect of our sellers?
All of that inspection took place in a very manually intensive,
in-person paradigm, and now you go almost overnight
to not having any visibility what your sellers are doing.
So the instantaneous relevance and necessity
of conversation intelligence kind of happened unexpectedly.
We might have gotten there, but on a much longer time horizon.
So in Covid, all of a sudden I can’t be at eight places at the same time.
So what do I do as a frontline leader?
I’m going to have conversation intelligence tell me actually what
everyone is doing when we’re not all in the same row in an office.
And then people begin to realize,. Holy smokes, this is pretty slick.
It’s less Big Brother-y than we thought.
Customers are less inclined to sort of switch off the recording
or bristle at it, because there is a way to pitch the value for the customer
as much as the value for the seller, and now it’s just table stakes.
So the insights that came out of that really unexpected chapter in Covid
have now all of a sudden illuminated tons of cool behaviors
that otherwise may have gone totally unnoticed or unchecked.
And now a lot of sales leaders are saying,. I can’t imagine running my sales team
without something like CI, and not just, again,
the recording to coach my reps or coach my managers.
But now I want those insights to trickle down into my forecasts.
Oh, by the way, I actually want them to move upstream into how I prospect.
And that’s sort of where. I’m going with technology,
is that in the last five years, the three legged stool that is prospecting,
coaching and forecasting can all be procured
by stitching them together in a best of breed capacity.
Or a lot of these vendors, now to consolidate, are offering
everything under the sun
in a one-stop-shop form.
Okay, so I’m hearing. Covid was good for something.
And I always like to look at the bright side.
But let’s talk about out of those conversation intelligence platforms.
Are there metrics that are showing up that an enablement leader can own?
Because when you’re in the go to market space,
everybody wants to know what metrics are you going to own as a leader?
Yeah.
So also, when we talk about at the start of this podcast,
you know, what is enablement?
Well, enablement is a cost center.
Enablement is a drain on resources.
Harvard Business Review in 2015 accused us of being the great training robbery
and looking at our department and saying what other business function
every year gets millions of dollars in budget and isn’t held accountable?
When do we put enablement feet to the fire?
And they were right.
So now when we think about, okay, what are the metrics that an enabler
constantly needs to think about?
As a former seller, it was so nice having the binary I’m above or below quota.
I’m either exceeding the expectations you have of me or I’m behind.
In enablement, it’s much more gray and squishy.
Well, now, if enablement is going to spearhead the rollout of a new message,
how did they historically know whether it was being adopted?
They would go around.
They would informally pulse leaders or individual contributors
say, hey, how’s the new message going?
And politically, that puts the recipient of that question
in a really sticky spot, because they know this is our baby.
So they have the courage to be a truth teller
and say, your baby’s ugly, no one’s using it.
And you slung us a bad bill of goods.
That’s helpful.
But that also is 1 or 2 data points.
It’s not comprehensive across the entire go to market team.
So at baseline with conversation intelligence now
we can actually determine is adoption even happening after the rollout
and the adoption of a new message, a new product, a new pricing strategy
that could have six seven, eight figure implications.
So you want to know
if you put all this thought in the war room into the rollout of this.
Do people even actually think it cuts the mustard to apply it in the wild?
That’s step one.
Two when you actually do see it adopted in the wild,
it may actually not contribute to the business impact that you want.
So in a new message, are you hoping that that’s going to elevate
your win rates against your incumbent or against your competitor.
Well we can look and see it’s been adopted.
But in fact when rates are going down,
when it’s applied because the message is crummy.
So then you can actually get in front earlier of iterating
or just jettisoning what it is that you rolled out
before you wait 6 or 9 months relying on misleading lagging indicators.
Now you’re actually as close to real time insights and course correcting
than you’ve ever been.
I love the real
time aspect of that, so it’s very insightful.
Are there certain parts of a sales cycle where enablement really shines?
Or is it really just all the way through at different stages?
I think that it’s entirely dependent on the size of the enablement team you have.
So as you grow the team, as you apply more headcount,
then you become much more role specific and then even like function specific.
So let’s take the case of in a go to market team.
You may have a commercial sales org which is different from your mid-market
team, from your enterprise team, which is entirely different
from your post-sale customer success.
And as those teams evolve, you may have if we look at the commercial team,
you have someone who just absolutely shines at demos
because that’s something that maybe an AE or an SA
or an SC, whatever your abbreviations are for those folks on that presale side.
Well, how do you actually teach a masterful demo?
That competency
may look entirely different from how you actually handle objections.
And do you have someone on your team that can do all that?
Great, awesome.
But then as you move further up the food chain to mid-market,
what are some of the other things that you need to start entertaining?
Procurement? Negotiations.
Think about tension management.
Is that also still something that is owned by one enabler?
Or do you begin to, as you sort of segment out your team and competencies
you want everyone to be in charge of their major, maybe commercial
or SMB sales and their minor that transcends that cohort maybe.
Oh, by the way,
and this is our negotiation expert who runs courses across the entire
go to market team from pre to post sales and up and down from S&P to enterprise.
Got it.
So this might be a loaded question.
But when is it time to establish an enablement presence in an organization?
Is there, like, a data point?
Is it a revenue band?
Is it a headcount or perhaps something else?
Yeah.
I think that you’re talking to someone who will always put such a high premium
on learning and education and for SMB organizations
when they’re still struggling to find product market fit.
And how long that takes is arbitrary.
I can’t give you a silver bullet like, oh, well, at ten people,
that’s when enablement comes in.
I think it has more to do with philosophically.
Do you decide with the resources you’ve got to allocate a headcount
for someone whose whole existence in the company
is to think about learning?
And again, like let’s delineate between enablement
and then a learning and development function.
Because I think that as we get into bigger organizations, those can be conflated.
But right now do you, if you’re a leader of a company
or a founder of a company, do you believe that that is time and money
well spent constantly cultivating people’s
awareness, intelligence about how to do their jobs better?
So again, I’m
going to come into that question with a huge bias that there is no better
time than the present if you don’t already have it to think about that person.
If you don’t have product market fit,
then you’re probably putting the cart before the horse,
because then the enablers just spitballing,
but I think once you have some degree of confidence
that you’ve got something really material and meaningful and sticky,
then I would want someone to come in and start thinking about codifying
what constitutes success and our top performer or performers,
so we can quickly replicate that, and even out the distribution
of the haves versus the have nots.
So feels super subjective.
Are there verticals or industries where you tend to see
more of an enablement function or is it just agnostic?
No, I think the we’re seeing a acceptance, but also a celebration
of enablement across all different industries.
So I’m talking to people in financial services
and health care and life sciences.
Obviously my pedigree is in the SAS and B2B technology space.
So that’s where I’m most comfortable speaking.
But I don’t think that that’s unique to our industry.
Got it.
So, a lot of times people listen to Closing Time
and maybe they are in a sales role, but they’re not exactly sure
where they belong in the sales organization.
So let’s say somebody is listening to this
and they’re thinking, mom enablement sounds super interesting.
Can you just share what you have seen as the most
likely pathway to a career in enablement?
And I’ll share anecdotally,
one of the best enablement professionals I’ve ever worked with
was an elementary school teacher before taking on enablement.
So I definitely think that that is a great path.
For sure.
I think that you see
lots of different walks of life that come into an enablement career.
The people who have the educational theory, this is what they studied.
They’ve actually had time in either a childhood or adult capacity to be
teachers. And now they want to apply it to a business context.
They make great enablers because they have that backbone of the academic theory.
I also think that folks who have walked a mile
in the shoes of their constituents, are fantastic enablers.
I think what you have to ask yourself, you know, you talked about this
proverbial person and go to market.
Maybe it’s a seller who’s like, oh man, I’ve been doing this for a while
and I just need a change.
Or, man, the weight and the stress
and the volatility of deals and quota, it’s it’s getting to me.
And there’s an imbalance in my, you know, personal professional happiness.
That’s another reason to contemplate it.
But I think more than anything you as an individual have to look into your soul
and ask, what fills my cup?
Because I was a great seller and I was really successful,
and had I stayed in sales,. I’d be making a ton more money,
probably be at Presence Club probably
again, would be in a very different financial bracket.
But in my soul,
I actually wasn’t feeling enriched by selling more deals or bigger deals
or chasing that next rung on the ladder that the brass ring wasn’t
gripping me authentically.
What I love to do when I was a seller was I love to moonlight
in our general like onboarding for new hires.
That to me, really switched me on.
So as you consider the puts in the takes and the pros
and the cons of staying in a sales role or being in pre-sales
or going into customer success versus coming here, do you love to serve?
And yes, there’s elements of service and all those other aforementioned personas,
but do you love to serve and you love to teach?
And I think that for the folks that I’ve seen enablement,
there’s sort of a we’ll say three ish general personas
of people that I think go the distance and find really natural habitats.
First is, are you just that thespian that takes content
and injects it with life?
You’re enthusiastic, you’re captivating, and you can get an entire audience
wrapped around your finger.. We need those in enablement.
If you want to be again, what do they call it?
The the sage on stage
there also, as enablement becomes a bigger function
within organizations, huge projects that require program managers,
we need people where nothing is going to slip through the cracks.
And you have the absolute confidence
and assurance in this program manager that the trains are going to run on time.
Well, as programs get bigger, we need teams that are within a PMO office.
And I would also say that with the technology, we’ve got
the third persona, at least on the sales item scene, is more of this Chief of staff
consigliere role to a sales leader or go to market leader?
Can you be a truth teller who’s able to toggle between
aspects of program management, aspects of facilitation,
but is also able as the conduit where we started this conversation,
to be a truth teller to the leader
and also bridge ivory tower to field vernacular.
So again, I think that you can be in all of those buckets,
whether you’ve got an academic pedigree,
whether you’ve got to go to market pedigree
or you just combine that naturally.
I think that don’t come to enablement, though if your soul is not feeling
totally tugged, that what you want to go do is serve.
Ivory tower to field.
I think that’s going to be my big takeaway from our talk. Danny.
Yeah. Cool.
Awesome.
Well, thanks so much for joining us on. Closing Time today and for really giving
us, a good lesson in what enablement is and how it can work for your organization.
Thanks, Val.
And thanks to all of you for tuning in to Closing Time.
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