Table of contents
Subscribe to our newsletter
Even though 65% of companies use enablement to provide sellers with the content, playbooks, and skills needed to navigate any interaction, only 28% of reps expect to hit their annual quota. Top-notch sales enablement tools and training will only take your reps so far without a strategic enablement program to guide them.
When executed effectively, strategic enablement accelerates sales productivity, aligns go-to-market priorities across teams, and drives business results.
Let’s break down what strategic enablement means and how to get an effective strategic enablement program off the ground. We’ll share expert insights from Amy Kautz, Director of Sales Enablement at SalesIntel, to help you step up your game.
What Does Strategic Enablement Mean?
Strategic enablement is a one-two-punch initiative to increase sales productivity and move the needle on key business objectives. The ultimate goal of strategic enablement is to drive change at scale by equipping your reps with the right framework, resources, and training to win over today’s buyers.
There are three ingredients in a successful strategic enablement program:
- Clearly defined goals. Collaborate with leadership to define the business outcomes you collectively want to achieve and the sales enablement metrics you’ll use to chart your progress.
- A dedicated framework. Outline specific processes for customer-facing teams that support your goals and provide the training, resources, and coaching required to maximize outcomes.
- GTM alignment. Make sure all go-to-market teams are in revenue enablement mode and break down the silos between each team’s processes and functions.
Proactive and strategic enablement sets the tone and pace of your workflows, turning strategy into consistent execution that can grow your business dramatically.
Common Myths About Strategic Enablement
Myths surrounding what strategic enablement is—and what, exactly, the enablement team does—can create barriers to unlocking your business’s full potential. Some of the most common misconceptions include:
Enablement is Just Training
Training is an important part of enablement, but enablement is far from just training. It’s an ongoing initiative that optimizes the information and processes reps use to close deals and drive revenue.
Enablement evolves with your company, providing reps the resources they need to do their job (think: templates, playbooks, software), as well as sales enablement training and ongoing support to do it well.
This might include in-app quizzes to help them with knowledge retention and AI-powered content recommendations to take their prospect interactions to the next level. Cue predictable and profitable business growth.
Enablement Teams Can Solve Anything
Most companies lack a clear definition of sales enablement or knowledge of what the enablement team is supposed to be doing. “We become this dumping ground for all of the problems in the business, and it’s assumed we’ll figure it out,” says Kautz.
On one hand, it’s an honor to be trusted with the company drama, but as Kautz points out, “there are a lot of days where you do a lot but accomplish nothing.” You end up feeling like a cog in the company machine, rather than the strategic advisor you were hired to be.
Enablement is a Want—Not a Need
Selling is more complex than ever before. Most buyers are already 70% through the buying journey before they talk to a sales rep. By the time they reach out, they’ve largely determined their needs and narrowed their options down to a shortlist.
To win their business, reps can’t just meet buyers where they are; they need to do so in a highly personalized way. These added layers of complexity make strategic enablement a must-have, not a nice-to-have. When done right, it has a measured impact on ramp time, win rates, and deal size.
Higher-ups not convinced? Prove strategic enablement isn’t a luxury by tying what you do every day to revenue. “For me, that was through the outreach email sequences I write,” says Kautz. “I went through a year of opportunities and figured out which ones were generated from the messaging I wrote and how much I had contributed to open pipeline versus closed won.”
Kautz was able to tie about $2 million to the emails she wrote. “Figure out what you do today and monetize it,” she says. “What does each improvement you make mean for the business in dollars?”
How to Run a Successful and Strategic Enablement Program
Ready to run your own strategic enablement program? Here’s how you can transform your current enablement function into a business growth accelerant.
1. Emphasize Goal Creation and Action Planning
The first step in building out a strategic enablement program is to define your business goals. Once you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish, you can map out an action plan.
Your strategic enablement blueprint should cover:
- How you’ll align your sales pipeline with your business goals
- What you want your reps to do (and how you want them to do it)
- The skills, collateral, and training reps will need to make it happen
- The key performance indicators you’ll monitor to measure your progress
The more specific your action plan and the more consistent your iterative process, the better for your company’s bottom line.
2. Use Project Management and Note-Taking Tools
Once you have your sales enablement strategy mapped out, use project management and note-taking tools like Trello, Monday, or Chorus to keep your initiatives on track.
And don’t be afraid to go old-school with your personal organization. Kautz, for example, is all about her notebook and pen. “I make a new to-do list every day and what didn’t get done yesterday gets transferred onto today’s list,” she says. “I know there are digital ways to organize, but writing things down really helps me prioritize.”
3. Use Innovative Onboarding Strategies to Improve Ramp Time
B2B sales reps forget 70% of their training within one week, and 87% forget it within a month. To increase knowledge retention, onboarding strategies need to be innovative and engaging.
The biggest game-changer for Kautz’s onboarding process? Team-led training. “With new hires, every day for six weeks I do a 30-minute session called feature-benefit,” she says. “Every single day we pick a different feature, and all we do for 30 minutes is talk about that feature, the benefit, and the value to the customer. Then we repeat them, and repeat them, and repeat them.”
As new reps start, Kautz has the reps in their fifth and sixth weeks of training teach the newer hires to make sure what they’ve learned really sticks. “The new rep is gaining knowledge and getting to know their co-workers, while the reps that have already been through it are gaining some leadership development,” she says.
Kautz also organizes bi-weekly lunch-and-learns. Reps decide what they want to be trained on next, then Kautz figures out who on the team excels at that thing and has them do the training. “I find our team gets more out of the training sessions when the information is coming from their peers,” she says.
4. Leverage Data to Show Off Your Enablement Success
The specific data points you can use to show success will vary depending on your company. “Figuring out which metrics actually push the needle for your team is the first step,” says Kautz. “The metrics that you can take to leadership and say, ‘Hey, I provide value.’”
Let’s say you want to measure the success of your outreach sequences. Some metrics you might keep tabs on include open rates, reply rates, pipeline generation, and closed won opportunities.
Once you’ve defined your metrics, consistent analysis is where it’s at—looking them over every week, then every month. Then compare week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter, Q2 of this year over Q2 of last year.
If your reply rates are up half a percent from last month but down one percent from last year, for example, you can go back through your messaging from the previous year to figure out what was working better and adjust course.
“You have to sit down and think it through,” says Kautz. “What is the next thing this impacts? And then where was the lift? And then monetize it out.”
5. Build and Maintain Relationships
One of Kautz’s top sales enablement best practices is regular team check-ins. “I’ll put time on their calendar—say, 15 or 30 minutes—and send them a Slack that lays out why,” she says. “I always let them know why I’m checking in so they don’t think they’re in trouble or did something wrong.”
For example, the agenda might be finding out how they feel about the latest sales training software or adding certain AI sales tools to the tech stack. Once you know their thoughts and challenges, you can put together a plan to fix them.
“I always leave it open, as in, ‘Tell me what’s going on with X,’ and they just talk to me,” says Kautz. “It goes back to relationship building, where then you don’t have to ask permission to ask questions. You can just say the hard things.”
6. Align Marketing, Product, Sales, and Customer Success Teams
The point of strategic enablement is to relate everything you do back to your company’s ultimate goals and objectives. Aligning enablement goals across all customer-facing teams makes it that much easier to determine what initiatives will drive the most meaningful results.
“I spend time with our business development reps and account managers,” says Kautz. “I spend time with product marketing and product enablement—and not all of these departments talk to each other.”
This helps enablement leaders root out and address problems that might otherwise go unnoticed, which can propel your program’s progress. Kautz calls it being the company lighthouse, “making sure things don’t go poorly because you see from a different purview than anybody else in the organization.”
7. Know How to Prioritize
Building out and executing a successful strategic enablement program requires being equally strategic with how you spend your time. Instead of instantly taking on every task or problem handed to you by leadership or other reps, “figure out how to not say ‘no,’ but say ‘not now,’” says Kautz.
Putting out little fires every day can be a major distraction from the tasks that actually move the needle for your company. If something’s important but not urgent, add it to your to-do list with the understanding that it will get done—just not on their timetable.
“I also started time-blocking this year,” says Kautz. Tuesday and Friday afternoons, for example, she has three-hour blocks on her calendar to focus on content. ”People know that if they absolutely need that time, they can ask to book over it,” she says. ”But you can’t just book over it without my permission.”
Ultimately, says Kautz, it’s about finding a system that helps you protect your time.
8. Try AI Enablement Software
For most companies, the market is constantly changing, with new competitors popping up at every turn. Keeping pace usually involves rapid-fire tweaks and modifications to sales pipeline stages, strategies, and processes. With this rapid pace, reps are usually in a constant state of overwhelm.
This is where an AI-powered sales enablement platform like Spekit can be a game-changer. Spekit AI is like an ever-present, all-knowing teammate ready to help reps with product questions, objection-handling tips, competitive positioning, and even recommendations on the sales collateral they need to win deals in critical moments.
You can also use Spekit’s generative AI to create playbooks, scripts, and more with a single prompt. Develop customized training materials in seconds, then deliver that training to your reps in easy-to-retain, bite-sized amounts.
What Are Your Top Strategic Enablement Tips?
Once you’ve got the above framework on lock, that’s only the beginning. A huge part of successful strategic enablement is consistently seeking out opportunities to level up your processes, like Kautz and her team-training breakthrough.
For those of you further into your strategic enablement journey, any recent breakthroughs of your own to share? Let us know which moves turned out to be the biggest game-changers for your business.
Sales enablement software is a must for any company looking to run a strategic enablement program. With Spekit AI at the helm, your sales processes and playbooks go from static to interactive, adaptable, and reinforceable right where reps live and sell—whether that’s Salesforce, Gong, Gmail, and more.
Reps can instantly surface the exact content they need, exactly when they need it, enhancing the quality of every buyer interaction and ensuring alignment with your business goals.
You can also measure and optimize your strategic enablement program using Spekit Analytics, send in-app alerts to guide reps through strategy tweaks, and follow up with ongoing training and coaching to reinforce learning.
