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Our checklist for Building Enablement from Scratch – Boston Chapter SES

The Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society met on May 4th (Star Wars Day) to collaborate and share our insights and, from this, a checklist for building enablement from scratch. This meeting was a follow-up from the April meeting that kicked off the topic.

Why do you want to read this article?

If you are building a new enablement program or simply looking to uplevel your existing program, you keep reading.

As we continued our exploration, we sought to brainstorm around the following questions:

  • What should be your priorities when you get started?
  • Who are the stakeholders you should focus on engaging?
  • What are the outcomes you should concentrate on driving?

While you can read the raw notes, we wanted to take a moment to convert the chapter’s Insights into a checklist for building Enablement from scratch.

As you review, let us know what you would add to this.

The Checklist for Building Enablement from Scratch

  • Identify your stakeholders (e.g., boss, sales leaders, salespeople, etc.). *
  • Take a listening tour to perform a gap analysis to identify the needs of these stakeholders.
    • Ensure you also gain an understanding of how people would want to measure successfully closing these gaps. **
  • Define your Enablement charter to clarify what gaps you will fill, what services you will provide to close these gaps, and how you will measure progress towards these goals. **
  • Ensure you have buy-in on your charter and your overall vision from the Executive team.

* Who are the stakeholders you should focus on engaging?

We noted the importance of identifying your stakeholders above. While your specific stakeholders will vary based upon the problems you are solving, here are some of the most common stakeholders you should consider.

  • Sales Leaders, Managers, and Reps.
    • You should consider all sales roles (e.g., inside sales, outside sales, partners).
  • Revenue/Sales Operations
  • Presales, Sales Engineers, Solution Consultants
  • Customer Success Leaders and Managers.
  • HR
  • Marketing
  • Product Management
  • Finance

** What are the outcomes you should concentrate on driving?

 Review this extensive blog article discussing how do you measure Sales Enablement.

In addition, some of the most common metrics teams use:

  • Decrease ramp time (first define what ramp means, i.e., time to first close, advancing a deal to a significant sales stage, or % of quota as an indicator of readiness)
  • Adoption and inclusion in enablement services as leading indicators (i.e., content, lesson completion, watching calls, etc.)
  • Employee tenure and reasons for their departures

-The Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society

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