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Sales Enablement Charter – The Only Guide You Need

What is a sales enablement charter?

A Sales Enablement Charter includes your sales enablement mission statement and provides a summary to the business about what the Enablement team does, who they support, and how they will measure results.

Your Charter is your team’s sales enablement mission statement.

It provides guidelines for your sales enablement efforts and shapes your overall sales enablement strategy, how you structure your organization, and everything else necessary for your success.

Note: We have included a downloadable sales enablement charter template at the bottom of this article.

FYI: If you are unclear about Enablement, read our Ultimate Guide.

Why is a Sales Enablement Charter important?

When experienced people discuss Enablement best practices, a Sales Enablement Charter is high on the list.

For many Sales Enablement Managers, building a formal sales enablement charter, which helps define the role of sales enablement within your business, is the first step they take upon joining a company.

See our 30 60 90 day plan for new enablement managers and see we have it as a deliverable for month two; it is that important.

Your first 90 days as a new Sales Enablement Manager


The Charter is an agreement between the Enablement team and the go-to-market team (i.e., sales reps, sales leaders, marketing, customer success, and so on).

This document defines what services sellers can expect from the Enablement team, the data, the sales enablement platforms, and the services provided.

This shared understanding leads to better collaboration, more explicit expectations, and a smoother-running Enablement machine.

And ultimately, a successful program will lead to higher sales productivity and a measurable, positive impact on your business.

What do you include in your charter?

The specifics of an excellent Enablement charter can vary from business to business, but the following key components must be present.

Your Sales Enablement Mission Statement

Why has your business invested in Sales Enablement?

Your Sales Enablement mission statement should answer this simple question.

What services are supported?

What are the core services of your sales enablement initiatives? Are you:

  • Collaborating with sales operations to streamline sales processes
  • Are you delivering continuous learning to the customer-facing organization on critical core competencies, including sales skills, your value proposition, your company’s products, etc.?
  • Are you delivering coaching services?
  • Are they providing content management, creating relevant content, and curating the right content from around the organization?
  • Are you developing and managing tools?
  • Are you facilitating sales and marketing alignment through regular-scheduled meetings?
  • Are you partnering with HR and customer-facing managers and leaders to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in respected in your business?

There is no one correct answer to the services you are providing.

Enablement’s role is to help the customer-facing organization overcome challenges, amplify what they are good at, and reduce risk where they cannot altogether remove it. The mix of services you provide should align with your priorities in these areas.

Remember that your buyer is the ultimate customer of your services.

And recognize that the buyer’s journey is different from your sales cycle.

If you focus exclusively on making the lives of your sales and marketing team easier without considering the downstream impact on the buyers, you are failing. The same holds if you create terrific buyer experiences while making the lives of your employees miserable.

You must find the balance.

Who is supported?

The answer may be as simple as your sales team if you are running a traditional Sales Enablement program.

Are you looking to support any or all of the following roles?

  • The entire sales organization and all sales professionals (account executives, sales development reps)?
  • Are sales managers a specifically supported group?
  • Partners?
  • Presales Engineers
  • Marketing
  • And so forth.

Are you including all customer-facing roles and looking to provide a broader approach (revenue enablement)?

Consider these customer-facing roles:

  • Customer Support/Service
  • Customer Success
  • and so forth

And, as if that’s not enough, as you evolve your Enablement program across the maturity model from Absent through Transformational, you will find yourself collaborating across the front and back of the business, and you may both be a consumer of and supporter of, services from teams such as:

  • Product
  • Product Marketing
  • Finance
  • Engineering
  • and so forth

See our Enablement Maturity Model if you want to understand how Enablement evolves during its time in a business.

There is a lot to consider, and you cannot afford to walk before you run.

However, you must understand what you can do today and understand where you are going.

Who is paying for Enablement? Who owns the budget?

Your sales enablement charter needs to call this out.

Ultimately, you want to control your budget, but the reality is that most Enablement teams do not manage their budgets today. Who is funding your efforts?

  • Sales?
  • Operations?
  • Marketing?
  • Product Management?
  • HR or L&D?
How will you measure the impact of Enablement?

How will you measure success?

You must be thoughtful and use a mix of lagging and leading indicators to guide how well your Enablement organization meets its business goals.

I would recommend reviewing our guide to business metrics.

In the meantime, here are a few key Enablement metrics of each type for you to consider:

Leading Indicators

These are indicators that are visible immediately. Consider metrics like these:

  • Percentage of individuals attending a training session.
  • Time to complete onboarding of new hires.
  • Percentage of content sellers are accessing.
  • Hours customer-facing teammates are spending directly with customers.

These metrics are a tiny percentage of the leading indicators you can consider. You can see that you directly influence these outcomes, but they are not metrics about which an executive will be concerned.

Lagging Indicators

These indicators occur as an effect, or side-effect, of your efforts and those of others in your organization. However, these are often the ones about which executives and key leaders most care. Consider:

  • Revenue from new business
  • Win rates
  • Churn rate
  • Average discount given
  • Deal velocity

You can see that you do not directly influence these metrics, but your actions should always relate to and influence lagging metrics.

How often should you update the sales enablement charter?

Your sales enablement charter must be a living document that evolves as the needs of your business change. Are you seeing meaningful improvement in one area but struggling to deliver results elsewhere?

You may need more training and onboarding amidst a hiring spree.

You may need much more content developed if your go-to-market strategy is changing.

Review the sales enablement charter with critical stakeholders, at least quarterly, and ensure it aligns with the business needs.

Remember, the Charter is a critical component for your business as you build the foundations of an excellent Sales Enablement function — have you created one yet?

Sales Enablement Charter Template

Reminder: Download your sales enablement charter template.

Your Sales Enablement Charter includes your Sales Enablement Mission Statement and provides a summary of how you will operate

Sales Enablement Charter Review

Do you already have a charter?

Are you worried it contains gaps?  Misses important information?  

Simply upload your charter to Trust Enablement.  Spend $150, and we will review your charter and provide recommendations, all within three business days.

Price: $ 150.00
Click or drag a file to this area to upload.
What are People Saying?

Wish I had done it sooner — would have saved me a few headaches!

Fast, thorough, these guys really improved my charter.

This was the best money I’ve spent with a vendor ever.

Time needed: 30 days.

Summary: What information do I put into the sales enablement charter?

  1. What is your mission statement?

    Why has your business invested in Sales Enablement?

  2. What services are supported?

    Are you providing training? Coaching? Content creation? Other services?

  3. Who is being supported?

    Are you supporting sales? Customer success? Others?

  4. Where does the budget come from?

    Do you have your own budget or does it come from another team?

  5. What metrics will be used to measure impact?

    How will you confirm you are on track and how will you report updates?

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