4 Essential Steps to Kickstart Sales Enablement in Your SMB

So congratulations, you and your business are about to join the weird and wonderful world of Sales Enablement (let's go!!). It's fantastic that your SMB or Startup is committed to the mission of improving the sales productivity and effectiveness of your Sales team.

But as an early advocate of sales excellence in your business, it can be a pretty daunting and lonely place. You've been hired to bring about structure and process where it may have never existed. So... I'm sure you're thinking "Where do I start?", "Who do I speak to?" and "How do I make a plan?".

Here are 4 steps that I recommend to any Sales Enablement professional that has just started their role at a SMB or Startup.

1. Take time to listen, look and understand

If you're in this role, the chances are you have been brought in to fix something and so there's work to be done. But you must resist the urge to jump straight in! It may sound paradoxical and act against your desire to hit the ground running, but effective enablement starts with effective discovery.

In your first few weeks, take time to understand the structure of your sales organisation and how your business sells; keep your eyes and ears open.

Take an opportunity to not only introduce yourself to the whole sales team and sales management - yes they are likely to have interviewed you, but now you have to interview them and observe them.

In practice, you should be looking to:

1. Evaluate Your New Hire Onboarding: Even though there may be no formal new hire onboarding process, there will have been some form of onboarding for you. Ask yourself - What did you find useful? What added little value? What's useful for a Seller? What's missing? Can this scale as you hire more and more reps? Keep notes and be critical.

2. Get to know the Sales Reps: Yes, they may know you're from your interview process or you may have been in the trenches with them, but now your job is to make them better at their jobs - and that's a different ball game. Introduce yourself and get to know the reps on a personal level (who are your extroverts, who are the clowns, who has influence). Remember people buy from people, and in Enablement you are selling ideas - they will need to want to hear what you're saying, and breaking the ice will help that process.

3. Understand how your Salespeople sell: By now you've met them and hopefully they like you. Take that goodwill, and ask to shadow a small sample of reps on their customer interactions.

   • Read their prospecting emails

   • Join their prospecting and qualification calls

   • Investigate the AE/BDR relationship and handover (if the business has a BDR team)

   • Be a silent attendee on demos

   • Understand the contracting and negotiation process (what's sent to a customer, what context is given around supporting them understand the numbers, is a justification or ROI given)

4. Create a Partnership with your Sales Director(s): You will need their buy-in and support in everything you do so:

   • Schedule a 1: 1 to understand their biggest challenges. Yes, a lot of this would have been shared in the interview process but look to get more specific.

   • What do they want to prioritise and what metrics really matter to them (Ramp time of New Reps, Win Rates, Pipeline Generation, Lead Conversion, etc.)

   • Finally, articulate how you like to work and your early observations of their Sales organisation. You don't have a formal plan but giving the Sales Directors feedback will increase your credibility and demonstrate that you've done your due diligence before you build a plan.

2. Get your hands on data

In my time, I've met many Sales Enablement professionals who actively choose to skip this step - don't make that mistake.

Sales is a performance-based business. Your Sales team has targets, and they are evaluated against them. As an Enablement partner, you are no different. You must show that you have made a tangible impact on target attainment/performance to justify all the ROI in your salary, the sales enablement costs that you'll be asking for and the time commitment that you are asking of reps.

So don't be intimidated but before you create your enablement plan, you must get your hands on the data that you're looking to impact.

You don't need to go too crazy here but have a good understanding of, things like:

• Pipeline Generation per AE

• Bookings per AE

• Deal Win Rates

• Lead Conversion Rate

• Average Sales Cycle Length

• Where most deals are lost (i.e. what stage in the sales cycle)

If your business has a Sales Operations Manager or Sales Strategy Manager, meet them and look to get this info from them on a regular basis., Take note of what the numbers are before you start your enablement so you have a quantitative measure of your impact.

Yes, yes, enablement will never have a 100% impact on these data points but they are often correlated and if you want a North Star to understand where you should focus your time then the priorities of the Sales Director(s) and the data are often a great place to start.

3. Align on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

I won't write too much here but get a feel from your Sales org's wins and even the data on your losses, who is and is not the target audience of your business.

This is important as to create a truly buyer centric sales journey, you need to know who your likely buyers are!

So once you have agreed upon the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with your Marketing team and Sales Director, look into how they buy and what matters to them.

Your company's ICP should dictate what your reps need to know and how they should sell.

4. Have a vision, but remember that Rome wasn't built in a day

Ok by now, you should have gathered a lot of information that will help you to build your enablement plan.

Let's check it off, you should have:

• Early thoughts on how to improve the new hire onboarding process

• A feel for the make-up of your sales team (i.e. who your subject matter experts/champions could be)

• Understood how your sellers prospect, demo and negotiate with clients

• A list of business priorities from your Sales Directors and backed that up with a look at the data indicators

• Confirmed the Ideal Customer Profile and understood who your sellers should be targeting

Armed with all that knowledge, thoughts will be flying around your head on what you can improve. Note them all down, in a small GSheet or Excel and in 4 columns alongside your idea.

1. Workload (i.e. can this be achieved in 3 months or 6 months or a year)

2. Supporting Team (i.e. who else in the organisation do you need to make this happen)

3. Budget (i.e. do you need any software or extra hires to make it happen)

4. Impact (i.e. how will this change influence your sales teams ability to hit target)

Across these 4 categories, rank your ideas to determine what is the most appropriate for you to address, and remember that Rome wasn't built in a day.

So that's the 4 key steps. Enjoy the journey, in Sales Enablement there's never a dull moment!

Good luck!

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