Sales enablement leaders are elevating their perspective to form a united whole to ensure everyone on the enablement team works together to execute the sales strategy.
When individual contributors are involved, sometimes it’s challenging to align with people who fall into the direct reporting line. What if others don’t report to the management structure of the sales enablement leader? How do they ensure the immediate and extended teams are both cohesive?
What does cohesion look like?
- Everyone seeks out broader perspectives and encourages each other to share their point of view.
- There’s an awareness that friction can happen and a willingness to explore the source.
- The team understands the projects, programs, and services they’re working toward.
- Everyone aligns in terms of concepts, terminology, and processes.
Without these perspectives in place by all members of these teams, it’s hard to create a shared understanding and drive unified action.
Pay Attention to the “First Team” and the “Network Team”
Many companies are organized in silos with many chiefs. To cope with this and be more cohesive, we’ve created a “first team” so that salespeople can focus on their shared purpose in a smaller group before they go into a more comprehensive organization.
To do that, savvy sales enablement leaders can’t just focus on the group of people immediately around them or report to them. Instead, they build a network of capabilities and skills across the organization to create maximum value for salespeople and other customer-facing employees.
To achieve cohesion, sales and marketing leaders can focus on the three V’s:
- Velocity at which you’re producing
- Volume of workflow
- Value creation
It’s imperative to start with a focus on value. What’s the value of what you’re doing? Enablement leaders and teams must be consistent about managing inputs and feedback from other groups and how you’re engaging in creating for others. As knowledge workers, a way to think about it is converting the information from someone else or creating something new. Each creates value, especially when groups of people are involved.
Teams are groups of people pursuing a unified goal and outcome. In the commercial ecosystem, that means seeking something more significant than anyone. Sales enablement leaders can orchestrate the people, process, information, and technology to create impact and clarify the value they’re providing. Regarding the broader network team, enablement leaders can make people happy while driving impact and having tough conversations. Enablement leaders also need to think about the type of macaroni their customers want to consume.
What about the network team? As a sales leader, you must influence and partner with people with different priorities and perspectives. That means engaging with them, no matter who they report to. When you do that, it’s essential to focus on getting people what they need to be successful by focusing on objectives and results.
As enablement teams engage up, down, and across the organization, they will learn to build productive and connected relationships from groups like product, marketing, and human resources. How do the actions of the team link with the overall outcomes and results? In other words, how does the team’s value fit into the overall value created within the company? It’s likely constantly evolving, so people must lean into innovation and creativity without being overwhelmed by complexity.
What it Means to Sales and Marketing Leaders
Enablement leaders connect high-level thinking with what’s happening on the ground in the tactical view. They look at the big-picture vision of strategy because it’s essential. However, they also understand how to complement this with more specific questions about the first and network team’s value and cadence.
Elevating a team and its value is essential for today’s enablement leaders, who must drive the company mission and explore the gaps and challenges that hinder increasing cohesion with various groups. A critical focus is on the first team and network team engagement and effectiveness between people.
