Enablement charters as a stakeholder management and ROI demonstration tool

Tired of a seemingly unending list of to-dos for your stakeholders? 

Feeling like your programs aren’t getting the credit they deserve? 

Unsure of how to say “no” to requests, or make “strategic yes” agreements? 

Then boy howdy, let’s talk about charters, and how they impact your team’s PR strategy. 🤩

You may be asking yourself: “What the heck does a PR strategy have to do with being able to negotiate workload?!” 

One of my all time favorite business tenets is as follows; “perception is reality.” 

If you and your team are perceived as being a vending machine, you will indeed be treated as, spoken about, and referred to as a vending machine.

Engaging with your team is a learned skill and you are constantly providing feedback (aka teaching) your peers how to do that. 

This is particularly important as a revenue partner team – at the end of the day, we’re influencing revenue, but not directly generating it. 

There’s no CRM report that says “here’s the pipeline you sourced and the revenue you closed this year,” so the way your team’s contributions are framed and tracked takes intention.

I’ve had some great leaders over the years teach me the value of providing clear, consistent direction around not only how to engage with our team, but how to answer the question “what would you say you do here?” 

The truth is, you can’t prove your team's value if you don’t know what you’re striving for.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

What would you say you do here?

If put on the spot, could you answer that question with something snappy, clear and direct? 

If not, a charter may help you do that.

Step one in defining a charter is having a good sense of what is, and is not in scope for your team. 

Now, in my experience, the best way to do this is through a ½ day workshop of sorts where the team gets together and discusses your perceptions of your team, the way your customers interact with you, listing what’s in and out of scope, crafting a mission statement, and then aligning on key skills.  

It doesn't have to take a week or an entire offsite, but it should be informed and vetted by your team, not created in a silo

Once you’ve got that sorted, and have gotten buy in from the team and your execs, you should have a very clear sense of:

• What the business needs
• How you and your team support those needs
• Clarity on projects you take on that support those business outcomes, and examples of things that don’t quite support those outcomes, and therefore should be deferred or delegated

However, as we all know, documenting is only part of the battle. The real fruit you’ll harvest from this type of work is your ability to communicate that charter, clearly and consistently to the field. 

Consider how you might weave this talk track into your:

• New hire onboarding
• Your stakeholder meetings
• Your program launches
• Your program closes/reports
• Your quarterly reporting
• Your scoping and intake calls
• Etc.

Again, if perception is reality, it’s crucial that people perceive and believe your team as having a clear corral around what you do and don’t do. You can influence this through documentation, but mostly by talking about it and see you walking the walk. 

Think you’re doing that already? Great! Here’s how you’ll know for sure:

1. You’ll start to see the number of out of scope requests decrease. “Oh we wouldn’t ask them for that, that’s not their bag, go to ______ team instead.” 
2. You’ll hear people using your shared language. 
3. Your team will have internalized the charter so that when new initiatives are announced at all hands, or board meetings, or company reports they’ll say “Hey, this seems like it’s in our purview, let’s talk about how we make space for that.”

The importance of scoping and intake 

Now that you’ve got your charter sorted, it’s time to support your documentation with repeatable processes in your operating rhythm. Step one is developing a clean intake process.

Quick check-in question for you, dear reader – metaphorically, raise your hand if you’ve found yourself saying yes to a project, only to find out that the requester and you had very different expectations about what “good” looks like, and you’re now drowning under a pile of scope creep and conflicting expectations? ✋🫣

If this has ever happened to you or “a close friend. Definitely not me. You just don’t know them; they go to a different school,” chances are you or your friend didn’t complete an intake call prior to agreeing to said project. 😵‍💫

Consider the intake process a manufactured speed bump, a checkpoint in the whirlwind of your day-to-day, a friendly “you sure ‘bout that?” buddy to help you assess projects and requests before taking them on.

Not to mention, a clear request process should also net you a clear way to track your requests over the year. You'll have a list of how many requests came in, from which teams, how many you took on or said no to in favor of others, etc.

Look at you, you’re already writing next quarter’s QBR and your end of year review without even knowing it! 🤓

The key to a great intake process is that it’s easy for your requesters to follow – a basic process might look like:

• A link to a request form that’s easily findable (perhaps in your team’s “About us” page, in your email signature, in your communications – wherever your stakeholders live, it should be easy to find)
• That link should include a form of some kind that says “hey, I’d like to partner with enablement on something”
• Within that form, have your requester fill in some basic questions like:
  • What’s the request
  • Who’s it for (audience)
  • Who’s asking for it (stakeholder)
  • Who’s going to check the success of this (exec buy in)
  • Why do you want it (urgency)
  • What business initiative does it map to (priority)
  • And a free form box for them to share any additional context, links, or resources

After that form is filled out, ideally you’ve got some kind of automation to alert you (or another key member of your team who owns the intake process) to schedule a Scoping Call (ideally within a week of it being requested, pending team availability).

Think of your scoping call like sales discovery, but for enablement – and your customer/prospect is your internal stakeholder or customer.

Your goal is to vet this project and identify a clear answer to questions like: “should we take this on? Does it comply with the team charter? Will completing this project bring us closer to our overall company goals of ________?”

If you haven’t run one of these before, here’s a sample agenda

• Subject of the meeting invite:  [name of requester] Scoping Call - [name of request]
• Length of meeting: 30 minutes
• Body of invite: 

These calls should help you:

1. Better understand any one request before saying yes or no 
2. Give you a big picture of the various requests coming in across the org so that when you inevitably have to negotiate with a stakeholder on timing/priority, you’ve got the full picture to work with 
3. Help map your team’s bandwidth and find trends in upticks/down time

Another key benefit of this call, or manufactured speed bump if you will, is that it gives you time to be intentional about your response, and provides you a buffer before sayings yes or no, ex: “I’d like to run this by [my leader] before I get back to you, I have a 1:1 with them tomorrow is it ok if I get you an update then?"

You now have data points to bring to your leader, your executive, your mentor (maybe all 3?!) to say “hey, I got this request, I’m inclined to _______. What do you think?”

When to say “no”

No:

Say you’ve vetted the request, and you can’t confidently say “yep, this clearly moves us towards our business goals and is within my team’s remit”. It’s time to say no.

You might use the prompt with the requester:

If saying “no” gives you pause for reasons other than "saying no is uncomfortable", consider the opportunity cost of agreeing to something outside of your remit, or without clear success metrics. If you say yes to this project now, what might it preclude you from saying yes to in the future?

Do you need to bank some team bandwidth in preparation for an upcoming mega-project (new product launch, SFDC migration, new team, etc.)?

Maybe:

Or, if it is high priority and you need to negotiate, try something like this, and share it with your leader:

Strategic Yes:

Now sometimes… there comes a time when a request may not be in your remit, but it’s still worth doing. We call those “strategic yeses." 

They’re strategic, because they bring you and your team closer to some larger goal, and you’re willing to make a one-time concession to do so.

They’re positioned as a gift to the requester as:

Here’s an example:

• Requester outside of remit asks for an in-person training session facilitated by your team
• Your team doesn’t typically do these, and usually defers to VILT (virtual instructor-led) but…
  • The requester is within a team you’ve been trying to build a partnership with for a while
  • The requester has clout within the org and if it goes well, should up your team’s brand
  • Your team will be spread a bit thin during the build for this process but can reuse previously made content to expedite delivery

Worth doing? Yes! The pros outweigh the cons and you choose to say yes.

Identifying your success metrics

We ask our sellers to identify success metrics with customers, why not do the same in enablement? 

Part of the intake process is asking the requester “how will we know we’ve done the thing you asked for? What does good look like?” 

This may be one of the most important questions to ask because, without it, you’re flying blind. 

Actually, possibly worse than flying blind because you’re flying one plane with two different maps and directions so to speak. 😱✈️

Examples of feedback loops might be things like:

• We’ll know the sellers understand PRODUCT VALUE PROPOSITION because we’ll hear them using it on calls (recordings), see it pop up in opportunities (SFDC reporting), see an uptick in close rate (better qualification) and hear from them that they’re more confident (pulse surveys).

Consider the types of feedback loops you’re going to use. Are you tracking baseline things like “was it completed or not,” or looking to demonstrate business outcomes?

Consider referencing tools like the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model to take a holistic view of your program’s impact. 

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Once you’ve decided on what you want to measure, make sure you’ve aligned on:

• Who will run the report, do you need to ask for help?
• Who will compile the report? Do you/they have time?
• Who will read it?
  •  Do you have a standard format in which to present these? Random status update emails will go into the ether. Do you have a meeting set to review the info? Or a video? Or something else in your operating rhythm?
• Do you know what you’re asking for when you report on this? Is it more resources, confirmation from them that you’re on the right track, praise for the team, escalating an issue, or something else? Remember, good communication is a two way street. 
  • Your stakeholders do want a business update, but they probably don’t want a book report
  • A report is helpful, and should have a next step/action item as a follow-up.

Have you sorted metrics sorted? Great!

Now be sure to report on them and hold yourself accountable. Yes, even reporting when you’ve missed the mark (including your plan to fix it) is valuable.

Tying out:

Building your team’s brand, and solidifying the way in which stakeholders interact with you and view your team takes time, intention, and decisive leadership. Establishing your team as a strategic revenue partner that delivers on key results requires more than just delivering programs and “letting your work speak for itself.”

Because unfortunately, your work will not speak. 

Positioning your team as a key partner (not a vending machine ) demands a well-defined charter, clear communication, and measurable outcomes and setting up a mechanism to do that consistently through charters, intakes and communication allows you to. 

• Define your team's remit and consistently communicate
• Develop a tight scoping and intake process
• Align your efforts with key business initiatives
• Identify and track  meaningful success metrics
• Build stronger partnerships across the organization

Remember, perception is reality.

When you consistently demonstrate your team's strategic alignment with business goals, make intentional decisions about resource allocation, and showcase tangible results, you transform the narrative around enablement from a "nice-to-have" cost center, to an indispensable revenue driver.

Want to chat more? Hit me up on LinkedIn or shoot me an email! 

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