How do you scale sales enablement across 1,300+ sellers, with a deeply technical product, in a company that adds 100 new customer-facing roles a month, all without adding headcount to your enablement team?

I’m John Shea, I lead Global Sales Enablement at Databricks, and that question is pretty much my entire day job. When I first joined in 2021, Databricks was already in high-growth mode. Fast forward to today, and we’ve added five acquisitions, dozens of product launches, and a ton of complexity.

We’re building as we go, and enablement is tasked with making sure every seller is in the know.

This article walks through how we do that – from the channels we use, to the metrics we (try to) measure, to the frameworks that help us keep pace.

Let’s dive in.

Enablement isn’t content. It’s context.

One of my biggest challenges internally has been getting people to understand that content isn’t enablement. Just because you created a 100-page deck with size 10 font doesn’t mean it’s ready for a seller.

Great enablement is great context.

I like to explain it using a data pipeline analogy. Databricks is a technical company, so this usually lands well. Think of content like raw data – it’s unusable in its raw form. You need to extract it, transform it, and load it (ETL) before it becomes useful.

That’s what my team does. We extract content from subject matter experts, transform it into something useful for the field, and load it into the right channel. We're the ETL engine for enablement.

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Our 7 channels of enablement

We use seven enablement channels at Databricks. Five are live, and two are self-paced.

Live channels:

  • Bricklayers (sales manager enablement)
  • Sales all-hands
  • Invest calls (our monthly enablement meetings)
  • AMAs (Ask Me Anything sessions)
  • Instructor-led training

Self-paced channels:

  • BrickBytes (our microlearning platform)
  • Accreditations (longer e-learning modules)

Everything we create ends up flowing through these channels. From onboarding to product launches to partner enablement, this is our operating system.

Let me walk you through the ones that have made the biggest impact.