In sales enablement, and training and development more broadly, it’s challenging to win the resources and investment you.

It can feel like an uphill battle.

The problem is that enablement is a historically under-resourced team, for a few different reasons:

  1. It's hard to show ROI
  2. Impact is often dispersed across multiple people and multiple teams
  3. It's hard to isolate variables (like sales training, or sales tools) and say they’re responsible for sales’ success
  4. We're often considered a support or administrative resource

But there are ways to structure your enablement team itself, from the very beginning, that make winning investment easy.

In this article, we’ll show you how.

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How do you structure a sales enablement team?

How should you structure your enablement team?

Here’s an answer you probably hadn’t considered: structure it to mimic a product dev team.

Huh?

That’s right.

The aim is to build your sales enablement organization in a way that:

  • Maximizes your impact
  • Makes it easy to prove that impact and ROI
  • In turn, makes getting investment easy

Modelling your team after product dev makes all this possible. Shortly, we’ll get into why.

Here’s what we’ll discuss:

  • Forming your enablement team
  • Modelling after product development best practices for impact and prove ROI

The solution: Modelling after product teams?

There are two key questions:

  • How do we develop our teams in ways that support achieving measurable business impact?
  • How do we report our impact back to the business?

The goal is to measure, objectively and quantifiably, the impact of all our enablement programs. It’s to make sure our teams and initiatives grow and improve in ways we can measure.

Ideally, we’ll be able to say, “By speeding up 10%, we saved you 90% in some key metric over the last three months”.

To do that? We have to develop solutions that both train and enable salespeople in ways that will drive ROI for your business. And we want to set our enablement team up in a way that makes it easy to deliver things that make that happen.

So why product management?

Before I worked in enablement, I spent some time as a product manager.

I learned a ton. Mostly, that there are best practices. Repeatable processes that help any team develop and deliver products with real ROI to the customers you serve.

Serving your sales reps as an enabler is no different. They’re your internal customers. And the enablement materials and training sessions you produce for them are the products and services you provide.

When you mimic a product team’s structure with your sales enablement team, you’ll start providing real ROI for your business. From there, it’s that much easier to get investment, and grow and develop the programs you know have impact.

The structure of a product team

There are four or five different roles that make up every product team. As a collective, they aim to answer the question: What products do customers want to buy?

Let’s start with the product manager:

1) Product Manager

The product manager is the person who sets the vision and strategy, plans and delivers releases, and curates new ideas. They build product and sprint backlogs of tweaks for existing products, and ideas for the development of brand-new products.

2) Development (software and UX)

The product manager typically works hand-in-hand with both software developers and UX designers. These are the builders who act out the product manager’s vision. They’re the people who create the products.

3) Technical product manager

You might also have a Technical Product Manager or a Technical Programs Manager who sits between the product manager and the developers. They’ll help ensure both sides are aligned.

(This is actually, in a lot of ways, where I see leadership sitting in our organizations.)

4) Product Analytics

Product analytics is the data role. This person analyzes sales’ and product’s success. They look at adoption rates, and other metrics, to link your inputs to data-derived outcomes.

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Example: If someone adopts a Square POS, it’s easy for us to link their amount of credit card processing to the POS systems, and figure out their product margins. We can then say how much they can expect to make based on a new product launch.

5) Product Marketing

The last group is product marketing. You’ve probably worked with them. They develop personas, craft positioning and messaging, and do competitive intelligence work.

How to apply this to enablement teams

There are resources out there that vouch for large enablement teams. They propose structures with multiple highly paid enablement leaders.

In reality, enablement teams are often small and under-resourced. It’s often not possible to build a team that fills all the following sales enablement roles:

  • Chief enablement officer
  • VP of sales enablement
  • Director of sales enablement
  • Sales enablement manager
  • Program manager
  • Content specialist
  • Sales coach
  • Instructional designer
  • Sales enablement coordinator

Now, these roles do make sense. They’re modelled after all the things enablers have to do. 

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For example, a content specialist creates content that helps their sales reps close deals. They’ll also create customer-facing content that moves people through the sales funnel.

A program manager manages and oversees the entire enablement program. Instructional designers create learning resources specific to the org’s industry, products and services, and competitive space.

But not all these roles are necessary. And if the goal is to win more resources for your sales enablement efforts, and prove ROI, there’s a way to do it.

We can adapt the lean product team structure we described above for enablement. This gives us a lean but effective team of as few as four or five people. And it’s designed to make proving ROI a breeze.

For the enablement team, you'll see very little has changed, except for some titles (that should look very familiar).

1) Enablement Program Manager

First off, build your team around an enablement program manager. (This shadows the position a product manager holds in a product team.)

Do this, and your most important programs will have a specific manager. Someone who sets the vision and the sales enablement strategy. They’ll create new ideas, and plan and deliver releases.

Here’s how your program manager should think:

They should think of each learning integration they're developing as a product. Something they have to sell to the sales team. The sales team has to adopt it, buy it, and then expand it so we can prove ROI.

Your program manager will work with people analytics to identify gaps in performance. I'm sure you have KPI measurements you look at and wonder:

  • What impact can I have on these KPIs?
  • Is there a learning intervention I can prove actually has impact?

When you develop the analytical frameworks, and work with your instructional designers to develop solutions, you're building a whole case. Then, you're able to document and prove, “If we are at X, here's our bet, we’ll get to Y, and it'll take us six months to get there”.

Now you can measure the impact and show it directly to your leadership teams.

2) Learning experience and instructional design (LXD and ID)

Instructional design’s goal is to work with program managers to figure out what resources your reps need to get better, and to make sure you understand the problems you’re trying to solve. 

Here are some of their responsibilities:

  • Develop training and educational materials
  • Do user research
  • Run usability testing on content
  • Own the learning management system
  • Report on program adoption rates and other metrics to help prove ROI

They’ll also work with field enablement (who mirror the product marketing function) to figure out personas you can use to better develop those learning materials.

3) People Analytics

Just as the product analytics person is the product team’s data cruncher, your people analytics person is yours.

Think about this: If you could tell me your onboarding programs saved your business $1.6 million by shortening Time to Ramp by two weeks over the last year, would that help you get investment? I think so.

Your people analytics lead helps you do that. They help you dive into the data and help you understand the levers you can pull to make your business the most money.

Here are some of their responsibilities:

  • Measure enablement content adoption
  • Link enablement materials back to outcomes
  • Create strategies for improvement with the operations team and program manager
  • Monitor content adoption
  • Alert stakeholders to concerning data trends

They’ll also report outcomes and identify gaps in performance.

That might mean a Tableau dashboard for everything you're doing, or a way to link ROI to the stuff you're creating.

4) Field Enablement

Field enablement mirrors the product team’s product marketing function.

This person:

  • Helps develop strong pitch decks
  • Builds testimonial loops with product marketing managers
  • Creates customer-facing content
  • Works with people analytics to optimize content in a data-driven way
  • Develops personas, crafts positioning and messaging, and does competitive research

Field Enablement might own your knowledge catalog, too. The field enablement manager will make sure your knowledge pieces are:

  • Verified
  • Current
  • Reviewed periodically

Remember how a product team collaborates to get ready for launch? Your enablement team can do the same thing. The difference? They’ll create, launch, and “sell” your enablement “products” to reps. This helps you prove ROI for the business.

They’ll also usually own a content management system (CMS). This will show them what content salespeople are using. It will also show them the content that actually moves people through the funnel faster. Again, this builds a stronger case for ROI.

Who should sales enablement teams report to?

By now, we understand how to structure the enablement team itself. We also understand the responsibilities of each role.

So it’s time to answer a question: Where does sales enablement sit in an organization?

Where should it sit?

There are a number of possible enablement reporting structures, all with their pros and cons. And the best for your organization depends on your org’s vision, priorities, and goals. As well as the resources available to you, and the size of your enablement team.

For example:

In 2024’s Sales Enablement Landscape Report, we found that 27% of enablers report to RevOps. 24% report to Sales, and 17% report to the C-Suite.

Of those that report to the C-Suite, almost half (48%) report to the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer).

There are other options too, like HR. But from our data, just 2% of enablers report to Human Resources.

Want more on how enablement pros perform the function today?

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