If you’ve spent any amount of time chatting to people in the sales enablement community, or tuned into sales enablement events and webinars, the odds are you’ve heard talk about charters.

But what is a sales enablement charter, why is it important, and how do you even build one? That’s exactly what we’re going to dive into in this article.

We’ll be looking at:

Before we get started, don’t forget to download SEC’s free enablement charter playbook.

Inside you’ll find everything you need to know, alongside expert insights and a sales enablement charter template to get you started.👇

SEC Enablement charter playbook - download it today!
SEC’s enablement charter playbook acts as your ultimate guide to creating an airtight charter.
Sales Enablement CollectiveDaniel O’Dowd

What is a sales enablement charter?

One of the biggest challenges that enablement departments face (especially new teams or markets where the discipline is less mature) is that the rest of the organization doesn’t know what sales enablement is.

And if they do have an understanding of it, it’s not a clear one. Sales, marketing, product marketing, and other functions in your organization might not understand how to collaborate with your sales enablement team.

Another challenge is that the enablement team is treated as a fire-fighting department, fixing problems as they arise and not having a true, long-term sales enablement strategy.

An enablement charter is a solution to both of these challenges.

Your charter is a document that provides direction and focus to your enablement team, while also acting as a “holy grail” which you can direct any other department towards when they have questions about what you actually do.

According to our Sales Enablement Landscape Report 2024, 38% of sales enablement professionals have a charter, which leaves a significant percentage without one.

Building a charter can help you align your enablement objectives with the rest of the business’ in the short- and long-term.

Why is a sales enablement charter important?

As we mentioned above, building a formal enablement charter helps address two of the biggest enablement pain points:

  • Other teams not understanding your role
  • Not having a strategic influence on the organization

How does building a charter help with this?

Firstly, it focuses your sales enablement efforts. Your charter will include the strategic, measurable initiatives you plan to undertake over the course of a year.

Your charter should clearly outline your sales enablement program’s objectives - this means that you’re not just taking work as it comes in a disorganized fashion. Everything you want to achieve as an enablement organization should be outlined within the charter.

How you plan to measure success and whether you actually achieved your stated objectives should also be included here.

Secondly, it helps you align key stakeholder groups. Creating your charter should be a collaborative process, and you should make an effort to take feedback from any functions you’ll be working with.

This ensures that anyone you’ll be working with knows what your sales enablement does and why it’s important to the success of the overall organization.

While your primary responsibility will be to support and enable the sales team to achieve success, you have to interact with other teams to do that and that’s where using a charter to gain organizational alignment is so important.

How do you build a sales enablement charter?

Creating a sales enablement charter isn’t an overnight task. It’s a process that takes time, and it’s never truly over.

Your charter should be built to be flexible and adaptable, as business needs are constantly changing and your enablement team needs to be prepared for that.

For a comprehensive view of how to build an enablement charter from scratch, including a template you can use, you can download our free playbook right here.

Here’s the rundown:

  • Start with a brief, aspirational vision statement
  • Create a clear and direct mission statement outlining how you help the company
  • Decide on what your enablement team’s priorities (or pillars) are and list them
  • Speak to your key stakeholders and collaborators to get their input
  • Build your core: map out the most relevant details of each priority you listed earlier
  • Include your team’s roles and responsibilities so stakeholders know who does what
  • Outline your review process, including how often you’ll revisit the charter to update it
  • Circulate the charter to everyone who needs to see it!

That’s your whistle-stop tour on how to build your very own formal enablement charter.

While you’ll find more information in our playbook, let’s look at what key details you should consider including for each priority or pillar of your charter.

What should you include in your charter’s pillars?

Regardless of which enablement pillar you’re focusing on as you construct your charter, there are certain elements which you need to include in order to ensure consistency in the direction of your enablement department.

1. Overall objective

Here, leave a summary of your overall objective for this pillar. Where do you want to be with this pillar in 12 months’ time?

2. Quarterly objectives

Follow up your overall objective by breaking it down quarter-by-quarter.

Not only will it seem more achievable if it’s broken down into micro-objectives or milestones, but it will also give you a reason to think about how you’ll achieve your overall objective.

3. Key metrics and KPIs

This is important because you need to know how you’ll measure your results and what you’re looking to achieve results-wise before you start.

Have set targets and metrics that align with the business’ overarching goals from the start and you’ll know exactly what to look for as you analyze your results.

4. Known risks and potential issues

Your charter can be an opportunity to highlight anything you know may go wrong in advance, as well as a chance to think about how to address those issues before they happen.

Maybe you’ve tried something in the past and it hasn’t worked and if so, what did you learn?

5. Cross-functional support

This is where your alignment is extremely important - list (and talk to!) the departments you’ll need to collaborate on this pillar with.

If you’re going to collaborate with product marketing on content creation, for example, how will that happen? If you’re working on your onboarding pillar, how will HR be involved?

6. Resources needed

Here’s a chance to call out what you’ll need resource-wise in order to actually achieve your goals. Do you need a new team member to run content as a content specialist, or budget for a new LMS to help with onboarding and coaching?

As this document will be circulated to all relevant stakeholders, it’s an opportunity to make your requests heard.

Of course, there’s no set way to build a charter!

Be flexible and adapt it to your organization’s unique needs. These are guidelines to consider as you’re building out your document.

Expert advice

Before we wrap up, you should know that Lisa Duncan, Senior Director of Global Revenue Enablement at Meltwater, hosted an AMA session in our free Slack community, answering anything and everything sales enablement charter related. You'll find her wisdom right here. 👇

Could you share how we can ensure that the sales enablement charter aligns with broader company goals?

Lisa: I start by looking at the company's goals and strategic initiatives, and the role the sales team plays in achieving these.

Depending on the size of your company and the nature of your relationships, you can usually uncover these priorities from conversations with sales and RevOps leaders about their priorities and initiatives.

If you don’t have access to stakeholders for these conversations for whatever reason, you can get a lot of insight from company or sales all-hands that share the company’s priorities and focus areas (but I would also encourage you to think about how to build those relationships so you can get more intel directly from them).

From these company priorities, I develop a point of view on the knowledge and behavior the sales team needs in order to deliver the goals.

For instance:

  • If top line growth is a company priority, I’ll want to make sure reps know how to grow deal size or generate a higher volume of opportunities.
  • If we’re focusing on churn, I’d want to build programs to enable reps to sell to the right ICP and to enable CSMs to deliver value.

At this stage I will validate my hypotheses with sales leaders and stakeholders to make sure I’m focused in the right areas. Next, I do an analysis to see where the gaps are between desired knowledge/skills and current state.

This could be as formal as a competency assessment, as simple as conversations with reps and leaders, or something in between like a field survey (and looking at CRM and productivity data is always helpful too).

Finally, I prioritize the gaps in order to set the priorities for enablement. Going back to the charter, then I can determine how to allocate enablement resources (people, time, budget) towards the different priorities and what resources outside of our team we will need.

When I put all this in my charter, I typically start with an overview of current company priorities and a visual that shows how the enablement priorities connect to each company priority and how we will measure our impact.

This is how I show our strategic alignment.The final product is maybe a 5-6 slide charter with the following items:

  • Overview of company priorities and alignment of enablement priorities with them
  • Enablement team mission/purpose, structure, stakeholder alignment and delivery model
  • Enablement roadmap for the upcoming quarter/year including learning objectives and desired outcomes (and a measurement framework)

How do you set realistic goals and timelines when building your charter?

Lisa: For almost everything I build in enablement, I work backwards from the launch date to build the milestones and timeline.

In the case of a charter, I work backwards from the date that I want to launch the charter.

For instance, if we have an all-hands coming up and I want to present the charter and roadmap there, I think through all the alignment I need to obtain before finalizing the charter, and which stakeholders need to be informed before I announce it to the sales team.

A typical order of events for me would include:

  • Complete almost-final draft of charter
  • Sales leader (VP) & stakeholder charter review & feedback session
  • Second line leader (SLM) charter review & feedback session
  • Finalize charter
  • Present final charter to sales leaders & SLMs, get their input on how best to position programs to their teams
  • Present final charter to frontline managers
  • Share with sales org
  • Rollout to partners across departments who need to be informed

With a large global team and lots of timezones to contend with, this process takes me about 3-4 weeks. So that means I need to plan to have my charter mostly done about 4 weeks before I am planning to share it with the sales organization.

What are the first steps to consider when building a sales enablement function from the ground up?

Lisa: I like to come into it with a vision of the enablement pillars and programs I want to incorporate into my function once it’s fully scaled. This is usually aspirational at the beginning, but I like to consider all the possibilities before narrowing it down.

Typically the pillars I look at include:

  • New hire onboarding
  • Role-based training (skills and processes)
  • Product knowledge
  • Tech stack
  • Manager development
  • Culture and events (SKO, newsletters, etc)

Certain programs within these pillars are table stakes, and if they don’t exist yet, they are a good place to start.

Depending on your sales motion, this can include things like new hire onboarding programs (even if you aren’t hiring a lot, you need to be able to ramp backfills quickly), CMS and LMS tools, a documented sales process, persona knowledge and value messaging, and product/pricing knowledge.

Think about the basics for your sales org and start by making sure those are in place. I’m a bit of a dreamer (Futuristic is one of my CliftonStrengths) so I also like to paint a vision of “what could be” for each of these pillars. Then I come back down to earth to build a realistic plan.

I talk to sales leaders and survey the field to understand the gaps in each of these areas. Then I map those back to company goals to prioritize our focus areas. And finally I look at the resources I have available to determine what we can realistically deliver.

Conversations will need to happen about trade-offs. For example: “Yes, I can revamp the new hire onboarding program, but given resource constraints, I won’t be able to build the new messaging program. If you want me to deliver both, I will need to hire a full time resource or a contractor at a cost of $X.”

Part of building the function from scratch includes identifying all the resources you will need in order (eg, headcount, contractors, technology, training budget) to deliver on the vision for the function and building a business case for investing in these resources by showing what you will be able to do with them and without them, and the impact the investment will have on business outcomes.

Would love to get any insight around best practises for incorporating feedback loops from frontline sales teams into the charter.

Lisa: Generally speaking, for feedback loops my approach is twofold:

  • Meeting with sales leaders and reps: In my ideal world, this would be monthly enablement forums with sales managers where we discuss programs that are currently running, rep engagement with them, and feedback on them, as well as looking ahead to programs that are coming up to get input and buy-in. I would also hold quarterly rep focus groups with a good cross-section of high-performing, well-respected reps who can contribute feedback on your programs and charter.
  • Surveys: I like to send a quarterly or biannual survey to the field to get input to help shape our charter. Typically this includes questions that help me get a baseline read on our reps’ confidence selling our different solutions and use cases, using tools, running processes, etc - but I also ask about the training and resources we provide them and what they would like to see more/less of and give them space for open comments and feedback.

Wrapping up

To sum up, a sales enablement charter is a document that:

  • Provides direction and focus to your team
  • Aligns key stakeholders and gets them on the same page as you
  • Is an opportunity to move from short-term, tactical activities to strategic, long-term planning

With a charter, you have a chance to change enablement’s perception in your organization from fire-fighters that have problems thrown at them as they appear, to a strategic powerhouse with real, long-term impact on the organization’s success.

If you’re still hungry for more information, as well as your own free sales enablement charter template, then don’t forget to download our playbook.

It’s packed with expert insights to help you kickstart your enablement charter journey. 👇

SEC Enablement charter playbook - download it today!
SEC’s enablement charter playbook acts as your ultimate guide to creating an airtight charter.
Sales Enablement CollectiveDaniel O’Dowd