How to Scale Enablement in Hyper-Growth Mode
As companies grow in size and business, Sales Enablement becomes increasingly critical and in-demand. To serve the needs of growth requirement, it is not enough to hire great reps — you have to scale rapidly and get them up to speed as soon as possible.
Sources including Forbes and the US Department of Labor estimate the cost of a bad hire can be over six figures. We would venture to say that in a hyper growth tech company, this figure easily reaches half a million dollars. That might be more than most would think — but factor in first-year earnings and the investment made in recruitment and training, as well as the lost potential business, and it adds up.
At Sisense, the BI platform empowering builders to turn complex data into powerful analytic apps, Enablement was introduced in 2017 with 400 employees. Fast forward to today, we’ve doubled in size and expanded from 4 to 8 offices globally. So our team has a fair amount of experience scaling enablement in this environment, while at the same time mitigating risk involved when onboarding new Sales and Customer Success Managers.
In Enablement, our primary mission is to ensure that everyone from new reps to those who’ve invested years with us are continuously empowered to succeed in their job and are kept up to date about our product, market, sales methodology and processes. We track this with Field learning certifications alongside time to first sale, win rate, expansion and upsell rate.
But we’re just a team of four people.
So how do we do it? To sum it up in four words: leverage collective tribal knowledge.
Effective Enablement cannot be done by one person or team alone. Instead, companies require an internal ecosystem that leverages the diverse knowledge across the organization and establishes success-driven collaboration.
When deploying an increasing number of global teams, this only becomes more important.
So how does a small team of Enablement relative to the size of client-facing roles adapt to this reality? These are three ways we’ve found most impactful:
1. Automate where possible, but don’t lose the in-person touch
Survey the tools your company currently leverages, whether it’s a Learning Management System (LMS), Content Management System (CMS) or call-recording system. Understand which aspects can be automated for onboarding and continuous learning.
We have an eight-week onboarding process at Sisense for new sales reps that is comprised of 30 online courses, reading materials and call recordings. At the end of each week is a certification exam which tests reps on that week’s core topics.
But as we also know all too well, short attention spans and complex training requirements means that not everything can or should be learned independently. As you consider which topics or introductory training can be facilitated online, equally important to decide is what needs to be done in-person.
At Sisense, we’ve combined those areas into four-day bootcamps that run on a monthly basis and leverage experts from across the organization. We’ve also rolled out weekly follow-up sessions to check-in during the onboarding process and bi-weekly training for the entire Sales and Customer Success teams.
2. Make content accessible within two clicks
Our VP Go-to-Market, PeggySue Werthessen, is a firm believer in any employee accessing the content they need in just 2-clicks.
For reps, that means the ability to answer new questions on the fly when talking to a prospect or customer. For Enablement, that means less manpower producing more impact.
This philosophy has transformed the way we approach content management. To deliver content in a 2-click model, we recommend starting by indexing all of your current assets (in our case previously more than a thousand) and then dividing them into the most important primary and secondary-level topics.
Keep in mind that when you’re reorganizing the hierarchy of content, it’s not to serve a marketing purpose but rather to meet the needs of Sales and Customer Success. That means getting their feedback at every stage of planning and organizing content into categories which resonate with them. When you come across content that is outdated or underused, consider archiving it or reintroducing an updated version if needed. In almost every case regarding content, the phrase “less is more” truly applies.
Once the organization of content has been rearchitected, assign subject matter experts (SMEs) for each category. This is the person who knows the most about the topic — whether from from Sales, Product or Marketing — and will be given responsibility to keep the content up to date each quarter. We also have found having a specific team owning the maintenance is important too. We have assigned a member of our Go-To-Market team to different content to help ensure the updates and refreshing of content is happening across all of the SMEs involved.
Finally, make sure you have the right platform aligned with your strategy and which allows reps to easily search, customize, send and track content.
3. Always get buy-in and input from sales leaders
Just as critical as leveraging collective knowledge is getting the buy-in from Sales leadership.
Your Sales leaders have a vested interest in their teams being fully enabled. And while some organizations take the approach of first rolling out new training initiatives and sales tools, and then involving Sales leaders, at Sisense we’ve seen time and again that to achieve success, this collaboration must exist often and early on.
Whether that’s evaluating an Enablement tool, planning the agenda for Sales Kickoff or introducing changes to the onboarding process, your Sales leaders should be your trusted advisors to ensure alignment and build consensus. Your reps should also be leveraged as a way to fact-check whether the strategies you built with their leaders will truly resonate with the customer-facing teams.
It goes without saying that scaling Enablement in hyper-growth mode presents significant challenges. But it’s also an opening for new opportunities, like building a more effective ecosystem that leverages collective tribal knowledge. When done right, you can maximize impact on the growth of the business and empower hundreds of reps around the world to succeed.
Jackie Retig is the Global Field Enablement Manager at Sisense. Find her on LinkedIn here.
