John Dougan posted something interesting on LinkedIn (There is so little interesting in LI that I treasure the moments when I find something.). It was his struggle with the word Enablement and the concept of what Sales Enablement has become. And John runs sales enablement at a great organization.
It got me thinking about something I see happening too much in everything we do in our GTM and customer entanglement strategies. Here’s the basic premise:
“What happens when our “verbs” become “nouns,” What happens when we move from “actions” to “structures?”
Let’s use the verb “enabling” as an example. When we talk about enabling, we talk about helping sellers become much more capable. Helping them learn, helping them become more curious, more effective, better able to execute their jobs. But, over time, the discussion started shifting from enabling to enablement.
All of a sudden we were focused on a function/department within the Revenue/Selling organization. We started drawing org charts, with the training group, the tools group, the programs teams, and all sorts of other things. We started focusing on the KPIs for those groups. “How many new courses did you develop? How many new programs did you put in place? What’s our tech stack look like?” Then we started looking at budgets and funding to support the organization. And then inevitably Sales Enablement Leaders started talking about getting a seat at the table.
The seat at the table discussion is interesting, but distracting. “If we call ourselves Sales Enablement, we work with the Sales Leaders. If we become Revenue Enablement, we now report to the CRO……” And with some functions, I’ve actually participated in discussions, “We should have a seat at the CEO’s Table.
About a year ago, I sat in a discussion about RevOps sponsored by a large VC firm. I had expected it to be a discussion about how they were helping identify bottlenecks in performance, changing processes, and doing things to help drive higher levels of selling/revenue performance. Instead, it turned out to be an org chart/budgeting/KPI discussion. The participants showed org charts, talked about each of the functions in the organization, debated about KPIs, how to justify budgets….. And it got to, “Who should we report to,” and there was some discussion about “Who should report to us?” Clearly, this started looking at Marketing Ops, CS Ops, and some arguing Sales Enablement should report to them as well.
I was uncharacteristically quiet in the conversation. The discussion leaders knew me pretty well. At one point, they said, “Dave, you work with lots of organizations, what are you seeing?”
I didn’t mean to be impolite, but I said, “I’m a little confused about this discussion. What are you doing? How are you helping drive performance? What does the workflow look like and how are you helping sellers and leaders achieve more, more effectively?”
The room was silent for a moment, then they awkwardly shifted the conversation back to org charts and KPIs.
We see this in too many areas of the business.
- Instead of focusing on learning, we talk about L&D.
- Instead of coaching, we talk about coaches, cadences, etc. We even look at enablement offloading coaching from manager to a coaching group in enablement (another block on the org chart).
- Instead of selling, we focus on our plays, playbooks, scripts, and metrics.
- We need to be thinking about creating, advancing, closing.
- We need to be thinking about growing more than growth.
Somehow when we shift from verbs to nouns, we turn dynamic activities into institutional structures. The purpose of these activities becomes lost in discussions about org charts, dashboards, budgets, and delivery calendars.
Ironically, these functions are critical to driving organizational and individual performance. But structure and function without action is meaningless.
We just need to shift their focus from the nouns to the verbs.
We have to stop talking about the thing or the function and start talking about what they are doing, what actions are they taking, what outcomes they are producing. We have to move from measuring activities/programs to focusing on developing capabilities.
Our success and the future of selling has little to do with how we build the functions, what our programs, org charts and KPIs measure. It will be based on how we leverage those functions, and act with purpose.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. It is one of the better discussions I’ve seen from this tool. Enjoy!
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