Building an Evolved Sales Enablement Team: 10 Key Roles
Just as there is no one-size-fits-all definition of sales enablement, there is no one-size-fits-all team structure that will work at every company. The key to determining the ideal roles for your organization is to understand your capacity to execute against your mission with your current sales enablement team.
Here are ten common sales enablement team roles, and how each can fit into your roadmap to help you be more effective.
Chief Enablement Officer
Although still rare, a C-level leader can drive strategy and adoption of sales enablement programs across the organization with a top-down, holistic approach that aligns with company vision. This role makes sense at organizations with a large sales enablement team, spanning multiple regions, sales disciplines, product lines, and go-to-market teams.
VP of Sales Enablement
A vice president to oversee sales enablement can be critical to maintain a strategic connection to senior leadership and to support the execution of sales enablement initiatives.
Director of Sales Enablement
A director is responsible for translating strategy into programs, including the management of budget, resources, and staff. At large organizations, a director may oversee regional or product-based silos within the sales organization. A key element of the role is to build cross-departmental relationships with product marketing, frontline managers, sales leadership, sales reps, and other teams.
Sales Enablement Manager
The sales enablement manager is a critical hire for every sales enablement team. This position is essential to design and deliver sales enablement initiatives when and how they will be most effective. Managers are directly responsible for deploying programs to the field and measuring results.
Program Manager
Depending on the size and scope of your sales enablement efforts, program managers might be necessary to run individual programs. For example, at rapid-growth companies that are hiring new sales reps, dedicating a sales enablement program to onboarding ensures that training sessions are valuable and frees up the team to focus on other sales enablement priorities.
Content Specialist
Sales enablement must partner closely with marketing to maximize the performance of sales content. However, relying solely on the product marketing team to create content for sales enablement can burden both departments and lead to bottlenecks. A content specialist dedicated to sales enablement material can be beneficial at large organizations and at small organizations that do not have a dedicated product marketing or content team.
Sales Coach
Coaching is an integral part of sellers’ professional development and productivity. The sales coach helps identify problems, advises managers on how to address them, and leads the strategy for coaching programs and training sessions. A dedicated sales coach can also ensure consistency and quality coaching at organizations with distributed teams.
Instructional Designer
Learners have different styles, and the way some reps learn and retain information is fundamentally different than how others do. To maximize engagement and retention, training sessions must be designed with special care to reinforce the information. Instructional designers assess the sales culture and create courses that resonate with reps.
Sales Enablement Coordinator
A sales enablement coordinator can help larger sales enablement teams stay organized and keep processes running smoothly. Coordinators take care of the tactical day-to-day details of programs while the manager takes the lead on rolling out initiatives to the field and monitoring performance.
Empower Your Sales Team
In this “next normal,” sales enablement is critical to sustain or drive sales success. When you empower your sales team with the right training, content, coaching, and tools, they simply have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently.
Whether you’re a solo practitioner or a member of a large sales enablement team, this vital function—when done well—can accelerate growth, boost revenue, increase your client base, and drive long-term success in a volatile world.
Learn More
To learn how to accelerate your results with modern sales enablement, download our eBook: Demystifying Sales Enablement: How to Plan for the Next Normal.
