When our girls were young, around ages six and nine, they enjoyed riding a small plastic toboggan down our gently sloped driveway in the winter, our Border Collie MardiGrowls running alongside barking and nipping at the sled to herd them to safety. Big sister Robin made up the rules of sharing… she would ride down, roll off into the snow, and get her little sister Anna to pull the sled back up for her. Every few trips Anna got to take a downhill ride, but of course she had to pull the sled back up the hill since her big sister was conveniently still at the top. It didn’t take her long to figure out something was wrong with this type of sharing.
Twelve or thirteen years ago we were building and redefining the sales support functions for a highly successful B2B tech company located on the route 128 corridor. We pulled together Sales Operations, Sales Training, Field Administration, Business Development, and Field Marketing. The term Sales Enablement was just beginning to be bounced around, and we played with names like Sales Readiness, Sales Support, Inside Sales, Center of Excellence. The label meant less than what we were building. Our mission statement was simple: Leverage Sales. I told the team that any activity we did, every dollar we spent, each hour we worked had to pass that filter. If we were doing things that didn’t help the sales team be more productive we scrapped them, and new ideas to help Sales were shared and implemented. Operations and admin teams offloaded non-selling tasks from the reps, and we blew up and rebuilt on-boarding and training programs. We reached out to legal and finance to streamline contract negotiation and order entry processes. At the beginning of each quarter we used a kaizen approach to identify the changes for the next ninety days, and the team was fully energized by the positive feedback from the Sales organization. Amazing the impact a simple focus on the customer had on our results. (Some of you reading this may have been part of this team, and for that I say thank you one more time!)
As the programs matured and outcomes improved a very interesting thing happened. Our colleagues in Service Operations, HR, Marketing, Product Management and Channel support started asking to share our content and audit workshops and events. We found great commonality in the need to understand buyer personas, messaging, customer success stories, and how we positioned ourselves to win. Our team was linked at the hip with Marketing and the collaboration on content and demand creation broke down some long-standing walls between the teams and contributed to an already fantastic corporate culture.
Fast forward to 2018 and we see the continuing proliferation of enablement and operations programs and teams across the enterprise. What if we were to step back and take a hard look at what can truly be shared across all teams? I would suggest this goes much further than common corporate and HR programs, and that organizations can create much more robust enablement and support material for all associates. If we take the time to define this and start to develop core content, curriculum, and processes with the intent of sharing across multiple roles and functions it will both help raise the bar for everyone in the company and raise the appreciation of all the common touch points we have. The concept of role specific learning paths aligned to specific competencies of course remains valid, but the foundational layer that we build on can be evolved. Sales people don’t need product training designed by and for engineers; interlocked teams shouldn’t be forced to consume materials designed with strictly a sales audience in mind. Sharing our own programs is great, but is it possible that this means our colleagues still have to pull the sled uphill and tailor or rework everything? Is it time to leverage a more widely shared pool of enablement and operations resources to create a common, high value experience for associates that results in an improved customer experience? As expectations change around employee empowerment, work-life balance, sharing, and transparency it seems to be an area worth revisiting before too many more silos get built.