This post is a snippet from The Essential Guide to Sales Enablement for 2019
A sales enablement charter specifies your revenue goal and sales objectives along with who is responsible for what. This is a critical step in deploying a sales enablement strategy, so don't skip it! Start by assessing the current state of your marketing efforts and sales operations and then create a vision for what they will look like after implementing sales enablement.
“The percentage of salespeople achieving quota at organizations with a formal sales enablement charter stands at 73.6 percent. The average quota attainment across the study was 57.7 percent and this represents a 27.6 percent improvement.”
– CSO Insights 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study
At a minimum, CSO Insights advises you to include these four components:
- Target groups: Who do your sales channels and partners sell to today?
- Vision, mission and purpose: Define these three elements and jointly come up with an emotional tagline that captures the urgency and spirit of your efforts.
- Objectives, strategies and roadmap: Map your current state of Sales and Marketing and what the future state will look like with sales enablement.
- Services and metrics: What services do Sales and Marketing provide to each other, and how will you measure them?
To the above, we recommend including a shared process for determining which team members in Sales and Marketing are responsible for creating content. Ideally everyone in Sales and Marketing will have a hand in content development. Typically, content creation is a core skill in the toolkits of marketers. Today it’s imperative, though, to actively involve sales reps because every day they are talking to buyers and relying heavily on relevant content when selling to them.
Clearly define what sales reps’ role in the content creation will be, including:
- Building and continually refining their content creation skills via training and workshops
- Authoring their own content assets such as presentations, demo scripts and implementation roadmaps
- Reviewing material produced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from other areas such as Software Development, Field Engineering and Customer Support
- Committing to regular interviews with full-time creators to transfer information from the field
- Forging an agreement that specifies how often creators may accompany reps on sales calls or meetings to harvest real-world intel
After completing the first version of your charter, publish it and promote it throughout the company, and ensure it’s always top of mind for everybody in Sales and Marketing. Hold a company-wide kickoff to inspire enthusiasm. You don’t have to print slick T-shirts for the masses, but make the charter easy for any employee to access online and create handouts people can tack to their walls or tape to their systems.
To sustain momentum, regular team meetings between Sales and Marketing are a must. Give this joint committee an easy-to-remember name such as the Sales and Marketing, or SAM, team. In the first few months following kickoff, commit to weekly SAM meetings. As the relationship progresses, settle on a less frequent cadence, maybe once or twice a month. (Warning: Meeting less than once per month puts your initiative at risk of failure.)
Make every SAM meeting open and productive, continuously revisiting your revenue goal, recognizing when milestones are reached and refining the activities owned by each team member. Realize that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. To ensure forward progress, celebrate every step toward achieving your revenue goal as a victory.
