In many ways, we’re in a technology golden age.
Almost every imaginable business process can now be optimized with a digital platform. But there is a downside: with so many options, it’s increasingly difficult to know which solutions will make a tangible difference — and which will become tech stack bloat.
Given this reality, the emergence of business enablement is no surprise. Dedicated to streamlining technology operations within an organization, business enablement initiatives ensure you only invest in platforms that deliver real impact.
In this guide, we’ll break down the building blocks for implementing effective business enablement programs, including:
- What is business enablement?
- Why is business enablement important?
- Who is involved in business enablement?
- What does good business enablement look like?
What Is Business Enablement?
Business enablement is a system of technology-driven initiatives that enable greater employee productivity. When done correctly, business enablement initiatives should reduce friction in an employee’s workflow by eliminating manual processes, repetitive tasks, and other admin. Business enablement often happens behind the scenes and encompasses everything from purchasing new technology to change-management processes.
What’s the difference between business, operational, and sales enablement?
If business enablement sounds familiar, there’s a reason for this. Many types of “enablement” have sprung up over the years as technology and solution providers work to define the enablement category. Often, you’ll hear business enablement used alongside operational, technology, or even sales enablement. Here are the differences between these terms. Technology enablement is closely related to business enablement; for some organizations it may even be the same function or initiative. Technology enablement focuses on streamlining internal operations through the implementation of digital platforms and solutions. Operational enablement, on the other hand, focuses on streamlining product operations, such as building new feature capabilities. This function typically works closely with sales enablement, product managers, and marketing to successfully launch new product offerings. Sales enablement is all about driving sales success by ensuring the reps have the content, guidance, and training they need to have effective buyer conversations that increases revenue and customer satisfaction. While sales enablement may benefit from all of the above, it is a wholly separate function. Learn more about the importance of sales enablement with our guide.
Why Is Business Enablement Important?
Business enablement is a key driver of internal operations. Without clearly defined guidelines about how and where to implement new technology initiatives, or who owns their success, businesses risk deploying tools that their intended audience fails to adopt. Ultimately, this results in wasted money and technologically skeptical employees.
However, with the right business enablement processes in place, you can swiftly launch new technology initiatives and ensure your internal systems keep pace with the modern workplace.
Who Is Involved in Business Enablement?
Done right, business enablement should be a cross-functional operation. Though sourcing and assessing feedback from many teams may sound like a logistical nightmare, you are actually insuring yourself against late-stage upsets from disgruntled stakeholders. Business enablement teams typically comprise three groups:
- Owners: Owners are responsible for the success of the project. These people will lead the change initiative and ensure that all other stakeholders understand the new process or solution and have committed to it. In practice, owners are usually IT or HR directors, as these functions often own the behind-the-scenes technology, such as payroll, that business enablement would seek to improve.
- Users: Users include anyone expected to use a new application or follow a new process. Often your user base will be a broad set of employees — sales, engineering, or even all your employees. Rather than involving every potential user in the decision-making process, select a few representatives to act as a focus group and ensure your initiatives meet their needs.
- Approvers: Approvers are your final decision-makers. Because business enablement initiatives affect broad categories of employees, your approver will typically be a head of finance or IT. Achieving executive buy-in from an approver adds weight to your business enablement initiative and ensures that other functional heads similarly support it.
What Does Good Business Enablement Look Like?
The cycle of building and achieving business enablement initiatives may seem complicated given the large scale of most projects. However, with the right people steering your initiative, you’ll be able to bring it safely to shore. Here are the five steps you should follow:
1. Gather your business enablement crew
Building the right crew is important, as collaboration between stakeholders is what makes or breaks business enablement success. Using the framework above, define your owners, users, and approvers. Then, select representatives from each group to join your crew. This crew should meet regularly to discuss project progress — and should continue to meet long after solution deployment to routinely assess its health.
2. Define necessity, prioritization, and expected outcomes
Hold a kickoff meeting where the initiative owners will walk stakeholders through the need for the business enablement initiative, where it ranks against existing priorities, and what outcomes are expected. Clearly defining goals and priorities in this way ensures that your stakeholders are aligned and guarantees a budget line for your project. This way, even as new initiatives arise and budgets shift, you have the commitment and buy-it necessary to keep moving forward.
3. Develop a communications plan
One of the most critical factors to success will be your communications strategy. Great communications can help you land a new solution and, most importantly, drive adoption. Considering the high cost of most business enablement initiatives (such as a new ERP platform), ensuring employees use the tool as intended is essential to achieving a strong ROI. Your communications plan should tell your user group when changes are coming, what to expect from the changes, and provide reminders on solution-critical actions users need to take before, during, and after deployment. Email, messenger apps, and other company-wide platforms are all an effective way to keep users informed as changes happen.
4. Launch your initiative
After weeks of careful planning, it’s time to launch your initiative. Though this should feel like a triumph, deployment days can be stressful as you manage the shift of sometimes thousands of users from one process to another. Several things can help launch day go smoothly. First, offer pre-, day-of, and post-solution training. This will ensure that your users are aware of changes that are coming and know what to do on the big day. Similarly, using the authority and visibility of your initiative approvers builds buzz to get users excited about change. Finally, offer a physical presence, such as a roaming help team or a lunch and learn, so users can ask questions in person.
5. Continually measure real vs. expected outcomes
Once you have your business enablement initiative up and running, begin measuring your expected outcomes against your real ones. Besides checking planned metrics (such as money and time saved), ask questions like the ones below — these questions will help you continue to optimize your initiative. As your program evolves, constantly reevaluating how the solution does (or doesn’t) meet your needs will help you avoid clinging to aging technology and keep your enterprise nimble.
- What went well during your solution deployment?
- Where are there areas for improvement?
- Are your new processes helping or hindering user groups?
- How can the user experience be simplified?
- How can you expand the solution use cases?
Business Enablement Keeps Your Business Moving
Though business enablement is a relatively new term, its impacts are far-reaching. Using the processes outlined above, you can easily and effectively invest in technology that keeps your business moving forward.
Looking to take your business enablement framework beyond behind-the-scenes initiatives? Explore how you can support sellers to grow your revenue with our complete guide to sales enablement.
By Highspot Team
The Highspot Team works to create and promote the Highspot sales enablement platform, which gives businesses a powerful sales advantage to engage in more relevant buyer conversations and achieve their revenue goals. Through AI-powered search, analytics, in-context training, guided selling, and 50+ integrations, the Highspot platform delivers enterprise-ready sales enablement in a modern design that sales reps and marketers love.
FAQs
Business Enablement Definition
Business enablement is the process of implementing technology-driven initiatives to increase productivity.
What is sales enablement Why does it matter to your business and what are the keys to doing it well? ›
Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business's sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.
Why is enablement important? ›
Sales enablement is important because it prepares salespeople to conduct a more effective sales process and achieve better sales results. The right sales enablement strategy equips reps with the training, coaching and content they need to be successful.
What is sales enablement and why is it important? ›
Sales enablement is the set of tools and content provided to your sales teams to help them sell smarter and sell more. But sales enablement also includes the processes that marketers undertake to help sales reps sell.
Who is involved in business enablement? ›
Business enablement teams typically comprise three groups – owners, users, and approvers. Owners ensure the execution of business enablement projects from start to finish. They are responsible for getting buy-in from all the stakeholders on the new business solution.
What is strategy enablement? ›
Strategic enablement involves the transfer of a firm's knowledge to their partners. • Tacit (explicit) knowledge is best transferred using human (technology) enablers. • Enablement investments in human vs technology lead to diverse learning environments.
What is sales enablement examples? ›
A survey by DemandMetric provides some examples of what may be considered sales enablement content, including: Informative blog posts. Case studies. Customer testimonials.
What is the goal of sales enablement? ›
The goal of sales enablement is to align the intersecting elements of sales, marketing, customer care, product/brand management, legal, and human resources to improve seller productivity and enhance the buyer experience.
How do you create a sales enablement strategy? ›
10 tips for building your sales enablement strategy
- Create a mission for your sales enablement playbook. ...
- Establish goals and track KPIs. ...
- Explain why sales enablement is important. ...
- Collect deal, account, and contact information in a single place. ...
- Collaborate, communicate, and provide feedback.
Employee enablement is the strategic and systematic practice of giving employees whatever they need to do their job to the best of their ability. Overall, employee enablement takes engagement to the next level.
The difference between these two terms is simply: Employee enablement gives employees the ability to continue performing high-level job functions, while employee engagement ensures your team is dedicated to the company vision and overall goals.
What does an enablement team do? ›
A product enablement team develops and executes programs that provide relevant product knowledge to employees across the company. The team, for example, might create a training program and resources specific to the customer support team.
What is B2B sales enablement? ›
What is B2B Sales Enablement? According to Gartner, “Sales enablement is the activities, systems, processes, and information that support and promote knowledge-based sales interactions with client and prospects.
What are enablement materials? ›
Sales Enablement Materials: 12 Types of Content That Empower Sellers
- Buyer personas.
- Email templates.
- Talk tracks.
- Discovery call checklists.
- Demo recordings.
- Slide decks.
- Battlecards.
- Thought leadership content.
Content enablement is the practice of delivering high-quality business content to prospects that ultimately persuades them to move through the buying journey. It involves the creation, classification, dissemination, and optimization of content to convert prospects to customers.
What is customer success enablement? ›
Customer Success enablement focuses on enabling your Customer Success professionals to effectively carry out their responsibilities. The person in charge of these initiatives ensures that Customer Success team members have the resources, tools, and technology necessary to support customers.
What is organizational enablement? ›
Organizational change enablement is the process of preparing a business and its people for the implementation of new capabilities in a way that enhances performance to deliver business results.
What does user enablement mean? ›
Because of this, B2B vendors prioritize investing in user education and enablement – a continuous process of providing customers and partners with the knowledge, resources and support to maximize the value of a product or service.
How do you build an enablement? ›
Start with the 5 key ingredients for success:
- Establish clear structure.
- Define sales enablement for all roles.
- Empower valuable conversations.
- Build out an intentional tech stack.
- Measure outputs.
Establishing a Workable Sales Enablement Plan
- Clarify Your Objectives. ...
- Discuss Sales Enablement with Your Sales Reps. ...
- Understand Your Customer. ...
- Align Your Sales Process with the Buyer's Journey. ...
- Organize the Content You're Going to Need. ...
- Prepare the Training Required. ...
- Gather the Required Tools and Technology.
6 Tips for Building an Unstoppable Sales Enablement Team
- Operate as a business within a business. ...
- Look for the right individual qualities. ...
- Embrace subject matter experts. ...
- Build for change and scalability. ...
- Focus on stakeholder alignment. ...
- Measure enablement success by intended change in behavior.
Sales operations and sales enablement are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are in fact many clear distinctions between the two. Put simply, sales operations handles the logistics of team organization to drive plans forward, and sales enablement uses those logistics to put plans into action.
Is sales enablement a good role? ›
Sales enablement plays a key role in scaling the sales organization beyond a handful of overachievers. It provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tool and resources required to be successful. One sales enablement best practice is to designate overachievers as leaders/teachers of the program.
What is an enablement platform? ›
Put simply, the definition of a sales enablement platform is a tool used to help bring people and technology together throughout the sales cycle. This may mean helping sellers stay organized in their day-to-day, aligning your sales and marketing teams, or even making onboarding smooth and easy.
What is a sales enablement plan? ›
A sales enablement plan or sales enablement strategy is a deliberate process of supplying sales teams with the information, tools, guidance, training, and other forms of support they need to help them do their job more effectively. Sales enablement allows sales professionals to: Engage more with prospects.
What is the future of sales enablement? ›
The Future of Sales Enablement
A strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interactions.
How is sales enablement different than marketing? ›
Though both content marketing and sales enablement teams focus on content, these teams differ when it comes to their primary audience: Content marketing focuses on creating assets for buyer consumption while sales enablement focuses on how salespeople will engage with and distribute that content.
What sales enablement is not? ›
Enablement isn't transactional - it's about sales strategy
It isn't about just clarifying what a rep is doing. Sales enablement adds another dimension to the way organizations approach sales strategy. Behun says that the key is making sure the information is practical and has a use for the rep.
What is sales enablement training? ›
Sales enablement training means training your sales team so that they are able to sell your products or services to prospects in the most effective way. This means they need to fully understand your offering in terms of: Benefits that your solutions offer to prospective customers.
Why is it important to enable employees? ›
Enabled Employees Enjoy Work More
One way to improve employee retention is to ensure that you enable employees to develop strategies to improve work culture, reduce staff turnover, improve productivity and build better relationships. As a leader, you can't do this alone.
Performance enablement is an ongoing process that can elevate your company and work. By giving employees the support and development they need on a daily basis, managers can unlock their team's potential to drive business results.
What is the difference between people empowerment enablement involvement and engagement? ›
These Indonesian Scholars proposed the model below, which shows that engagement, enablement and empowerment are distinct as well as interrelated. Engagement is about one's willingness. Enablement is about what is provided in the work environment. Empowerment is about what is entrusted to one's capability.
What is performance management in an organization? ›
Performance Management - Definition
Performance management is an ongoing process of communication between a supervisor and an employee that occurs throughout the year, in support of accomplishing the strategic objectives of the organization.
What does enablement support mean? ›
Wellness is an approach that builds on a person's capacity to improve their physical, social and emotional functioning while supporting them to live independently and autonomously. Enablement is 'doing with' rather than 'doing for' the individual in order to enhance autonomy and/or independence.
What does a business enablement manager do? ›
A sales enablement manager is a standard role within sales enablement teams, and is responsible for deploying programs and initiatives that enable customer-facing teams to execute the core-aspects of their jobs more effectively, especially as it relates to selling and revenue performance.
What does an enablement team do? ›
A product enablement team develops and executes programs that provide relevant product knowledge to employees across the company. The team, for example, might create a training program and resources specific to the customer support team.
What is a business enablement analyst? ›
Reporting to the Data Manager, the purpose of this role is to guide business teams in the development of processes and standards to improve effective use of Information Management Systems (Document Management, Intranet and Digital Asset Management) which have recently been implemented at Starlight.
What is organizational enablement? ›
Organizational change enablement is the process of preparing a business and its people for the implementation of new capabilities in a way that enhances performance to deliver business results.
What is customer success enablement? ›
Customer Success enablement focuses on enabling your Customer Success professionals to effectively carry out their responsibilities. The person in charge of these initiatives ensures that Customer Success team members have the resources, tools, and technology necessary to support customers.
How do I become an enablement manager? ›
Desired Experience and Skills
- Bachelor's degree.
- 5+ years experience in a high-performance sales organization in sales, enablement, or learning and development.
- A strong understanding of the sales environment, including sales content, tools and training.
- Experience with content management and learning management systems.
The Technical Enablement Program Manager is responsible for leading and managing technical learning programs for GitLab technical sales and customer success professionals (Solution Architects and Technical Account Managers) across the technical sales professional lifecycle.
What does enablement support mean? ›
Wellness is an approach that builds on a person's capacity to improve their physical, social and emotional functioning while supporting them to live independently and autonomously. Enablement is 'doing with' rather than 'doing for' the individual in order to enhance autonomy and/or independence.
What are enablement materials? ›
Sales Enablement Materials: 12 Types of Content That Empower Sellers
- Buyer personas.
- Email templates.
- Talk tracks.
- Discovery call checklists.
- Demo recordings.
- Slide decks.
- Battlecards.
- Thought leadership content.
10 tips for building your sales enablement strategy
- Create a mission for your sales enablement playbook. ...
- Establish goals and track KPIs. ...
- Explain why sales enablement is important. ...
- Collect deal, account, and contact information in a single place. ...
- Collaborate, communicate, and provide feedback.
Because of this, B2B vendors prioritize investing in user education and enablement – a continuous process of providing customers and partners with the knowledge, resources and support to maximize the value of a product or service.
What is meant by business performance? ›
Business performance, which is closely tied to commercial effectiveness, is determined by the ability of a company to implement optimal organisation with the aim of offering a product or service that meets the expectations of consumers and customers.
What is enablement training? ›
Enablement assumes that the employee can do the job effectively, they just need a little help. Enablement focuses on removing any roadblocks that prevent the employee from being successful. Training tries to cram knowledge in. Enablement draws it out.
What is a change enablement lead? ›
Change Enablement Lead. Summary. The Change Enablement Lead is responsible for providing organization design, change and communications support to large scale, strategic initiatives and is part of our corporate Change Enablement team.
What is enablement in human resources? ›
Employee enablement is best defined as a strategic practice to provide employees with everything they need to do their job to the best of their abilities and creating an environment that allows them to perform optimally.
