In partnership with the Revenue Enablement Society (RES), SBI surveyed 134 commercial organizations to understand the scope of modern enablement and what top-performing leaders do differently to scale the size of their teams and the impact of their work.
Commercial leaders struggle to balance a wide spectrum of enablement activities with the realities of resourcing trade-offs. While modern enablement teams serve many critical roles across the GTM organization, they can cost as much as a comparable group of sellers.
The mandate for enablement teams has evolved
Modern enablement has grown to support functions for client-facing roles across the commercial team
Roughly half (48%) of enablement teams support sales, customer success and partner channel teams
But as the scope of enablement grows, so does the cost.
An enablement director or VP can command as much as an enterprise seller in on-target earnings (OTE)
A modest enablement team with one director, two managers, and one associate has a median cost of $585,000 per year
Resource critical activities first, then scale.
Optimally scaling headcount is not about finding an ideal ratio of enablement FTEs to sales FTEs, it's about satisfying jobs-to-be-done
Enablement teams typically staff the fundamentals first, e.g., content curation, onboarding, sales training
GTM leaders gain efficiencies by right-sizing capacity-constrained roles and grouping activities for other roles
Top-performing enablement teams have:
Higher quota attainment
They exceeded the mean attainment level in each of the last three fiscal years.
Higher growth
They operate in moderate to high revenue growth environments
Higher proficiency
They reported a mean proficiency rating 17.1% higher than peers
Top-performing enablement teams scale their impact through different-in-kind execution.
Prioritizing quota-carrying experience when hiring enablement professionals
Measuring the right indicators to gauge the efficacy of their programs
Regularly training both sellers and sales managers on sales effectiveness
