While sellers worldwide scramble to close Q3 against the backdrop of a global recession, I’m rounding out my first year in Sales Enablement. When I first made the switch, I declared tongue-in-cheek that the shelf life of an ex-seller was very short. As each day passes, I become more and more “out of touch” with the daily grind of sales, increasingly obsolete to the field I’m meant to serve.
I make it a point to put my seller hat back on every day I show up as an Enabler. As a fun empathy exercise, I wrote this letter to my current Enabler self as my former Seller self. Hope it adds some warmth and levity to your day. More importantly, I hope it challenges you to think hard about how we can better support the Sales teams who work so hard to bring in revenue.
Dear Sales Enablement,
By writing this letter, I am screaming into the muted void of my end-of-quarter angst. These are strong opinions, strongly held that I would never share in one of your post-training surveys. Why? Because what would even be the point? I’m so tired of raising feedback that doesn’t get actioned. It feels like you and every other function only ask for it so you can report back quality or relevance scores for your own KPIs.
Last I checked, most functions in a company exist to support the goal of revenue growth. Why, then, do salespeople live in the perpetual purgatory of role reversal? I hate to play this card, but we literally keep the lights on. In this recession economy, we’re the ones keeping our company profitable. Everyone else is a cost function.
I, for one, feel the weight of that responsibility. I have a clear target over my head. Let me appeal to your humanity: my ability to hit quarterly targets impacts not just my performance review and career trajectory but also my ability to put food on the table for my family.
Enablement, by definition, exists to help me do my job better. So why don’t I feel like you truly empathize with the pressures I’m facing? Why are you so far removed from my day-to-day realities? How come I don’t feel the same sense of urgency from you? You supposed to be my ride or die. Why aren’t your KPIs more closely tied to mine?
I might tolerate this kind of removal or distance from Product, Legal, Risk, maybe even Sales Ops. But Sales Enablement? It’s literally in your name.
You might be getting defensive at this point. But what was it that that Sales book said? “Let’s get real or let’s not play.” If you really cared about whether these sales trainings were “highly relevant to my role,” you could’ve put more effort into quality control.
I think back to the countless sales trainings I’ve attended that have missed the mark on applicability, relevance, engagement, timeliness. I see more forums for “SMEs” to spotlight their own work than focus on increasing my ability to sell. Just thinking about it gives me a migraine.
Despite being burned multiple times, I still prioritize these trainings blocks because I’m trying to invest in my growth. Do I get any recognition for it? Nope. It’s not like my manager shows up to these. I don’t even know if they know (or care) that I do.
Every hour of these sales trainings is selling time I’ll never get back. In this post-pandemic world where I sit in my home office staring at a computer screen peddling product for hours on end, it’s also 60 minutes of my blurred work/home life I’ll never get back.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
If this trend of low quality Enablement programs keeps up, you’ll start to see one more black box of “video off” on Zoom. Better yet — one fewer person joining the Zoom at all. It’ll be hard for me to vouch for your work. When new hires ask which Enablement programs they should prioritize on top of the hundreds of things they need to do to spin up, I’ll probably tell them to just shadow me. Even if I don’t get as many shares as product or engineering, I’m still invested in our long-term equity. Can’t have poorly trained sellers running around eroding the future value of all my hard work.
And the next time you ask ME to help build one of your trainings? I’ll politely decline. You’re asking me to take time away from selling to record a video nobody will watch or consult on a project that isn’t directly tied to revenue or build a product training that will become obsolete in two months’ time? In this economy? That’s like a landlord asking his tenant to sew curtains for a house that has no indoor plumbing.
So going back to these post-training feedback forms. It’s a big ask for me to take the extra minutes to help you do your job when it often feels you can’t be bothered to do the same for me. I know you tell yourself that Sales coaching is my manager’s job, Sales reporting is Sales Ops’ job, Sales tooling is Productivity’s job, Sales plays and one-pagers are Product Marketing’s job. But sales TRAINING? I mean come ON. That’s GOTTA sit staunchly in your wheelhouse.
In the spirit of EOQ generosity (I seem to be giving one-time only discounts to all my customers anyway), let me hook YOU up with a free advisory session. I quadruple hat as lead gen, solutions engineer, industry expert, and compliance officer anyway. What’s one more hat to wear? What’s one more cross-functional team making requests of Sales during EOQ while offering both diddly and squat in return?
Allow me to give you a gift… the gift of feedback.
If I could ask just ONE thing of you to enable YOU to better enable ME, it’s this: see yourself as the gatekeepers of the sales team’s most valuable resource — our time, attention, and mental bandwidth.
Every minute I spend on Enablement is time away from selling. I cannot stress this enough. Moving from prospecting and customer meetings to an e-learning is a total context switch. Even the most realistic and relevant practicums you build are still one degree of separation from an actual customer conversation. I need you to help ensure that each minute I spend on Enablement today will pay dividends in the future. And not the future starting 6 months from now, but, like, later today. In the next customer conversation I have. The next deal I close. The next email I send. The next opp I work.
That being said, I do appreciate the time you’ve taken to read all the way to the end of this letter. I hope that what I’ve written so far hasn’t ruffled your feathers or put you off. How about this. If you can forgive me for being direct bordering on abrasive, I’ll forgive you for the times you’ve insinuated I was lazy for not completing your pitch certifications. Let’s call it even?
For future reference, if you ever want to hear our honest opinion on anything you’re building or frankly anything at this company, don’t send another survey. Join a Sales happy hour after work. We’ll tell you more over a beer or frozen marg than we ever would over a Google form or the company Slack instance.
But proceed with caution: be prepared for scathing honesty. You can always count on salespeople to be straight shooters. After all, you can’t hit the target if you’re not shooting straight. And unlike you, if I don’t hit my targets, I get put on a PIP.
Otherwise, also happy to chat on a call. My calendar’s up-to-date so throw over a cheeky 15-minutes. Not every meeting needs to be half an hour. But give me modify rights because I WILL reschedule if a customer call pops up.
Oh, and definitely not anytime in the next two weeks. I’ll have a lot more headspace come October. That’s when it all resets to zero and we start the manic climb again.
Love,
Salespeople
Note: This is my first blogpost on Medium, and I welcome your thoughts. In the months ahead, I’ll tackle other topics around Sales, Enablement, GTM strategy, and general career building. If there’s anything you’d want my “hot take” on, let me know. I’d be glad to give it a go.
