How to Structure and Hire Your Team

I've been in many sales enablement roles in my career, ranging from individual contributor to managing a global team of five. There are some common threads in building a highly effective team.

Team Composition

You must cover 2 bases from the get-go: Vision and Execution. Whether you have one person or a large team, I have never seen success without both competencies.

• Vision: This is the ability to work cross-functionally to diagnose the root causes of challenges and come up with a prioritized plan of attack. The word priority is key because many sales enablement projects to take a lot of time.
• Execution: This is the ability to implement and complete projects quickly, "failing forward". Measure your sales enablement team by how quickly they can get projects off the ground and show early results so they can course-correct if necessary.

Hiring Considerations

These are the top traits I would look for in building out a team. By the way, notice it's not a checklist of experience doing sales enablement projects.

• Maverick - Most challenges facing sales teams are mired in a culture of "but we've always done it this way." You need someone with a sharp edge to transform the culture.
• Truth Teller - Your head of sales enablement needs to be the CRO's chief of staff. They are often closer to the ground truth than the C-suite. You have to trust that they will tell you the truth about what's going on and not sugarcoat the facts.
• Bridge Builder - Many sales reps have some degree of fear when it comes to their managers, because expectations are high and they don't want to deliver bad news. What happens then? Sandbagged forecasts. Your sales enablement team needs to have high EQ and empathy and build the trust of not only reps, but also sales leaders, marketing team, and products team.

There are many more traits I could describe, for example being tech-savvy, but these are the most important.

If you are considering building a team or face challenges with your team, how about a 30 minute discussion to explore the possibilities?