What Is a Sales Enablement Manager (and Why Is This Position So Important)

Role of Sales enablement manager in an organization

So your company is growing steadily, and you’re thinking of bringing on a sales enablement manager to help you sustain your growth, and avoid a plateau.

In this blog post, we discuss what a sales enablement manager does, and exactly why this position is so important. By the time you reach the end of the article, you’ll have a good understanding of how this person will work together with the rest of your team, and what you should look out for when hiring for this role.

Ready? Let’s jump right in!

What is sales enablement?

Before we unpack what a sales enablement manager is, let’s take a second to discuss the concept of sales enablement.

In a nutshell, sales enablement is the process of providing a sales team with the information, content, and tools that help them to sell more effectively.

Here are a few key metrics that are tied to sales enablement:

• Revenue per sales rep, ie the amount of revenue that each sales rep brings in
• Win / Loss rate, ie the percentage of sales opportunities that are won (vs lost)
• Competitive Win / Loss rate, ie the Win / Loss rate of deals where you’re competing with another company to close a prospect
• Sales rep onboarding time, ie the time it takes for a new sales rep to start reaching out to prospects and closing deals
• Lead to customer conversion rate, ie the percentage of leads that eventually become a paying customer
• Sales cycle length, ie the time it takes to close a sale from a lead

All in all, sales enablement is about empowering your sales team to become better at what they do, so that they can achieve better results for the company.

What is a sales enablement manager?

Simply put, a sales enablement manager is someone who supports the company’s sales and marketing teams, and ensures that the sales team has all they need to sell more effectively.

Wondering what’s the difference between a sales enablement manager and a sales manager? A sales enablement manager is more of a “niche” role, with the candidate being focused on the different aspects of sales enablement, including:

• Providing training to sales reps
• Optimizing onboarding procedures
• Producing content or overseeing the production of content
• Aligning the sales team with the marketing team

What does a sales enablement manager do?

What does a sales enablement manager do, and how do they manage a team to produce better results? This can be broken down into three overarching elements, which are:

• Improving team effectiveness
• Improving team efficiency
• Planning and strategizing

Improving team effectiveness

First and foremost, sales enablement managers help sales reps become better at their jobs by providing training, refining onboarding processes, and creating sales content and collaterals.

Depending on how big or small the company is, and how many resources it has, the sales enablement manager may be directly involved in providing training and creating content, or they may outsource and oversee these activities.

For example, if a company doesn’t have an in-house copywriter and has no budget to engage an agency to create sales collaterals for them, the task of creating content will fall on the sales enablement manager’s shoulders.

But if the company is working with an agency, then the manager will simply sync up with the agency and provide directions on how to improve and optimize the sales content.

Improving team efficiency

Next, sales enablement managers also help to improve team efficiency, and empower sales reps to make the best use of their time.

To do this, they may introduce new tools and platforms to the team, re-engineer workflows and processes, and more.

According to statistics, the average sales rep only spends 35% of their time selling. With this in mind, the goal of the sales enablement manager is to reduce time spent on menial, easily-automated tasks, so that reps can channel their time and energy into building relationships and selling.

Planning and strategizing

Finally, sales enablement managers are also involved in planning and strategizing. Here are some key decisions that these managers have a say in:

• How to allocate resources and budgets
• How to deploy reps across different territories
• Planning of sales promotions and marketing campaigns

What kind of background should a sales enablement manager have?

As you’ll now understand, a sales enablement manager isn’t just involved in sales. This position actually lies at the intersection of sales and marketing — so an ideal candidate would have experience in both these areas.

For instance, Kurt Jones, director of sales enablement at PeopleFluent, has worked in both sales and marketing.

Prior to taking the role of sales enablement director, Jones worked as a recruiter. Seeing as PeopleFluent owns a recruitment software, Jones’ stint as a recruiter allowed him to get a better understanding of both the seller and buyer’s points of view.

That said, this doesn’t mean that companies should write off a candidate who only has experience in sales or marketing.

Assuming you hire someone who’s a marketing expert, but isn’t as well-acquainted with sales, there are many things you can do to get them more familiar with how the sales team works. For example, get them to go on ride-alongs with sales reps, so they get to experience the sales process first-hand.

Background aside, it’s also crucial to look for the right skills when hiring a sales enablement manager. Generally speaking, candidates who are good at communicating and have good writing skills will perform better at these roles.

To unpack this: seeing as the sales enablement manager is the one to bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams, being a good communicator is essential. Having good writing skills will also come in handy as this person creates sales collateral (or oversees the creation of sales collateral) for the company.

Why is a sales enablement manager important?

At the heart of it all, a sales enablement manager helps the sales team to do their jobs better, and this translates into higher conversion rates, and an optimized sales funnel.

This can make a massive impact to how much revenue a company generates — without having to drastically increase the budget spent on marketing or advertising.

Here’s an example: say the marketing team generates 200 qualified leads per month, and your sales team closes 20%, or 40 of these leads. Assuming a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of $5,000, this translates into $200,000 of revenue (or potential revenue) that you’re generating each month.

Now, if you bring a sales enablement manager on board and they manage to increase the closing rate by just 5%, they’ll bring your company an additional $50,000 in revenue, every single month.

The bottom line? Small improvements to your sales processes and funnel can bring about a huge increase in revenue. That’s why it’s important to hire a dedicated sales enablement manager!

Upon joining a company, the sales enablement manager should…

Once you hire your sales enablement manager, you’ll want them to hit the ground running, and start putting together a roadmap of what they can do to help the team.

But before implementing any changes, your manager should conduct an audit to assess how well-prepared and sales-ready the team is. Here are some areas they’ll want to investigate:

• Does the company have a solid marketing plan, with concrete KPIs, action plans and timelines in place?
• Are the sales and marketing teams aligned on how to define a lead?
• Are the sales reps familiar with the latest product information?
• Are there any content gaps? Is there any obsolete content that should be updated or replaced?
• Is there structured training in place? Do reps share their best practices and strategies on a regular basis?
• Is the training effective? How engaged are reps during the training?
• Do reps have a specific system when following up with leads?
• Is the sales team making use of new tools and technologies (eg live chat, chatbots) to optimize their workflow?
• If yes, are they maximizing the potential of these technologies (eg by using canned responses in live chat?)