In our Sales Enablement Summer School, we’re sharing a proven process that leads to creating a powerful and effective enablement playbook. The first lesson covered a hugely important concept: the foundation of your playbook on which everything else builds.

It’s not an overstatement to say that getting this first stage right is crucial. Just like building a home, a playbook with a weak foundation is no playbook at all.

Since your job as a sales enablement professional is to help the sales team achieve success by hitting their KPIs and quotas, you need to understand what your organization’s stakeholders care about. That’s why we start with their point of view.

The Stakeholder Framework

Enablers have a certain number of stakeholders across four buckets:

1. Executives (C-suite and VP level)
2. Middle managers (Director level)
3. Individual contributors and reps
4. Departments (Marketing, product, HR, etc.)

Each of these groups of stakeholders care about their priorities, metrics, and vision.

What you have to lay out is their perspective, expectations, and needs. That involves answering three groups of questions:

1. What matters the most for them? What are their most pressing needs?
2. How do they measure success? What are their key metrics?
3. How do they expect enablement to help them?

Sketching out this plan gives you the framework that lays out - in no uncertain terms - the target you’re looking to hit on behalf of the sales team as a whole. But it’s only one part of the foundation.

Your Sales Enablement Framework

The second essential framework you have to develop is from your perspective as an enablement leader.

You’ll answer three groups of questions:

1. What are the most important things you want your enablement program to achieve per quarter and per year?
2. How will you measure success? What metrics will you use? You may already have these established somewhere else.
3. Finally, how will you execute all of these initiatives? In other words, how will you achieve each priority and measure success?

If you put both of these concepts together - the stakeholder framework and the enabler framework - you’ll have a foundation for your sales enablement playbook. If you’re a single practitioner, this foundation is enough to get started. If you have a larger enablement group, or a collection of different groups/enablers, then you’ll need to outline the “how” for each of those groups, based on their responsibilities.

Sharing the Playbook With the Stakeholder

Once the playbook has been put together, it’s time to have important conversations with your key stakeholders.

The main goal of these conversations is to fully understand the stakeholder perspective. It’s very important at this point to understand why this priority is important to them. You can’t get the right how without really getting the why.

After these conversations, you can share your enablement playbook with the stakeholder. This shows the stakeholder how enablement will get the job done, what metric you’re hitting, and how that impacts your priority.

This is where we marry two concepts: the stakeholder’s vision for what sales enablement will do, and your plan for getting it done. These need to match up well to make sure enablement is achieving success. If not, then there will be painful friction between the sales team and the enablement team - and that isn’t something anyone wants.

Continuing Forward: What to Do Next

Planning and building a playbook is essential to success, but it isn’t success. It’s just the beginning.

Moving forward, as sales enablement puts the plan into place, leaders need to be flexible and adaptive. You need to measure progress each week so you can see how well the enablement program is coming along, and any gaps that may be emerging.

Communication between enablement sales is also key so that you - through your playbook - can be not only responsive to needs, but forward-looking and proactive.

Throughout the Sales Enablement Summer School, we’ll hit on these concepts and more. With the framework down, you’ll be off to a great start.