Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is the function that provides salespeople with the training, content, guidance and resources they need to handle conversations with prospects and customers more effectively. It connects the needs they encounter in sales with materials and learning that the team can put to use.

Depending on the size of the organisation, this responsibility may be shared among several people or assigned to a dedicated role. The person responsible for sales enablement may design onboarding for new salespeople, prepare ongoing training and keep sales guides up to date. They gather difficulties reported from the field and work with marketing to adapt content intended for prospects. The precise scope of the role should be defined before hiring: designing a programme, producing resources and tracking their use call for different levels of autonomy.

The role aims to prepare salespeople for their daily work. It does not automatically manage the sales team or take ownership of sales forecasts or CRM data. A sales manager continues to support their team in applying training and coaching. These boundaries may vary between companies: they help clarify responsibilities rather than prescribe a single organisational structure.

Sales Enablement, Sales Ops and sales management: who does what?

• Sales Enablement: organises learning, content and resources that help salespeople conduct sales conversations.
• Sales Ops / RevOps: works in particular on sales processes, forecasting, CRM data and the tools that support operations.
• Sales management: supports salespeople in their daily activities and helps them put training and coaching into practice.

The work therefore involves salespeople, their managers, marketing and, depending on the issue, sales operations. The useful question for a company is who gathers needs, who designs the response and who monitors its application.

Hiring for sales enablement first addresses a problem of sharing knowledge: salespeople need to learn, find the right content and adapt their practices as sales situations change. If these tasks are spread across teams without an identified owner, guides may cease to reflect the needs the team reports. Training produced without feedback from the field may also miss what actually happens in conversations with prospects.

The first decision concerns the main need. A team onboarding new salespeople may need a learning programme and accessible materials. Another may chiefly lack content that addresses questions raised in meetings. The person hired will then need to work with marketing, which provides or adapts materials intended for prospects, and with managers, who support their daily use. Setting out these responsibilities avoids expecting one role to solve every sales problem indiscriminately.

The second decision concerns autonomy. Should the role design a training programme from a defined objective, or mainly organise and update resources prepared with other teams? What access will the person have to feedback from salespeople? Who will decide which of several content requests takes priority? These questions determine the profile to seek and the work to examine in interviews.

Hypothetical example: salespeople regularly ask for a guide to explaining a product to prospects. The person responsible for sales enablement could gather their questions, agree with marketing on the content needed, then ask managers whether the guide actually helps during conversations. This illustrates a possible form of coordination, not a practice observed at GetPro.

Finally, counting the training sessions delivered or documents created is not enough to judge their usefulness. A clear objective and observation of changes in salespeople's work help determine whether training or materials need to change. Sales outcomes also depend on other factors: assessment of the role should remain proportionate to what it controls.

• Identify the difficulties salespeople encounter and the resources they lack in conversations with prospects.
• Design an onboarding programme that helps new salespeople acquire the knowledge they need for their work.
• Prepare ongoing training based on needs reported by salespeople and their managers.
• Create or update conversation and product guides with the relevant teams.
• Coordinate with marketing to produce content useful in conversations with prospects.
• Organise access to materials and gather salespeople’s feedback on how they use them.
• Share useful sales practices while leaving managers responsible for monitoring their daily application.
• Link training activities to a defined objective and observe their effect on sales practices.

No single career path defines sales enablement. Experience in sales, sales operations, marketing or human resources can help prepare someone for the role. Its value depends on the skills actually transferable to the position. Degree requirements vary between companies; no course title substitutes for the ability to connect a sales team’s need to useful learning or content.

Sales experience brings knowledge of conversations with prospects and the difficulties salespeople face. It is particularly useful for onboarding new salespeople when accompanied by an ability to structure the knowledge to be shared. Prospecting experience, especially in an SDR / BDR role, can therefore provide a starting point, without being a prerequisite or demonstrating teaching ability on its own.

Marketing can bring experience in creating content for prospects and working with sales teams. Sales operations can provide knowledge of the processes and tools that make resources easier to access, without equating that background with responsibility for training salespeople. A human resources background can help with organising onboarding or training, provided it is adapted to sales situations. In every case, the role calls for gathering feedback from the field, working with marketing and managers, then updating resources according to how they are used.

The grid in this profile distinguishes Junior (0–2 years), Experienced (2–5 years), Senior (5–8 years) and Head of Enablement (8+ years). These are labels in the existing grid, not an automatic progression. The relevant background depends on the responsibilities assigned: maintaining materials within an established framework, designing a learning programme and coordinating several teams call for different levels of autonomy.

GetPro’s method starts with a prioritised set of criteria. For each criterion, it distinguishes what can be checked in a candidate’s background from what requires an interview or test, then sets out an assessment method. In interviews, GetPro focuses questions on the key criteria and asks for concrete examples. With the candidate’s prior consent, reference checks may then confirm their skills and clarify points still in question.

For a sales enablement role, the criteria and exercises below are advice to adapt to the responsibilities assigned. They do not describe a GetPro practice specific to this role.

1. Set the criteria before interviewing

Describe the tasks that will really matter: onboarding, ongoing training, sales content or coordination with marketing. Specify the autonomy expected for each. Distinguish the ability to produce a resource from the ability to decide which needs to address. If the role must design a programme, ask how the candidate would start from an objective and observe changes in sales practices. If the role is more operational, focus on the quality of a guide, access to it and its upkeep.

A positive sign is an answer that names the users of the deliverable and the need it meets. A warning sign is a candidate listing tools or training sessions without explaining how they are used. Sales experience alone does not establish an ability to train other people.

2. Examine past work

Ask for an example of onboarding, training or sales content that the person helped create. Ask them to clarify their role, marketing’s role and the sales managers’ role. What difficulties faced by salespeople prompted the work? What did they change after receiving feedback? An annotated document, a training plan or an explanation of decisions helps distinguish the person’s contribution from the team’s result.

Look favourably on a precise account of the original need and the changes made. Be cautious if the candidate attributes a sales result solely to their work without explaining other possible factors. They should be able to say what they observed in salespeople’s practices, even when an effect on sales is difficult to isolate.

3. Present a case close to the role

Hypothetical case: several salespeople report that a conversation guide no longer addresses prospects’ questions. Ask the candidate what information they would gather, with whom they would build a new version and how they would monitor its use.

The answer should show how they turn scattered feedback into useful content, without assuming every difficulty calls for new training. Listen to how they divide the work among salespeople, marketing and management. A proposed measure is more persuasive when it describes an observable practice than when it merely counts the number of documents distributed.

4. Observe coordination and teaching ability

Ask the candidate to explain to a sales manager why a resource needs to change, then to explain to a salesperson how they could use it. You can assess the clarity of their explanation and their ability to respond to an objection from the field. Ask about a disagreement between teams over a content priority. A strong answer describes who decides, on what information and how the decision will be revisited. Confusing coordination with managerial authority over salespeople is a warning sign.

5. Check against references

With the candidate’s consent, speak to someone who has worked with them on a programme or content. Ask for examples of their scope of work, cooperation and how they incorporated feedback. If your company has no sales enablement expertise, involve a sales manager and someone from marketing in the assessment. Together, they can judge the relevance of the case and whether the proposed responsibilities are workable.