My perspective on enablement comes from working in fast-growing companies, particularly taking the function from zero to one and scaling it up from there.
Growing GTM puts pressure on how you hire, develop people, and introduce new products and processes. You need to make success repeatable while giving teams enough clarity and autonomy to keep finding better ways to work.
Enablement is part of how the company meets those demands. It requires a strong hiring foundation, managers who develop their people, and teams that see their work through. A dedicated function can bring expertise and sustained attention to that work, but equipping high-growth teams to do their best work remains a shared responsibility.
Whether you’re building that function or scaling it, these principles should shape what you expect from the business and what you ask an enablement team to take on. How you do this work will change as the business grows, but the principles remain.
Hire great people
You wouldn’t hire an experienced engineer and then teach them how to code. You’d teach them your architecture, product, and ways of working.
I’d expect the same of experienced sellers. They’ll have plenty to learn about your business. They may need help adapting to a different product, market, or sales motion. But if they’re missing fundamental selling skills, take a look at your hiring.
Keep onboarding practical, and trust good hires to learn on the job
New sellers need to learn the product, the customer, and the company’s own process. They need to understand what good looks like.
Often with the right hires, a clear set of docs, good examples, places to ask questions, and feedback on how they’re doing can handle much of that.
Figuring out what they need to know and do and making that clear is often harder and higher leverage work than packaging it in an elaborate learning experience.
Expect every team to see its work through
If RevOps introduces a process or Product ships a new capability, explaining it is part of the job. The same applies to every other team that ships something the field needs to understand or use.
Whether a team is shipping a product or an internal process, it’s important that they see it through. Documentation, demos, and basic adoption support belong with that work. That includes finding out what’s working, what isn’t, and iterating.
There may be plenty of collaboration though. A dedicated enablement team may own parts of the rollout. The people building something still need to be capable of explaining it, answering questions, and helping others use it successfully. This is especially true when introducing something new. The company needs their expertise to get it right, and that’s part of owning the work.
Expect managers to develop their people
Frontline managers have the most direct responsibility for enabling their teams. They should know where each person needs help and be able to provide useful coaching.
That means joining and listening to calls, working through key deals in detail, giving specific feedback, and following up. It’s as much a part of the job as forecasting.
People dedicated to ensuring enablement happens can work alongside managers, develop approaches, and even set examples. Managers still have to manage. If they aren’t developing their teams, examine how they hire and how they coach before adding another program.
Dedicate people to solving real problems
If you dedicate people to enablement, they need to deeply understand the business, product, and customer. The reason to make them dedicated is to ensure the time and focus necessary to work on whatever gets in the way of success.
Some of that work happens directly with customer-facing teams and how they approach situations, but it also means understanding what those situations reveal about the business (e.g., a recurring pricing objection may warrant better guidance on presenting pricing, a change to the pricing, or something else entirely).
A dedicated team can help steer those decisions, work through problems with the teams involved, try improvements, and determine whether those improvements helped. That work becomes a flywheel that helps the company improve both what it builds and how it operates.
Build the minimal structure necessary
Growth means change, and change requires learning new things. The right structure can accelerate growth. It should create enough clarity for people to execute and repeat success while leaving room to experiment and find better ways of working. This is the core work of enablement in high-growth organizations.
More formal learning, highly coordinated communication, and dedicated ownership of content creation or delivery may be necessary at a certain point, but how much structure you need depends on the size and complexity of the business and the problems you’re trying to solve.
Whether you’re building enablement from zero to one or scaling it 10X, it requires judgment and restraint to add only the structure needed to keep people clear on what to do, equipped to do it well, and free to find even better ways of doing it.