Given its powerful impact on the bottom line, more organizations are realizing that implementing sales enablement is no longer optional. It’s a crucial element for survival, growth, and success in the new economy.

Sales enablement managers are being recognized as essential for company growth. But the pressure is on to deliver more results with the same—or fewer—resources. Teams are struggling to support sellers AND other client-facing teams and ramp up programs without adding people.

The ability to scale is proving to be increasingly important, especially in fast-growing industries. Implementing sales enablement at scale means expanding your services and your reach to a growing audience, without adding more resources. Here’s how to scale when resources—people, budget, time—are tight.

Scaling for Future Success

You need three things to scale your sales enablement initiatives and be successful in the future: a high level of influence, cooperation of internal teams, and the right set of tools. Follow these steps for implementing sales enablement at scale to deliver programs more effectively and efficiently.

1. Grow Your Influence

Sales enablement pros must influence individuals and teams that don’t report to them directly. Sales managers, sales trainers, and sellers must buy into your plans and processes, use your content, and follow your methodologies.

Sales leadership must support your initiatives. Internal subject matter experts and colleagues on other teams must contribute their knowledge and share content.

Implementing sales enablement at scale starts with extending your reach and ensuring the cooperation of multiple teams. You want to boost your influence with executive support and high visibility.

Action Items:

• Secure an executive champion (or champions), ideally your CRO or other sales leader. Having their “seal of approval” on your initiatives is the first step to ensuring managers and reps toe the line.
• Align on goals. Make sure your priorities flow from the organization’s business objectives and that your goals and sales goals are in sync.
• Boost your visibility with regular communication up and down the ladder. Be transparent with your plans and share milestones and wins.
• Create a feedback loop. Hold regular meetings to update the sales team on initiatives in progress and to gather feedback from the field on what’s working and what’s not.

2. Leverage Internal Experts

A high-performing sales enablement initiative depends on a steady stream of content to onboard, train, reinforce, and coach sellers. But it’s really challenging to produce, review, and maintain a high volume of content with a small team.

Think about those within your organization who can contribute. Leverage the expertise of your sales leaders, subject matter experts, and the sellers themselves.

Scaling sales enablement means upping your content output. Tap into internal content creators to publish, distribute, manage, and track customer-facing sales assets and internal sales training content. Try to be the conductor of the orchestra, not a soloist.

Action Items:

• Align with marketing. Collaborate with your marketing team to align on goals and create up-to-date, targeted content.
• Enlist internal SMEs. Build relationships and share information from subject matter experts to disseminate ideas, competitive intelligence, and winning approaches.
• Coach the coaches. Equip sales managers with tools to coach and enable reps for you, increasing your reach.
• Crowdsource learning. Activate peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• Coordinate content. Get all content creators on the same page to ensure that your platform always has the most compelling and up-to-date content.
• Create a culture of continuous learning. Make programs interactive and give salespeople the tools they need to drive their development.

3. Implement Effective Tools

Thriving in today’s competitive climate requires investing in the right tools. The typical stack includes a Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Experience Platform (LXP), Sales Content Management (SCM), and tools for call coaching, role play, reinforcement, video engagement and more.

To implement sales enablement at scale, you could cobble together multiple platforms with a range of capabilities. But the most efficient approach is having learning, content, and collaboration all in one place. Implementing a robust, integrated sales enablement platform will save time, effort, and resources.

Action Items:

• Replace siloed tools such as LMS, CMS, coaching / role playing, reinforcement, and call coaching with an all-in-one solution to harness system-wide benefits.
• Gain a 360-degree view of the metrics that correlate with success within a single platform, instead of cobbling metrics together from disparate systems or making assumptions based only on course completions or shared content.
• Reduce workload with a seamless administration of a single solution versus management of multiple separate platforms.
• Increase user adoption with a frictionless experience for reps who can access, create, and share content, get training, and collaborate with their teams without switching tools.
• Cut costs by eliminating subscriptions to redundant tools.

Implementing Sales Enablement at Scale: Allego Customer Spotlight

Here’s how Finastra, an Allego customer, scaled sales enablement with a six-person team, transformed learning, and delivered more strategic, effective, and efficient services.

Situation: Large Global Team

Formed from a 2017 merger between Misys and D+H, Finastra is the third largest Fintech company in the world, providing software solutions to banks and financial institutions globally. Finastra employs over 10,000 people world-wide.

Challenge: How to Scale Training

Since the organization doubled in size following the merger, the team began looking for ways to scale the training of the company’s sales force and client-facing staff while making it more interactive and accessible on the go.

Solution: Rapid Implementation of Allego

Anna Hiett, Global Head of Sales Training, said, “With a small team of six and double the audience since the merger, I knew there was an immediate need to bring our learning into the digitally enabled 21st century. After careful technical and functional evaluation, we decided to go with Allego because of its user-friendly interface to create courses and upload content, its ability to be implemented rapidly, and specifically the video coaching functionality it offers.”

Results: Onboarding Time Reduced and $170,000 Savings

Finastra reduced the length of onboarding workshops from two weeks to one without sacrificing effectiveness. It also enabled the company’s employees to access learning on the ground. In the first year alone, Finastra realized a $170K cost saving for travel and expenses.

Adapting to the Next Normal

The future of sales enablement solutions is mobile, on-demand experiences that are engaging and effective to drive learning at scale—no matter how dispersed or centralized your team may be. Follow these steps to empower your sellers with the tools and resources your sales organization needs to be successful in any business climate.

Learn More

Download a copy of The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Sales Enablement for Virtual Sales Teams to get best practices to scale up sales enablement—without adding more resources.

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