It’s no secret, we’re experiencing a boom in the sales enablement profession. The market for sales enablement professionals is hot, hot, hot. Everyone wants an experienced enablement leader, and even more than one.
Why are sales enablement professionals so in demand and what problems do they solve for corporations?
Sales enablement professionals are a group of unsung heroes. They do a lot of the day-to-day work, making go-to-market goals happen. They work with sales. They work with marketing. They work with customer teams. They work with product development. They strategize. They coach. They motivate. They train. They build tools. They build pipeline. They help sell. They close business. They launch products faster. The great ones make it happen.
Sales enablement leaders work behind the scenes and often as a communication bridge between corporate departments. They connect dots to make a company’s go-to-market work more efficiently and effectively. They are the “go to” people for many executives and teams across sales, marketing, and products. They understand the processes that aren’t documented. They know who all the players are. They get work done when no one wants to do it. They are the last mile in product rollouts and campaigns. They are the difference between success and failure, and between mediocracy and greatness.
What we, sales enablement leaders do, is always top of mind to every CEO on the planet. Listen to earnings calls or read transcripts and listen to what happens in the first few minutes – there’s always talk of productivity metrics and go-to-market priorities. Companies realize revenue results faster when they elevate the productivity conversation to the executive suite including the CEO.When I was at Salesforce, we had very forward thinking leaders like Frank van Veenendaal, Linda Crawford, Jim Steele, and Marc Benioff who over-invested in sales enablement programs and resources under my enablement leadership. We lived it and look at the Salesforce revenue trajectory. You can read about some of it in my book.
The rise of the enablement professional is happening. Look back at 2005 Google Trends and compare the number of searches for the word enablement then and now. Go to LinkedIn and see how many professionals have enablement in their job titles these days. Today, there are over 7,500 jobs listed and 273,000 people results for sales enablement. Click to view the search results. It’s truly incredible and it’s just the beginning.
Given the number of requests we (and I) get daily from companies, it’s apparent that there’s a shortage of highly qualified sales enablement professionals. We’re committed to bridging this gap.
If you want to learn more about the sales enablement career and join the movement, sign up for the Sales Enablement Community. It’s a community rich with dialogue, mentorship, and best practice sharing. We host conferences twice a year. We help enablement professionals do their jobs. We help sales enablement professionals find jobs. We recognize industry enablement leadership. We connect enablement professionals with each other. We share templates, best practices, and resources. Join us.
Wondering if the world of enablement is for you? Enablement leaders are born from sales, sales operations, product marketing, sales management, and sales engineering. Enablement also crosses all job roles and extends to customer success, support, professionals services, marketing, engineering, and more. Here are a few qualifying questions to help you think through if you want to explore a career in this discipline:
- How much do you enjoy helping professionals be the best they can be?
- How does scaling best practice sharing, training and onboarding sound to you?
- How effective are you at connecting dots between departments and business strategies?
- How close do you want to be to key go-to-market discussions and actions?
- How credible and effective are you engaging individuals, teams, and executives all the way up to the CEO?
We’ll do our best to direct you to hiring companies. We’re already helping many of our customers find the right candidates. I personally know about twenty sales enablement job openings. There are hundreds. We just partnered with a couple very seasoned recruiting professionals to help us address the needs of this booming market by matchmaking great candidates with great companies.
We do this because we care and because we know what happens to revenue results and go-to-market excellence when sales enablement investments are made in people, tools and technology.
