This article comes from Chris Book’s insightful talk at our 2023​​ London Sales Enablement Summit, check out his full presentation here.

These days your sales enablement strategy has to be just as innovative as your product or you risk being left behind.

I'm Chris Book, and I lead the sales enablement function at commercetools. We're in the business of helping big enterprises sell online, providing the infrastructure they need when off-the-shelf solutions won't cut it and Shopify is too small. This makes our approach to sales enablement particularly interesting – if I do say so myself!

So in this article, I'll share our formula for sales enablement success – from our core philosophy and tech stack to our onboarding program and continuous enablement strategies. 

Whether you're a seasoned enablement professional or just getting started, I hope my experiences and observations from a decade in the field will give you some fresh perspectives on leveraging technology for sales success.

Let’s dive right in!

Breaking down our tech stack

Let me walk you through the technology that powers our sales enablement. At the core, we have our content creation workflow. Our instructional designers use Articulate Rise to create engaging, self-paced content. This then gets published into what I call our CMS (content management system) – and yes, I deliberately say CMS rather than LMS (learning management system). 

Here's why: I've noticed over the years that the value of traditional learning management systems has been declining. When you're building content outside the LMS using new tools like Articulate Rise, the whole concept of a formal LMS starts to feel a bit outdated!

We use Showpad as our content management system, which hosts both internal and external content. Everything is integrated bi-directionally with our CRM – and yes, you might be surprised to learn we use this up-and-coming technology called Salesforce (I'm kidding, of course). This integration is crucial though because it means our sellers can access everything they need right where they work.

Now, let's talk about what I call the "residual 20%" – those seemingly low-level, repetitive activities that actually make a huge difference. In our case, it's the Google Workspace tools. 

We're a Google house, and we spend a significant amount of time in these tools. It might seem basic, but being proficient in Google Meet for running remote sessions, utilizing breakout rooms, and managing Q&As effectively instead of letting the chat run wild – all of this matters enormously in a remote-first world.

Speaking of remote-first, Slack is absolutely crucial for us – it's the heartbeat of our company. We've created some really active communities there. For instance, we have a channel called "competition", integrated with a tool called Klue. It's constantly buzzing with sellers sharing competitive intel, and the threads underneath are gold mines of information. 

We even created another channel called "pain" where we incentivize sellers with Amazon vouchers to share snippets where customers talk about specific pain points. The real magic happens in the conversation threads where our team discusses how we solve these pains.

Sales enablement tech stack checklist
A practical guide for building and maintaining an effective sales enablement technology stack.
Sales Enablement CollectiveJames Shaw