We come from diverse backgrounds, and enablement can be a very different experience depending on the size and the maturity of the company you’re working for, or that you're starting with. Some of us have even been part of the origin story of enablement at our respective companies.

During our fantastic Revenue Acceleration Festival in November 2021, Bryan Grobstein, Head of Revenue Strategy & Enablement at Lunchbox, led a panel discussion focused on scaling and accelerating revenue enablement from diverse backgrounds, in terms of industries, audiences, and business sizes, with two industry experts:

  • Emily FitzPatrick, Global Director of Revenue Enablement at Culture Amp.
  • Christi Loucks, Head of Revenue Acceleration at SecZetta.

Check out the discussion’s highlights below: 👇

  • Working across companies of different sizes
  • The ideal enablement to rep ratio
  • The new wave of go-to-market enablement
  • Prioritization during hypergrowth
  • Key partnerships outside of the sales org
  • Measuring enablement’s success
  • Making enablement strategic with a seat at the table

What's been your experience working at companies differing in size? How is enablement across companies?

Christi Loucks: My enablement experience has always started at the ground level for high-growth organizations. At that point when you're the only person, it’s all about acceleration. Going from zero to one is probably the hardest part, but it also creates the most impact.

Simple blocking and tackling means you can have a positive impact on sales acceleration quickly.

On the other hand, it's also important to build a thoughtful and strong foundation for programs and processes that you'll have to eventually scale in the future.

Once you're at this tipping point, maybe the team has grown, you've hit a certain revenue goal or there's been an acquisition, that's when scale comes into play and it happens quickly.

Essentially, as you're building in the initial phase, you also need to be thinking about how you're going to run your programs more frequently for people and how you can do it at a fast clip.

Bryan Grobstein: Fast is the key word there. Many organizations with an enablement function as an early hire have a high degree of confidence in their growth as a business and their revenue growth.

Emily and I both started at Groupon when they were the fastest growing company in history, on the cover of Forbes magazine, and they had hundreds of employees when they established enablement.

What has been the ideal ratio for you in terms of enablement to your target audience?

Emily FitzPatrick: There's theory and what we would like it to be, and then what we're able to get. Especially when you're at a scaling company, trying to make the case for a non-revenue generating hire can sometimes be a conversation you have to have many times with many people.

For scaling companies, what I typically like to see is about a one-to-30 ratio between enablement practitioners and the teams they support.

It’s also a question of whether you should go for role alignment first, knowing there might not be 30 people in each of the roles you support (e.g. for revenue enablement, I support SDRs, AEs, AM, and CS), or do you want a generalist who’s going to be doing a little bit of everything.

As I was doing some digging into this and building out my org structures, I heard numbers thrown around with like one-to-50, and even one-to-70. Those are great for scaled organizations, but the amount of change is a good correlation to how much enablement firepower you need.

If you're onboarding consistently, if your managers are new, if the reps are new, if the product is new and constantly changing, then there's a limit to how much people can do in a day.