Many enablement teams find themselves stuck in a constant state of reactivity. They are faced with seemingly never-ending shifts in learning plans due to perpetual requests to do last-minute training or are asked to create resources for whatever is top of mind for their go-to-market teams that week. 

When an enablement function operates like this, it has a diminished ability to create structured, long-term enablement plans with a measurable impact on the business. 

This article covers:

  • Reactive vs proactive enablement
  • Benefits of proactive enablement
  • Moving from reactive to proactive enablement

Reactive vs proactive enablement

In organizations with reactive enablement functions, resources and training sessions are often developed in a rushed manner and the enablement team consistently has to "put out fires." 

Additionally, revenue team feedback is needed to initiate action, and while feedback is always valuable, this means that enablement may miss opportunities to address needs before they become pain points.

Scale is also not prioritized within these functions, which can make it challenging to keep up with needs as the organization grows. 

While reactive sales enablement has the potential to be more effective when an organization is new and less mature, a strictly reactive approach does not set enablement teams up to maximize their impact at any stage of an organization. 

This is why many teams choose to take a more proactive approach, which is based on long-term planning, aligning resources and timing with key moments for the business, and anticipating needs before they impact productivity.

In organizations with proactive enablement functions, enablement teams build plans that are closely aligned with broader business goals and tend to have more time to develop content, tools, and resources in preparation for upcoming initiatives. 

These teams also use data to identify patterns and trends to predict what materials or training will be most beneficial, balance strategic programs and continuous learning opportunities, and adapt programs based on ongoing feedback loops and data insights. They also collaborate closely with departments like product, marketing, and revenue operations.

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Benefits of proactive enablement

Shifting from reactive to proactive enablement helps enablement teams transition from being a support function to being a key partner in a GTM organization’s growth strategy. 

Benefits to enablement

Proactive enablement teams benefit from this transition by: 

  • Making enablement initiatives more targeted and effective by allowing time to build programs based on the highest impact needs, backed by data. 
  • Being able to tell stronger data-backed stories to articulate the impact of their enablement programs on the GTM organization. 
  • Reduces the constant need to respond to last-minute requests, freeing up time to focus on creating high-quality resources.
  • Able to allocate their resources more strategically, focusing on high-impact areas.
  • Fostering alignment between sales, marketing, and product strategies through advance planning, ensuring enablement initiatives support larger organizational goals. 
  • Minimizes duplicate effort and ensuring that all content aligns with the latest messaging.
  • Allows more structured feedback cadences to support updating and refining training content.
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Benefits to the organization

Enablement teams are not the only group that benefit from a more proactive approach. Their organizations benefit as well, by:

  • Receiving higher quality enablement output that helps revenue teams stay ahead of trends, minimize disruptions, and remain competitive
  • Having a better understanding of how enablement programs are driving impact on the business and identifying what is/isn’t working to ensure revenue team time is used most effectively 
  • Having a stronger culture of continuous learning and improvement within revenue teams
  • Ensuring enablement efforts and revenue team focuses are supporting company objectives
  • Minimizing “random acts of enablement” (information shared with revenue teams by either enablement or other cross-functional teams that provide minimal return for the level of distraction they create in the field) to keep revenue teams focused on selling and supporting customers
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How to move from reactive to proactive

To start to make the move from reactive to proactive enablement, enablement teams must take deliberate action. Here are a few ways to get started:

Be realistic about your business

Even in the most proactive, strategic enablement teams, there still needs to be room for flexibility and adaptability to meet evolving needs of an organization. The right balance between proactive and reactive enablement will vary from organization to organization based on maturity and context. 

That said, an 80/20 split can be a great place to start, meaning that 80% of enablement is proactive within a given timeframe (e.g. year, quarter, month) and there is a 20% buffer to capture any reactive needs of the business and market.

Understand company GTM objectives 

It’s great to have enablement play a role in company planning motions at the GTM cross-functional leadership level. 

If planning has already been completed within an organization, enablement can sit down with GTM leadership to understand the organization's current priorities and learn how often priorities are revisited to determine the frequency with which enablement plans will also need to be adjusted.

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Get alignment across teams 

Understanding the timing of field-impacting programs coming from other GTM teams (e.g. marketing and RevOps) can help enablement get involved early, when needed, and be mindful of customer-facing team capacity for change and learning when building our enablement plans.

Align goals with GTM objectives

Define enablement goals and milestones and align them to company GTM objectives. 

Use your understanding of business priorities and the timing of planned programs to map out enablement efforts that support those needs, while flagging key dependencies and needs for alignment with other cross-functional teams up front.

Prioritize the list of ideas 

There are countless ways enablement teams can lean into supporting GTM organization goals and the enablement teams want to find the most impactful way to engage. 

To rightsize the enablement team's effort and maximize impact, consider weighing the expected level of impact against the perceived effort for both the enablement team to build the program and the customer-facing teams to learn the information. 

Additionally, there is a limit to how much information customer-facing teams can consume in a given period of time, so flagging where the teams may feel overloaded can help the broader organization make tradeoffs and be thoughtful of program timing.

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Build an enablement roadmap 

Check out this article to learn how to create an enablement calendar to manage your learning journey. A calendar can help you synthesize your plans and outline a schedule for training, resources, and support materials that map to anticipated product releases, campaigns, and company initiatives.

Measure and evaluate success

Identify the key KPIs for planned enablement programs and the ways in which these ladder up to the company’s overall goals. 

Then establish a process to revisit and evaluate your enablement plans. This can be done through additional company planning motions, data review, and feedback loops with GTM leadership to gather insights into what’s working well and where adjustments are needed. 

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Final thoughts

Switching from reactive to proactive enablement is an ongoing process and finding the right balance between the two within an organization requires a strong understanding of the organization’s level of maturity. 

Even enablement teams who already have a proactive motion in place are at risk of slipping back into reactive mode. 

Therefore, it is important to revisit the level of proactive vs. reactive enablement within an organization regularly to ensure the approach is the most impactful for both the enablement teams and the organization as a whole. 

💡
Connect with your peers and discuss proactive enablement further by joining our growing sales enablement community over on Slack.