Hey sales leaders: Who does your enablement team report to? The answer reveals the value you place on enablement.
There’s plenty of lively debate here in LinkedIn about whether SDRs should report into sales or marketing. But I don’t recall ever having seen a discussion about where the enablement team should live.
So I’ll take a swing at it.
As a longtime enablement leader, I’ll share what the various options signal to us:
Option 1: Reporting directly to the sales leader (CRO/SVP/VP)
This is our optimal scenario, largely because it ensures we have direct access to our primary customer. We have our fingers on the pulse of what’s important to sales leadership — and we’re accountable directly to them.
Option 2: Reporting into Revenue Operations or Sales Operations
This is can be okay, especially as the company grows. In early stage companies it’s less than optimal because you don’t have direct access to the sales leader, because the RevOps leader’s priorities for enablement may be different than that of the sales leader, and because those priorities have a tendency to be more tactical than strategic. As companies scale, though, there can be value in the synergies between enablement, ops, and strategy.
Option 3: Reporting into Marketing
This is a caution flag for us. When enablement reports into marketing, it signals to us you think of enablement almost exclusively as content producers and as product trainers. Not a team that can help identify and mitigate sales performance gaps. Not a team that can foster scalable systems for performance improvement. Not a team that understands sales.
Option 4: Reporting into Learning & Development
For the love of God, no. Hard no. Show me a company where enablement reports into L&D and I’ll show you a sales org that doesn’t value sales excellence — or maybe a company still feeling the aftereffects of a bad experience with a horrible enablement leader.
Happy selling.