Over the years, we’ve partnered with thousands of organizations on their journey toward enablement maturity. Through these relationships, we’ve developed a maturity framework for what makes good enablement. This blog is the second in a series of five posts that will outline the Seismic Maturity Growth Framework. You can read the first post here.
In our previous post, we provided an overview of Seismic’s Maturity Growth Framework. In this post, we’ll dig into the first stage of maturity: Control Chaos.
Starting something new can sometimes feel unorganized, challenging, or even chaotic. But just like anything else we experience in life, changing a process or learning a new skill takes time and repetition to build new muscles. It might even hurt a bit, but the outcome is always worth it!
Fun fact about me: before joining Seismic, I was a customer (and super-user). I know firsthand that managing behind-the-scenes sales and content enablement efforts can feel like you are trying to hit a moving target. Many times, just before a project goes live, that target can move further away, adding new obstacles. Amid these challenges, you’re still expected to answer questions about the effectiveness of your initiatives. This can easily lead to frantic decisions that make you feel out of control. The good news is that this is a natural place to begin. What’s important is that you continue to make ad hoc adjustments and actively manage changes.
Kick Go-to-Market Chaos to the Curb
When you find yourself or your organization in this type of chaotic situation, take a deep breath and remember maturity and growth come in phases. It takes time to improve an enablement maturity strategy. So, you’ll need to adjust your plans and come up with innovative ideas to drive early user adoption and grow excitement around your enablement efforts.
It’s also important to define future outcomes for success at an early stage to effectively track your progress. As an enablement leader, you have many responsibilities across various teams and systems to manage. It can be challenging to narrow your list of objectives to fit into one solution that integrates with legacy tools and solves every workstream requirement. This is where you need to be strategic! Let’s look at how chaos may manifest within your organization:
- Examine your content management process for red flags. Are teams collaborating or are they operating in silos?
- Gather feedback from different end-users to understand unique use cases. Are sales reps complaining that content is hard to find or that it doesn’t meet their expectations?
- Do you have high-level coordination such as a steering committee or cross-functional, executive buy-in? Or are you struggling to find sponsors who will champion the use of the platform, and/or help define and drive outcomes for success?
During this time, issues will inevitably emerge, and it’s critical to double-click into each one to gather answers that will inform your changes.
Feedback is critical at this stage of maturity. It will help you find better ways to break down silos, uncover user challenges, and make sure your roadmap is backed by multiple levels of executive sponsorship and buy-in. A better understanding of the end-user experience will increase your effectiveness in developing good strategy and beneficial enhancements to the platform and your overall process. This will lead to a better experience for your users as they start to see changes based on their feedback. The results? Higher user adoption, faster sales cycles, increased pipeline, and movement away from chaos toward better enablement.
Good enablement comes in many forms, from live sessions to prebuilt learning content. It’s important to diversify your approach and dig a deep well of resources that will help everyone find the answers they might not know they need at this early stage. As you look at creating content and filling gaps, always go back to your agreed-upon targeted outcomes to ensure your teams are looking in the same direction. Regular refreshers through new learning opportunities help make adoption behavior sticky and repeatable. Measure improvement by closing the feedback loop throughout these continual sales enablement sessions. These changes will add up over time to become a tipping point, taking your maturity to the next level.
This is just the first stop on the road to maturity. The next step in the journey requires a deeper understanding of the impact of the changes you make, so stay with us as we travel to the next phase: learning how to measure and understand impact. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ provides invaluable insights about your sales teams, the content they use, and the motions they follow to drive the best results and outcomes.
If you’d like to learn how you can go to market quickly and smoothly, download our eBook, Kick Go-to-Market Chaos to the Curb.
