As someone who’s worked in enablement over the last 6 years, I’ve always found I’m most energised by finding new ways to use enablement tools to help solve problems. That said, having a brilliant tool or platform to help you is just the start.
Think about it this way – if you had a Ferrari and put low-octane fuel in the tank, it might work okay at first but, over time, it would cause significant damage. And, you’d spend a lot of time (and money!) to fix it.
Similarly, enablement teams are the high-octane fuel that drives your enablement platform to deliver the outcomes you need. In order to go fast, you sometimes need to start slowly. In the world of enablement, that means developing a solid foundation and process to underpin your platform and ensure you work efficiently.
At Seismic, I work in the product enablement team. One of the biggest perks of the role is testing new platform innovations and sharing feedback with our product team to discover new use cases and meet the needs of our customers. Often in SaaS companies, this is referred to as customer zero – the internal power users who can provide early indicators and validation on usage trends.
Recently, we launched Enablement Planner, our purpose-built, native planning, auditing, and reporting hub. Our team has been over the moon to incorporate this tool into our daily work since it’s a first-of-its-kind tool built just for enablement professionals. Swoon — we feel seen.
You may be asking what’s the best thing it’s helped me with so far? In my role, I create playbooks and hubs that add context to our content. And with Enablement Planner, I can quickly identify ineffective or stale content and act on it. I can also trace the content lifecycle to ensure our team is working on the initiatives that drive the most revenue impact – all in a matter of seconds. What’s even better is that my boss can see the progress of a project without even asking for an update. It’s a win, win.
Requests are one of the exciting new releases in Enablement Planner. Field teams can now send requests to the enablement team directly in their flow of work (i.e. in Seismic) and the Planner dashboard gives us a single location to collect, manage, and assign enablement work and requests. I can even control the request process by choosing which users can access each form.
At a previous company, I was responsible for delivering a new comms strategy for sales because (and this was a real productivity killer) the team was receiving 15-20 communications each week. Some included actions, others didn’t. Some had priority labels while others didn’t, and it was tricky for the sales team to know what was important. As a result, they often ignored comms that included important enablement initiatives. Streamlining comms through enablement was a no-brainer that helped key business units communicate effectively and saved the salespeople time trawling through email.
At Seismic, our GTM communications strategy is similar. We field announcements from around the business and regularly channel them to the relevant field teams through Seismic. Previously, we used a 3rd party planning tool to help us with the request process. But the link to the request form was often lost in the midst of other initiatives and stakeholders would reach out to the team directly. Unfortunately, this produced even more manual work and difficulty tracking the request.
With requests, we’re able to simplify the workflow and have them submitted directly through Seismic. This means less context switching and no more broken links. Hooray! We can even notify the requestor once the task is started so they have full visibility of progress.
With requests, we can close gaps and optimise our efficiency, whilst ensuring the field never misses what’s meant for them – be it updates to content, announcements, enablement assignments, and more.
If you’re using Planner today and wondering how to leverage it further and optimize efficiency, this is for you! Not using Planner? Get in touch with your customer success manager today.